As the military services look to harden networks and improve defenses, leaders are focused on the Defense Department’s flagship IT development effort: the Joint Information Environment. But while JIE is well under way, its lack of status as an official program of record means the services are facing growing pains as the project comes together under a common goal of enterprise IT.
“JIE is not a program of record, it’s a framework, a strategic operation direction that steers other programs of record in how to align them between the services so we all are doing the same thing as we move forward, as opposed to not having that top-level framework or strategic directions of JIE and going in our own directions,” said Coast Guard Vice Adm. Marshall Lytle III.
Lytle, who spoke at the Association of the United States Army July 14 in Arlington, Virginia, in recent days was promoted to director of command, control, communications, computers/cyber and CIO, Joint Staff/J-6.
Despite no formal program, there has been an overwhelming buy-in from the individual services to meet this common operating picture.
“The Air Force as of last year put [Joint Regional Security Stacks] into the program,” with funding starting in fiscal 2017, Lt. Gen. William Bender, Air Force CIO, said at the event. “Lacking a program of record, we as a service are kind of seeing this is as foundational to everything else we do and therefore we need to pay the cost of doing business first. And that’s with at least in the initial discussion, it’s with the support of my leadership,” Bender said.
The Army agrees as its CIO, Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell, said JIE is a joint effort funded by all of the services; a year ago leaders forecasted the requirements of funding and resources needed between calendar year 2016 throughout 2019. “So the collaboration from the DoD and the collaboration from our partners that are here really is what’s really making a difference,” he added.
Janice Haith, Navy deputy CIO, noted that the Navy is also moving toward this effort and has established funding priorities for it. However, the effort is “forcing [the Navy] to make some other changes with our overall infrastructure on our shore-based environment, which was in dire need of some upgrades and enhancements so it’s making us do those things. I think the cooperation – joint – has been good for all of us, both at the senior level as well as the action officer level,” she said. “We’re all learning from each other. We all find something good to take back and bring forward and we’re seeing the capability mature based on the lessons learned…I think the Army being the first helped us in the Navy and Marine Corps look at what we want to have more because of what we were doing, so we build on that and I think that’s beneficial to our whole department.”
A GAO report published in July, however, discovered that DoD has not fully addressed key program management and planning practices or fully defined a scope or cost for JIE. Moreover, despite initial workforce evaluations, GAO found DoD has not determined the number of staff and skills needed. GAO recommends DoD “fully define JIE’s scope and expected cost, and take steps to improve workforce and security planning.”
One common theme in expressed in terms of greater work to do is defining roles and responsibilities within the joint environment, which boils down to command and control.
The area “that is really lacking and an area where we have got to get our collective act together is on C2, command and controlling this weapon system. … Some really heavy intellectual rigor needs to go into this and from my own perspective, despite all of us being pretty aligned in the requirements, I have not seen it happen yet,” Bender said, adding that he has brought this all the way up to DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen during quarterly updates. “I think all of us would be willing to take the lead but none of us are in the best position to be lead given the joint nature of what we’re trying to do,” he said.
Ferrell agreed that leadership and who plays what parts remain major hurdles across the services.
“I think the biggest challenge that we’ve all wrestled with is just roles, responsibilities from higher to lower and left to right,” he said.
During a briefing with reporters, Ferrell added to his comments, noting that each individual services has its own culture and operating procedures. Folding these together into a common environment will take time. “Each service has its unique culture. They’re aligned to the standards but each culture of management, there’s some nuances we do in the Army technical-wise for the equipment that’s aligned that may be a little bit different than the Air Force typically have or the Navy. And so it’s working through those technical exchanges and then who does what? Who oversees that?” he said.
These challenges aren’t all bad news, however. For Lytle, it means that JIE is really taking off. The C2 conversation was not possible a few years ago because everyone was still operating their own networks and systems, he said, signaling the progress of the effort.
At first, the technology folks were driving the direction of JIE, but now, “it’s time for the operations side to catch up and use these tools and use these capabilities in the framework that we’ve got with JIE to figure out how we’re going to C2 for the best interest of the country,” Lytle said. “We have this opportunity for U.S. Cyber Command and Joint Force Headquarters-DoDIN…to actually start exercising C2 of the organization,” he said.
