The latest package of aid includes a large amount of various types of ammunition, such as rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, and an undisclosed number of fuel tanker trucks and riverine boats.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a statement, said the package also provides more ammunition for howitzers, Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, high-speed anti-radiation (HARM) missiles and anti-tank weapons.

“Russia alone could end its war today. Until Russia does we will stand united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” said Blinken.

The new aid comes as Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow on Monday, giving a political lift to Russian President Vladimir Putin against the West just days after an international arrest warrant was issued for the Kremlin leader on war crimes charges related to Ukraine.

The American weapons will be taken from Pentagon stocks through the presidential drawdown authority, so it will be able to be delivered quickly to the warfront. The U.S. has provided more than $32.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.

As the Biden administration gave senators a classified briefing Tuesday on four incursions by unidentified floating objects in recent days, lawmakers were left with many questions unanswered, and several have vowed to go over the North American Aerospace Command’s budget and capabilities with a fine-toothed comb.

“The latest incidents reveal that we have real gaps when it comes to policing our airspace, and we need to have better situational awareness and more of a protocol of how exactly to react,” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee and its defense spending subpanel, told Defense News on Monday.

“If there are gaps that are caused by a lack of equipment or sensors or better radars, the Department of Defense needs to provide us with that information. The fact that the military was able to act so quickly on these subsequent objects raises very serious questions about why they did not act quickly on the first one,” Collins added.

Since Biden ordered the shoot-down of the suspected Chinese spy balloon that transited the United States earlier this month, NORAD — the U.S.-Canadian organization responsible for warning and defending against missile threats to North America — has been looking more closely for potential airborne threats, including by tweaking radar detection parameters.

After three more unidentified devices were spotted and shot down, with the latest on Sunday over Lake Huron, U.S. officials attributed the spike in part to NORAD sharpening the ability of its radar “gates” to detect small objects at high-altitudes, moving at slow speeds.

“Radars essentially filter out information based on speed. So you can set various gates — we call them velocity gates — that allow us to filter out low-speed clutter,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, who leads NORAD, said in a call with reporters on Sunday.

U.S. airspace detection capabilities haven’t always been attuned to spot these sorts of objects. VanHerck and other officials say at least three Chinese surveillance balloons transited the United States during the Trump administration and weren’t immediately detected.

“The intel community after the fact assessed those threats from additional means of collecting and made us aware of these balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America,” VanHerck said, adding that NORAD has a “domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

Exiting Tuesday’s briefing, the top Republican on the Senate’s military readiness subcommittee, Sen. Dan Sullivan, stressed that the incident highlights the seriousness of the “domain awareness gap” that VanHerck has been warning lawmakers about for years.

“We have to have systems and capabilities that can pick up a slow-moving balloon, that can pick up a hypersonic missile that’s traveling eight, nine times the speed of sound, that can pick up low-flying cruise missiles,” said Sullivan, of Alaska. “These are all things that I think this episode is revealing are still challenges.”

NORAD has long operated the North Warning System, a line of short- and long-range radars across northern Canada and Alaska, and a network of alert fighter bases for response.

But a Center for Strategic and International Studies report last year faulted NORAD’s employment of Cold War-era technology and decision processes as outmoded. One of its authors, missile defense expert Tom Karako, said that while NORAD has been experimenting with machine learning and artificial intelligence, it needs to be using them more broadly to analyze the gobs of data collected by its radars to spot potential threats.

“You can’t defend against what you can’t see,” Karako told Defense News. “We have to get more and better sensors and get better at using the data coming off those sensors.”

That effort is underway. In June, the Canadian government announced it would invest $4.9 billion over the next six years to create a new Northern Approaches Surveillance system of two over-the-horizon Radars and a network of sensors with classified capabilities, distributed across northern Canada, called Crossbow.

Melissa Dalton, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, told lawmakers at a Feb. 9 hearing that the Defense Department “continues to be acutely aware of the need to enhance persistent surveillance of the airspace and maritime approaches to North America.

“To that end, we are working closely with our Canadian allies to modernize NORAD’s surveillance capabilities, paced to the current and future geopolitical environment,” Dalton said.

“In the near-term, we are taking steps with Canada to augment the existing NORAD warning system, including development of a new system of sensors called Crossbow that will enhance NORADs ability to detect approaching airborne threats.”

At that hearing, the Senate’s top defense appropriator for defense, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., also said he supports more funding in the 2024 budget, due in March, to help the Pentagon stop incursions into U.S. airspace. The suspected Chinese spy balloon was first spotted over Montana, home to several nuclear weapons sites.

“When this budget comes forth [from the White House] I hope this is addressed in some line item and not only addressed with dollars but addressed with actions on how these moneys will be put to work to make sure that this never happens again,” said Tester.

On Tuesday, another member of the appropriations committee, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, said the Pentagon budget request ought to provide funding to fix any vulnerabilities.

“When we get to the starting point, we’ll have a better understanding of how serious they are about shoring up existing gaps,” Murkowski’s office told Defense News in a statement after the classified briefing on Tuesday. “At this point, nobody knows more than administration officials about what is needed to fill the shortfalls the senior military leadership have identified.”

But Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee’s air and land warfare panel, argued that shooting down unidentified objects like the Chinese balloon before they enter U.S. territory is more important than pouring more money into NORAD modernization.

“We should not spend billions – probably tens or even hundreds of billions – of dollars changing the way we protect our own airspace against small, slow-moving objects,” Cotton told reporters after Tuesday’s briefing. “We have the capability in certain settings to detect those.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that President Joe Biden ordered National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to lead an interagency effort to explore the parameters and protocols in place for dealing with such objects, and to find potential improvements.

None of the three objects shot down over the weekend have been recovered. Kirby said military officials are still working on recovering debris from the recent shoot-downs to better understand what the objects were. He said the devices may not have posed any real national security threat, but officials won’t know for sure until after that work is finished.

“Having investigators look at that debris would certainly be of immense value, in terms of our ability to positively identify what these objects were and what their purpose was,” he told reporters.

However, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said separately that the recovery efforts for the object downed over the Arctic would be hampered by “very, very difficult terrain.” The same Pentagon officials who briefed Congress on Tuesday told senators last week that the complicated recovery efforts in the Bering Sea were a key factor in waiting to shoot down the Chinese surveillance balloon over the South Carolina coast after it had already traversed the country.

Amid all the mystery surrounding the incursions into U.S. airspace and NORAD capability gaps, lawmakers and Biden administration officials took pains to make one thing clear: it’s not aliens.

“There is no serious discussion that this is some sort of extraterrestrial contact,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Tuesday after the classified briefing. “And you’d think if they did, they would use something more sophisticated than a balloon.”

Leo Shane III contributed to this report.

The contract, called Defense Enclave Services, will move 22 Defense Department organizations, known as Fourth Estate agencies, from disparate networks to common IT systems under a single provider. Government leaders expected to release the final solicitation in late September. A draft request for proposals had been released earlier that month.

“We’re anticipating the final release next week,” said Don Means, Jr., national leadership command capabilities executive at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The delay was due to an additional review by Dana Deasy, the Pentagon’s top IT official, according to Danielle Metz, the DoD’s acting deputy CIO for information enterprise. She added that such a review was standard practice.

“What we really wanted to make sure was that, both from DISA and DoD CIO’s perspective, that all the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed,” Metz said. “This is an incredibly important endeavor that we are embarking on. It is one of the crown jewels that we have as part of our IT reform initiative under the [National Defense Strategy] and so we thought that a little bit more due diligence was important to make sure that we were doing what was right for the department.”

Fourth estate agencies are DoD agencies that don’t fall under a military department, such as the Missile Defense Agency or Defense Logistics Agency. The contract is expected to be an 10-year, indefinite delivery, indefinitely quantity contract. The final award is still expected to come in December 2021, as originally scheduled. The Defense Enclave Services contract is part of the Pentagon’s push to save money through the Fourth Estate Network Optimization effort, an IT reform push to consolidate common IT services across the department.

Across those offices, “you’ve got varying IT networks at varying levels of maturity, varying levels of security. With the goal being integration, this is the way to get after it,” Means said.

At DISA’s annual forecast to industry, Stephen Wallace, systems innovation scientist at the agency’s emerging technology directorate, said that quantum-resistant encryption is a new technological area of focus for the agency in fiscal 2021. Quantum-resistant technology is only in the “monitor” stage, Wallace said, and DISA officials are working to get a better understanding of what the technology will mean in the future.

“We are not looking to stand up quantum computers, but we are looking to understand how quantum computers will impact our ability to defend our networks going forward,” Wallace told reporters on a conference call after the event.

Quantum-resistant encryption is becoming increasingly important as near-peer adversaries, including China, work to develop quantum computing capabilities that will be powerful enough to break current encryption capabilities. Though still years away, quantum computers would make secure communications nearly impossible.

He noted that DISA, the DoD’s combat IT support agency, has no active projects on quantum-resistant technology, but told reporters that the agency would like to move “fairly quickly.” Wallace said he believed that quantum computing will become a real threat in the next few years.

“Frankly, our adversaries likely won’t advertise the fact that they’ve achieved a quantum computer,” Wallace told reporters. “We have to have crypto algorithms in place prior to that to allow us to continue in a safe position.”

DISA is looking to partner with the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency that have work underway on quantum-resistant computing, he said. In the future, he said DISA could “quite possibly” put out solicitations on quantum-resistant encryption.

DISA, which has an annual budget of about $9.4 billion and is responsible for DoD network security, is also looking at new cybersecurity measures in fiscal 2021. Wallace said the emerging technology directorate is monitoring encrypted traffic analysis solutions to better detect anomalies in network activity that could pinpoint malware in communications while files are in motion across the network.

The agency wants to improve email security by expanding a Cloud-Based Internet Isolation award that created a protective buffer between DoD users’ internet traffic and DoD networks.

“Now we’re thinking we can take some of those same technologies and apply them to the problem around email and attachments,” Wallace said on the webinar.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced DISA to rethink the DoD’s network perimeter as employees worked from home and introduced new cybersecurity risks. That discussion includes zero-trust cybersecurity concepts, which inherently distrust users, Wallace said. The agency this week released its revised strategic plan for fiscal 2021-2022, which identified zero-trust as an enabling activity for its revised cyber defense priority area.

“We’re actively planning how we can handle perimeter evolution,” Wallace said.

On the conference call with reporters, Wallace added that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the new focus areas that the emerging technology directorate chose to focus on in fiscal 2021. Another capability that the directorate plans to learn more about this fiscal year is a concept called telepresence, or technologies that makes someone feel present at a physical meeting location from a remote location. DISA is making a push in remote access to classified information, an effort that was underway but accelerated due to the pandemic. In fiscal 2021, DISA plans to prototype that technology.

“The importance of that [remote classified access] … was substantially more once COVID hit and our environment changed,” Wallace told reporters.

The Cloud Based Internet Isolation (CBII) program, which hosts internet browsing in an isolated cloud environment, transfers the traffic away from the user’s desktop or laptop device.

It is an especially important tool with personnel working remotely, safeguarding against potentially malicious code being downloaded to endpoints and infecting the broader network, officials said. Moreover, it works even if employees forget to connect to the virtual private network “to get to the DoD-specific stuff and they just go to Google or something and click around, they’re still protected,” Angela Landress, chief of Defensive Cyber Operations at DISA, told C4ISRNET.

Landress explained that when browsing the internet, visiting a single website can mean communicating with an average of 31 other websites, which often include advertisers. CBII hosts that connection in a separate cloud environment, meaning there’s only one line of code when looking at the source code of the website because its routed it to secure isolated vendor space.

Over the summer, DISA awarded an other transaction agreement with a ceiling of $198.9 million to By Light Professional IT Services. The program initially began with 100,000 users and is now up to 105,000 users. It is in the incremental enterprise adoption phase with plans to expand it to more users across the DoD.

Landress also outlined other measures DISA has taken to secure networks. These include increased identity management, multifactor authentication, refocusing of analysts to defend against cloud and internet threats and partnering with other federal agencies to defend against threats that aren’t part of DoD but can influence the workforce.

Landress declined to specify which federal agencies they’re collaborating with, but said DISA is working with those organizations and with internet access point owners to compare and contrast what has worked and what hasn’t.

Many of these efforts weren’t spurred on by the pandemic, Landress said, but they were accelerated as a result.

While she also declined to discuss threats to the network and how increased telework may present unique threats, Landress did mention the intangible effect of the human element.

“When you’re in a government facility around your co-workers you’re held to a standard and your security strategy is always reinforced.

“When you take almost 100 percent of that population and put them in their homes distracted by their families and TV and trying to be on conference calls with phones and cameras and all kinds of things nearby, the threat landscape changes because you’re introducing a lot more of that human element in,” she said. “When you’re in a government facility around your co-workers you’re held to a standard and your security strategy is always reinforced.”

She added that there isn’t any direct evidence these distractions have created a threat or lack of vigilance, but that teleworkers are opens to some distractions that don’t exist in the workplace.

The pandemic sent organizations across the United States scrambling to support mass telework, but none had to meet the size and scale of the Defense Department with its millions of employees. One of the major initiatives rushed out by IT leadership at the Defense Department was the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, a Microsoft Teams environment that provided remote collaboration tools to DoD users across the world.

The platform has more than 1 million users and provides secure access to unclassified work. According to Caroline Kuharske, senior strategic planner for the services directorate and the strategic communication lead for CVR, the document sharing platform and cloud storage capability has been one of the most popular tools CVR supports.

Kuharske told C4ISRNET that part of the success was because early on in the pandemic the team “really clearly defined goals and what the outcome needed to be.”

“The more that you’re able to message early, with both internal and external sources, that definitely helps to create that narrative that, ‘yes, we are in a very unfamiliar state, but we are going to be able to do our jobs for this nation,’” Kuharske said.

The new platform meant users had to learn new tools, which is always a challenge. Kuharske said that the DoD IT leadership set up training programs for employees “to provide that level of comfort to where these warfighters weren’t focused on how hard this may be, but rather, ‘I can use this new tool and complete my mission.’”

The CVR platform’s self-service capability allows users to reset passwords and accounts without contacting a help desk, a function that has provided $21 million in service desk savings, according to Kuharske.

DISA had to do more than just roll out the CVR platform to ensure mission continuity during work from home. Another critical component was DISA’s Defense Collaboration Services program office, led by program manager Carey Burris. which rolled out a chat tool to Android devices to allow 135 employees to message with DoD employees from their mobile device. According to Burris, the typical timetable to scale the services they provided would take two to three months, but during the pandemic they did it in five weeks.

“Everyone understood the sense of urgency and that need. And how the entire department was department was depending on us,” Burris said. “There was a lot of synergy and just collaboration among the group. So it was just involvement of everyone understanding that ‘hey, this is something that we’ve got to get done.’”

The DCS program also used automation to deploy the tools faster.

“If it’s done manually, sometimes individuals move away from the script. They may think ‘okay, I got a shortcut’ or ‘I can skip this process to move it along.’ But if you’re using automated tools and you’re running those tools, it’s a repeatable process that it’s going through and you don’t have to worry about things being missed,” Burris said.

Some capabilities are likely to remain once work returns to normal. The CVR environment is a temporary solution, but top IT leaders at the DoD have said that an enduring solution will be implemented in June 2021 with higher security levels.

“We know we need a more enduring solution but [one] that keeps the same functionality of CVR, which allows us to talk to people at IL-2, talk to people not on the Department of Defense Information Network,” DoD principal deputy CIO John Sherman said at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon event Oct. 28.

Throughout the year, the Pentagon’s top IT organization has had a hand in the department’s Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, which provides collaboration tools for more than 1 million users. DISA has also helped set up IT capabilities for the Navy’s two hospital ships as they docked in New York City and Los Angeles to assist with the COVID-19 response.

As a result, it has also been a busy year for Debra Daniels, DISA’s vice procurement services executive and deputy director of the Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization. Daniels started at DISA in March, right as workers were being sent home. She joined from the Small Business Administration after about 30 years with the Army and now helps oversee a $17 billion portfolio at DISA.

C4ISRNET interviewed Daniels about her new position, the unexpected tool she uses to communicate and meeting small business goals. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is it like to take over a massive IT portfolio during a pandemic?

It makes you think differently and do things differently. It definitely increases communication as DISA provides IT and cybersecurity support. One of the most basic things that I use to make sure to communicate and get on board is the telephone. It works well on picking up and introducing yourself to not only the workforce but the mission partners themselves, stakeholders, small business, in order to do the job. It just makes you reach out more.

But I’m going to tell you: DISA has all of the tools in place that allow us to stay in and keep connected so far. DISA never shut down during the pandemic. We just moved from a federal workspace to our own home workspaces and kept going. And what I can say about the contracting force is they never lost momentum, they never lost focus on the priorities at all in doing that.

How have your first six months gone?

As our contracting operations moved to a home space, it never shut down, never closed, it never lost a beat. I would say probably the momentum increased with the contracting force on just what they were doing in reaching out, making sure that the war fighter had the capability.

I’m proud of the fact that, again, we definitely met or exceeded our small business goals. [Specifically], there’s about five new records that were [recently] set that continue to build the small business industrial base. This fiscal year, we did $7.6 billion in obligations, which was about a billion dollars more than they did in FY19, I would say just with increasing requirements in the need for the IT and cyber solutions across the Department of Defense but also probably related to some of the pandemic-related urgent and emerging requirements that we provided in that.

This is a very difficult time for small business. What should small businesses expect when interacting with your office?

What I would want small businesses to know is they’re definitely vital to us meeting our goals and our demands and capabilities for the war fighter. And they help us meet those demands. More often, as you know, we get great support — even greater support from them. We could not do it without them.

So for industry I would like to say they always want to know how can they participate in the request for information. I would definitely say to continue to reach out, but I would ask them [to] definitely do [your] homework [related to] whatever product or solution they’re seeking to provide to make sure that it fits within DISA’s capability and its needs. We also partner right now in contracting; definitely a key member at the table at the beginning of acquisition planning is our Office of Small Business Programs here in DISA. Definitely reach out to them, I would say, particularly if [you] want to partner with us to be invited to one of the DISA one-on-one small business orientation offerings that says how you can partner with us.

I’ll also say that as we get ready in this season to prepare for the DISA Forecast to Industry virtual conference, we will give our industry partners, particularly to include small business, our forecasts. I would say if you want to, you can probably see on the DISA website the forecast from fiscal 2019, and we actually updated that forecast of offerings for the upcoming years. We posted that earlier this summer. So you get an indication of what we’re looking for.

I would also say a biggie for industry to participate with us is answer requests for information and attend the industry days so you can definitely learn about DISA’s mission and what it’s seeking, particularly war fighter-specific [needs] and the capability we’re looking for.

What do small businesses need to know about the cybersecurity requirements at DISA?

That is one of the main focuses of DISA as the premier IT support agency and [a trusted provider that] connects and protects the war fighter in cyberspace. So cybersecurity is very important to us, and also should be important to our industry and our small business partners. I think they want to protect their intellectual property and capital just as much as we do. So if you’re wanting to work with DISA and the DoD, be accountable also for cybersecurity throughout the life cycle of the capability you’re providing.

What is DISA doing in relation to the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification — the new cybersecurity audit standards?

As we’re tracking right now, we do have new requirements that are coming out [because of] the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification in the DoD. So as that starts in its implementation process, the Procurement Services Directorate is definitely working to understand these new interim rules — and following [those rules] so we can implement that cybersecurity process once we have the application and accreditation requirements. So we definitely know it will impact all of our industry partners. It will not impact or affect our cybersecurity posture. So if you’re going to work with us, cybersecurity is definitely a key.

There’s a perception that we want to prioritize speed of delivery in deployment over cybersecurity. No. In DISA, in the department — again, I can’t harp on [enough] — cybersecurity is one of our utmost priorities, and that is something that we will not diminish or lower the standard on. So it’s important that while we deliver with speed and relevance to meet the needs, we’re also maintaining our cybersecurity.

The areas are cyber defense, cloud computing and Defense Enterprise Office Solutions. The latter is a new office tools contract. This is the second version of DISA’s strategic plan for fiscal 2019-2022, which was originally released in 2019.

“This refresh incorporates updates to our priorities in light of a changed strategic environment characterized by rapidly shifting global and cyberspace landscapes,” the introduction stated. “In this era of technological advancement in the cyber domain, DISA is continually seeking new ways to meet the needs of the end user that demands responsive, resilient, secure and high-quality IT services.”

In her letter from the director, Vice Adm. Nancy Norton noted that the Defense Department relied on DISA, as its top IT combat-support agency, to enable telework and COVID-19 pandemic response. The pandemic kicked off remote work for many of the department’s employees, which brought with it greater cybersecurity risks and sped up conversations around zero-trust cybersecurity architectures, senior IT officials at the Pentagon have said this year.

DISA’s cyber defense strategic focus area centers around zero trust, a model that inherently distrusts users trying to access systems. To enable that architecture, the strategic plan states that DISA must define the zero-trust reference architecture, which Norton said will be released by the end of the calendar year, develop policy, and test and implement capabilities.

Right now, DISA is working with the National Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command and the Pentagon’s chief information officer to develop a zero-trust lab environment “to replicate existing and near-state technologies to test zero trust capabilities,” the plan stated.

DISA also plans to bolster cyber defenses at network boundaries using threat intelligence, both internally and from commercial vendors. It plans to complete this project in FY22. The agency will also boost cybersecurity through cloud-based internet isolation, for which DISA awarded a $199 million other transaction authority contract earlier this year.

The strategic plan also lays out increasing regional defenses and endpoint security. DISA plans to sustain its Joint Regional Security Stacks as well as update the stacks through technology refreshes in FY21 to FY22.

DISA also plans to enhance endpoint security through the Comply to Connect program, a cybersecurity program that boosts network security. Sunsetting legacy systems and migrating to Comply to Connect started in FY20 and is expected to end in FY22. DISA also plans to stand up its Enterprise Patch Management Service by FY21 so Pentagon components have a centralized platform to find software fixes.

In terms of the cloud, DISA highlights several agile software development activities as key enablers for the department’s cloud mission, including a DevSecOps framework, a DevOps metrics model and a departmentwide community of practice. The strategic plan lists three major lines of effort for the cloud, including the Cloud Based Internet Isolation tool. The other two are cloud access and security, and cloud infrastructure. For access and security, DISA wants to establish enterprise identity and authentication for the department’s cloud environments and “evolve” its cloud access and security offerings.

“During this strategic time frame, we will host critical traditional systems, divest outdated legacy computing systems, and where appropriate, shift to cloud-based alternatives,” the plan read. “We are actively onboarding new mission-critical applications and working toward an infrastructure technical refresh for [Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network] and [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network] in 2021.”

For cloud infrastructure, DISA wants to deploy milCloud 2.0 on the SIPRnet and integrate common services that will be provided through the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, the Pentagon’s long-delayed enterprise cloud.

The final area, the Defense Enterprise Office Solution, is a commercial cloud offering that will provide the Microsoft Office suite across the department in an effort to standardize tools and applications across the department. The $4.4 billion contract was recently re-awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology after several protests.

“In this strategic time frame, we will facilitate migration from legacy enterprise services to DEOS, and sunset legacy services,” the strategic plan read. “This includes standing up, testing and authorizing NIPRNet services within the continental United States, as well as initiating OCONUS and SIPRNet services.”

The Fourth Estate Network Optimization is an IT reform effort that consolidates common IT services across the department and will now be managed by DISA as a single service provider, agency leaders said at the annual Forecast to Industry conference Nov. 4.

“Fourteen DoD agencies and field activities networks’ and the associated IT staff moved under the operational control of DISA,” Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of DISA, told the audience. “The network consolidation in transfer personnel will take place from FY20 to 24 and will improve the effectiveness of our cyber landscape across the enterprise.”

Officials told reporters at the conference that the IT reform increases DISA’s responsibilities and means the agency will maintain more items within the network. It is also expected to lead to significant savings throughout the department.

“What you’re really doing now is moving DISA’s responsibility, expanding it from the standpoint of starting at the strategic level, continue to operate strategic operations but now we’re basically at the end user level where in the past we basically would deliver capability to a point within the architecture and then it was somebody else’s job to carry it forward,” Dave Bennett, director of DISA’s operations directorate, told reporters. “Now we’re basically operating across the entire continuum. We’re not really at the tactical level but we’re definitely down in the end user arena, which significantly expands the roles and responsibilities.”

Norton also said this project allows other defense agencies to focus on their core mission, rather than worrying about IT.

“We can no longer assume dominance in the electromagnetic spectrum and what that means in practice for us is that we have three dimensions that we have to deal with. We have spectrum that’s congested, spectrum that’s contested and spectrum that’s constrained,” Gregory Wagner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Defense Spectrum Organization, told C4ISRNET.

Wagner said that these three dimensions — constrained, contested and congested spectrum — will all surface in great power competition while in the wars of the last decade leaders generally only worked against two of those factors.

Now forces and commanders have to be more agile and flexible, Wagner said.

He explained that across the military, leaders make decisions faster regarding their use of spectrum and to do that, they need improved command and control tools as well as additional information.

This is where Wagner’s outfit helps.

Officials at the Defense Spectrum Organization are trying to move to the cloud and piggyback on other Department of Defense efforts. This could mean helping the Pentagon’s top IT leaders with modernization projects associated with artificial intelligence and machine learning and how to address the spectrum challenges for commanders. This includes “better awareness of how we’re using the spectrum, better awareness of the operational constraints that are being put on the spectrum in one of those three dimensions,” he said.

They also have a project called the Electromagnetic Spectrum Enterprise Architecture that describes the data flow between services and between and the joint force. In addition, DISA officials maintain a “one-stop-shop” that commanders, both joint force and service specific, can access for curated spectrum data. For example, this group could provide information on what an organization’s spectrum footprint should look like based on military doctrine. Such data would allow a commander to better understand their terrain and better command and control their forces.

Think about a joint command. A leader would likely need to know all the forces in their operating area — land, sea or air — while an Army brigade commander would only be interested in their formation but might want to drill down as far as company or platoon level, Wagner said.

This also allows commanders to be more precise in their decisions. To act as a deterrent, Wagner said, maybe commanders want adversaries to know they’re in the spectrum. Or maybe not. By knowing their own footprint in the spectrum, they are able to better calculate their next move.