WASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Special Operations Command\u2019s top IT official delivered a blunt message to industry Thursday: \u201cI want you to rethink your business models.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SOCOM CIO Lisa Costa requested more flexible tools for operators that the command can easily tailor to mission needs. \u201cThink about not necessarily always proposing a full stack solution, but instead focusing on providing infrastructure as a service, data as a service, algorithms as a service, and keeping those separate so that we can mix and match them for the next unknown mission,\u201d she said at the National Defense Industrial Association\u2019s Special Operations Forces Industry Conference<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Costa\u2019s comments reflect a shift across the military that the technology it buys must be flexible as it prepares for constantly evolving threats in future wars. In the next few decades of warfare, the military must process mass amounts of data at the edge to ensure operators have the most up-to-date information possible, all while withstanding jammed communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What special operations forces need going forward, Costa said, is next-generation tools and platforms that will allow for resilient communications and network logins, secure access to data across classification levels and cloud-agnostic solutions that reach from the SOF enterprise to the battlefield \u2014 all while being interoperable. Costa wants to get away from the logistical nightmare of delivering pallets of hardware with proper cooling equipment into \u201cincredibly\u201d austere environments. Instead, she wants phones or tablets to adapt to needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat I really want is I want to enable the hardware that we currently have in place and let\u2019s say it\u2019s a phone to be the thing I need it to be at that moment in time,\u201d Costa said. \u201cSo it could be an unattended ground sensor. It could be a router or an AI computational processor. What\u2019s key here is using process much like we use today to update, for example, your iPhone or your iPad. We can enable hardware to be computationally different from what it was originally deployed to be, and then return it back to its original place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With data at the center joint all-domain operations, SOCOM\u2019s IT shop is also developing common data fabric for special operations forces that would allow for secure data access to operators across SOCOM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe no longer can afford to put our data into mission silos,\u201d Costa said. \u201cThat data has to be discoverable to everyone at the security classification that it resides.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chief Warrant Officer Robert Byrd, SOCOM\u2019s chief enterprise engineer, said at the conference that the data fabric effort is still in the \u201cnascent stages.\u201d Byrd said that the CIO team is working with SOCOM\u2019s chief data officer to define what data SOCOM users have. From there, Byrd said SOF will decided what use cases and missions the fabric will need to serve, as well as work with its components and the military services to identify areas of interoperability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SOCOM\u2019s IT needs fit into its ongoing effort to provide operators with vast amounts of tactically relevant data in battle, an effort called the Hyper-Enabled Operator. One area the IT office is contributing to HEO is through edge data processing pilots, or ensuring that operators have high compute power on the battlefield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAn operator who may be in a team who may be disconnected for a significant amount of time, not only do they need to have the ability to have access to information, but they also need the ability to process the information that they\u2019re collecting,\u201d Costa said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a call with reporters Tuesday, SOCOM\u2019s director of science and technology, Lisa Sanders, said the command is experimenting with edge computing to evaluate it for the battlefield. The critical research area for the command right now is connectivity and what tradeoffs to make in terms of connectivity in disconnected environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are balancing what capability we can get without any connectivity back to a cloud-based environment and trading off how can that be used tactically because of the smaller sized servers operators need in battle,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIs it more important for [operators] that it\u2019s small, and it\u2019ll last on the battery power that you\u2019ve got for a certain amount of mission … or is it more important that you have greater capability, and maybe I use something bigger than a handheld device, maybe I put something in a truck or I put something back in base, and I connect to that base. So those trade-offs are really the experimentation that we\u2019re doing in edge processing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SOCOM’s top IT leader said industry needs to deliver more flexible tools to operators so they can be easily tailored to new mission needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":59833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":36,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"10":{"categories":["sofic","digital-show-dailies","daily-news-roundup","newsletters"],"primary_category":"sofic"}}},"categories":[7,8,106,29,13,36,38,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3252],"class_list":["post-22682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-battlefield-tech","category-c2-comms","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-industry","category-it-networks-battlefield-tech","category-mobility","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"H4KADYDXFJBTJOMF7WT55HYI7A","arc_canonical_url":"\/battlefield-tech\/it-networks\/2021\/05\/20\/socom-cio-to-industry-rethink-your-business-models\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n