Militaries the world over are increasingly developing and deploying drones and robotics, with the systems posing a threat on land, at sea and in the air. The growing importance of uncrewed systems has been on display for two years in Ukraine and is at the heart of the Defense Department’s clandestine Replicator initiative.

In discussions about the Army’s fiscal 2025 spending plans, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Doug Bush said a multiyear procurement for something that changes as fast as unmanned aerial systems “may not be appropriate.”

“There’s also a lot of new entrants in that space,” Bush said in a briefing at the Pentagon. “Committing to one, as good as that company might be, would perhaps foreclose other options because there’s so much innovation with new companies in that space.”

Multiyear procurements are typically used to secure mass amounts of munitions. They are thought to motivate defense suppliers, who can count on longer-term demands and ramp up production as a result, and save money by buying in bulk over the long run.

But locking in on the same drone year after year is a different circumstance, according to Bush. Demands for technology can change month to month, let alone year to year.

“What you buy in one year, I’m not sure you’d want to buy that exact same [unmanned aerial system] for five years,” Bush said. “We might be heavy one year in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and heavy the next year in strike.”

The Army’s fiscal 2025 budget blueprint totals nearly $186 billion, an uptick of $400 million compared to the year prior. The service is asking for $175.4 billion in its base budget and another $10.5 billion to pay for overseas operations.

The budget levels also presume the congressional passage of supplemental funding to cover the costs of funneling military aid to Ukraine and to support increased operations in the Middle East, Defense News reported.

Speaking at the West naval conference in San Diego on Feb. 15, Del Toro, a former businessman, said that in a time of war abroad and political uncertainty at home, the U.S. needs companies to deliver weapons, warships, aircraft and more on time, on budget and without excuses.

“You can’t be asking the American taxpayer to make even greater public investments while you continue, in some cases, to goose your stock prices through stock buybacks, deferring promised capital investments, and other accounting maneuvers that, to some, seem to prioritize stock prices that drive executive compensation rather than making the needed, fundamental investments in the industrial base, in your own companies, at a time when our nation needs us to be at all-ahead flank,” he said.

“Through initiatives like the Taxpayer Advocacy Project, I have directed our contract community and the Office of General Counsel to ensure that we will leverage all legal means at our disposal to ensure that the American people are also getting what they paid for,” he added.

The message was delivered to a standing-room-only crowd teeming with some of the world’s largest defense contractors. Del Toro did not single out any one company.

The defense industry in the aggregate is financially healthy, and that status has improved over time, according to a Pentagon contracting study published in April. Traditional defense firms outperform commercial counterparts in many key financial metrics, it found.

Shipbuilder HII this month reported revenue rose 13 percent to $3.2 billon in the fourth quarter of 2023 from the same period a year earlier, as operating income almost tripled to $312 million. General Dynamics said it earned $1 billion, or $3.64 per diluted share, on revenue of $11.7 billion, the highest quarterly EPS and revenue in company history.

Del Toro said the Navy would hold accountable contractors with poor performance, including through a “deep dive” investigation of the most chronic offenders.

“We must endeavor to ensure that contracts with the Navy are delivered on time and on budget,” he said. “The global strategic situation demands it.”

The department tapped Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle to supply digital services for the JWCC, itself the follow-up to the failed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure venture, or JEDI, in December 2022 in an award worth as much as $9 billion over three to five years. The companies are in competition with one another for task orders, and each is only guaranteed $100,000.

Dozens of orders totaling hundreds of millions of dollars have already been logged using JWCC. The arrangement spans unclassified, classified and top-secret designations and is meant to connect far-flung front lines with established headquarters.

“When we announced JWCC, it was a three-year base with two option years, and we’re already in the one-year base of this,” Chief Information Officer John Sherman said Dec. 13 at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Portland, Oregon. “We said all along, in ‘24, in that timeframe, we’re going to start looking at what comes next.”

Sherman provided no timeline for what the Defense Department has previously advertised as full and open multi-cloud and multi-vendor competition. He did say, though, the Defense Information Systems Agency will play a key role in “JWCC 2.0.” DISA is the department’s de facto information technology authority.

“We are firmly committed to mutli-cloud, multi-vendor, and this is what we’re going to be doing moving forward,” Sherman said. “Watch this space. More to follow.”

The JWCC is considered the backbone of the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, or CJADC2, in which forces and their databases across land, air, sea, space and cyber are interlinked.

Cloud is increasingly seen as a means to get the right data to the right people at the right time — the tenet of CJADC2. Sherman earlier this year instructed defense agencies, military services and other offices to prioritize JWCC, especially when cutting deals concerning the nation’s most sensitive information.

“The JWCC is not a cloud management or hosting environment,” he said in a memo made public in August, “but rather a key vehicle in the department’s technology arsenal for the acquisition of services for current and future DoD component managed and controlled cloud environments.”

Sherman’s directions for JWCC employment included carve outs for the National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. They rely on the intelligence community’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, which was awarded in 2020. It features the same vendors as JWCC, plus IBM.

The contracting push is meant to meet “the increasing demands for commercial GEOINT,” or geospatial intelligence such as images and data collected by Earth-facing satellites, Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said Dec. 12 at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The NGA analyzes imagery, maps the Earth for military purposes and handles portions of Project Maven, launched by the Pentagon in 2017 to detect targets of interest in footage captured by uncrewed systems. The project has since become a program of record at the agency.

A request for proposals is expected next month. A draft published in late October described Luno A as transformative to the agency’s methods. It also emphasized NGA isn’t seeking additional technology to install and manage on classified networks.

“The goal is to enable NGA to do two things: Acquire commercial GEOINT object detections and leverage industry analytics and automation in areas of national security interest, of course,” Whitworth said.

Whitworth on Tuesday said the value of Luno A contracts would be “significant” but declined to give an exact dollar figure.

Overhead imagery is a resource of growing importance, with governments and expert organizations relying on it to monitor neighbors and affairs farther afield. Such photos and analysis were used to expose Russia’s materiel buildup ahead of its invasion of Ukraine last year. More recently, photos and video have shown the destruction wrought by the Israel-Hamas war.

The NGA is the intelligence community’s lead organization for analyzing imagery and turning it into usable information. The agency relies on what’s called the National System for Geospatial Intelligence, or NSG, to distribute nearly a petabyte of data around the globe each day.

C4ISRNET reporter Courtney Albon contributed to this article.

U.S. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who also heads the National Security Agency, on Dec. 8 described Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as “the most important authority that we utilize day in, day out.” A lapse, he said at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event here, would be disastrous.

Section 702 allows the government to collect and review communications like emails and text messages of foreigners abroad, including when they are in touch with Americans. The power is set to expire at the end of the month, following renewal in 2018.

The Biden administration is pushing for reauthorization while also battling criticism from groups that say it is ripe for abuse and amounts to a warrantless dragnet. Nakasone rejected the criticisms Friday.

“As the director of the National Security Agency, I will tell you that our focus is not only national security. It’s also the protection of our civil liberties and privacy,” he said. “This is an authority with oversight and transparency that allows both of those things.”

The House judiciary and intelligence committees this week advanced legislation that would re-up the powerful spying tools. The measures differ, though, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has threatened a showdown on the House floor, Politico reported.

Nakasone’s advocacy aligns him with other government and military officials, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, the CYBERCOM deputy chief.

Haugh, who is expected to succeed Nakasone in the dual role, but remains in confirmation limbo, in July said Section 702 was irreplaceable and served as the cornerstone of the president’s daily intelligence rundown.

“When we see things like the origins of fentanyl in China and its path that it takes to the United States? Informed by 702,” Haugh told lawmakers at the time. “Counterterrorism actions, the ability to see some of the egregious acts that Russia has done in Ukraine? Informed by 702.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers are urging the Department of Defense to prioritize the Indo-Pacific as it interlinks soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and their disparate databases in a multibillion-dollar effort known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

Companion bills filed this week by Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, instruct the department to address Indo-Pacific Command’s long-range networking and intelligence-sharing needs first. The command’s remit includes China and North Korea, as well Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The Biden administration considers the region critical to international stability and financial well-being.

By seamlessly connecting forces across all environments, including cyber and space, U.S. defense officials hope to outwit and outshoot tech-savvy adversaries of the future. Establishment of such links has been piecemeal as the services each have their own contribution to the connectivity campaign, and outdated or siloed technologies have hampered in-the-field collaboration.

The JADC2 Implementation Act, as the legislation is known, motivates “the right people and programs at the Pentagon to deploy needed strategies in a transformative way,” Issa said in a statement Nov. 27. “These capabilities will be a force multiplier for military efforts abroad and achieve smooth and efficient integration of warfighting units on the battlefield.”

The geography of the Indo-Pacific, too, poses unique challenges. Vast expanses of water, with islands strewn throughout, dares connectivity while dense foliage impedes signals and extreme weather events foil logistics.

Untangling it all to find the right solutions, and soon, is critical, according to Ernst. The bills require regular updates on activities, including the deployment of a joint data integration system handled by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. The office was established in 2021 and has since played a significant role in the CJADC2 pursuit.

“No matter the service branch, commanders should have access to critical capabilities to best equip our warfighters and better coordinate our military’s efforts across air, land, sea, space, and cyber,” Ernst said in a statement. “Through the Joint All-Domain Command and Control Implementation Act, I’m working with Congressman Issa to further integrate our joint forces and give commanders better access to the tools they need to achieve their mission.”

The Defense Department in fiscal 2024 requested $1.4 billion for CJADC2. It said the funding was necessary to “transform warfighting capability.” Lawmakers have previously questioned related price tags and timelines.

The proposals in both chambers are congruent with plans outlined last year in drafts of the National Defense Authorization Act. At the time, senators advocated for a joint headquarters for CJADC2 alongside INDOPACOM as well as quarterly demonstrations of tech maturation.

GDIT, a division of General Dynamics, this month made public the results of its defensive cyber operations research, which relied on a survey of 200 government leaders working in national security fields.

Some 41% of respondents found themselves “submerged in data,” with more than 30% saying they needed more skilled personnel and more-efficient analytics to handle it. More than one-quarter already see the value in AI for cybersecurity, namely for real-time threat detection and automated countermeasures. Human error was the most significant issue, the study found.

“There’s overwhelming volumes of data. I think that challenge only gets worse as we progress, because the threat landscape is ever-increasing,” Matthew McFadden, GDIT’s vice president of cyber, said in an interview. “One of the key findings is: How do we help cyber professionals work smarter, more efficiently? AI and automation is, really, a key way to do that.”

Potential applications of AI, automation and other pattern-recognizing tools are growing as the technologies mature and the public becomes aware of them. Their use for digital defense is gaining steam as hacking threats from small groups and world powers such as China and Russia evolve.

The Department of Defense and other federal civilian agencies consider AI a means to quickly parse piles of information and pass along useful insights, either on the battlefield or in furnishing public services. Machines and programs can also handle rote tasks, freeing up manpower already spread thin and sought after.

The GDIT study notes that robust cyber defenses comprise both trusted, well-defined capabilities and innovative technologies. Automation is a key piece of the Pentagon’s push to zero trust, a new cybersecurity paradigm. The approach assumes networks are jeopardized, requiring perpetual validation of users, devices and access.

“AI is, technically, providing better results to the defender than the attacker at this moment,” Matt Hayden, GDIT’s vice president of cyber, intelligence and homeland security, told C4ISRNET. “When you see responses like this, it’s recognized that all these customers see now is the time to make sure they’re getting the most out of what they’ve already invested in, and to put their chips to the middle of the table to get that defender’s advantage.”

The Pentagon requested $1.8 billion for AI in fiscal 2024. It is juggling more than 800 unclassified AI-related projects, the Associated Press reported.

While the military has led AI spending, funding for similar projects at other agencies, especially NASA, has similarly grown from 2020 to 2022, according to analysis by Deltek. Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs on AI tripled in a two-year period, spurred by machine-learning and virtual-reality obligations, the software and consulting business said.

“We’re going to start to find that AI is not only in almost everything,” Hayden said, “but we’re going to have to start categorizing it as to how autonomous it is.”

Conquering the information ecosystem from social-media chatter to government propaganda is increasingly important as mis- and disinformation proliferate and world powers including China and Russia try to influence foreign affairs from afar.

The Defense Department must “build a process to rapidly deploy teams of information forces, including the reserve force,” and foster a related workforce comprising military and civilian experts, according to the 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment. Improved recruiting, training and career paths are needed for the effort.

The congressionally mandated document was made public Nov. 17, months after internal publication. Information warfare represents a persuasive brew of public outreach, offensive and defensive electronic capabilities, and cyber operations; it combines data awareness and manipulation to gain an advantage before, during and after major events.

“As this strategy makes clear, our ability to gain and sustain information advantages at the times and places of our choosing are critical to successful operations in the information space,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the introduction. “Make no mistake: America’s competitors and enemies are moving quickly in the information environment, hoping to offset our enduring strategic advantages elsewhere.”

Emerging technologies play a critical role in both waging and foiling influence campaigns, according to the strategy.

Generative artificial intelligence, capable of imitating human interaction, can fuel spam, phishing attempts and impersonation, while automation can flood Facebook or X, formerly Twitter, with misleading and provoking posts. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned of the former. The latter has been seen in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, the commander of the information warfare-focused 16th Air Force, at an event earlier this month said the discipline dominates international competition and shapes the fighting that can follow.

“It’s the essential enabler, as we’re looking to gain information and decision advantage,” Kennedy said at a Mitchell Institute event last week. “We’re employing forces across domains to make sure that we’re ready to seize the initiative in the information domain, and, through our information warfare capabilities, to prevail in conflict and set the conditions for peace, after the conflict, as we’re moving forward.”

Dahut leads Google Public Sector, launched in June 2022 to target government modernization and the tech-centric needs of national security. She previously worked as the president of Booz Allen Hamilton’s global defense business.

Dahut sat down with C4ISRNET on the sidelines of the Oct. 17 forum to discuss her experience with the company, government adoption of artificial intelligence and cloud, and the ever-changing landscape of cyber. Google Public Sector the same day announced it was collaborating with Accenture Federal Services on a cybersecurity center of excellence.

Portions of the interview below were edited for length and clarity.

How is Google Public Sector shaping up a little more than one year after its launch? Who or what have been some of its biggest focus areas?

I’ve spent the last year, really, traveling around, visiting with customers and prospective customers. There are three things they say, resoundingly, that they need and want.

One is they need to move quickly. They need to move boldly, and they need to transition out of legacy IT.

Two is that they need security built in. I don’t know if you saw Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia speak earlier this morning, but the number of cyber incidents are quadrupling, the number of zero-day incidents are just growing extraordinarily, and our public-sector customers are experiencing that and seeing that. They need security built in.

Then, the last thing is that they don’t want to do this by themselves; they need really strong technology partners to support them.

I use that as a foundation to say we’re really trying to address those needs for our public-sector customers. Bringing modern cloud to the table, bringing an IL5-compliant cloud that is truly differentiated, because we are accrediting U.S. Google Cloud entirely at IL5, and it has security and AI built in by design. By default, security is built in.

What we have been really evangelizing with our customers is we’re the right partner for you. We’re the fastest growing cloud in industry for a reason. We want to bring this cloud and these feature sets to you to really help you, whether it’s security challenges that you have or to digitally transform using AI.

In your experience, how well are government or defense agencies adopting cloud, something like the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability? What more can be done?

First of all, it’s quite variable, dependent on the technology leaders that lead the different agencies, how quickly they have moved to the cloud. I think the number is somewhere less than 20% in all of government that have actually transitioned to the cloud and are using the cloud in a meaningful way.

JWCC is a great contract vehicle, right? It’s a contract vehicle that all of the Department of Defense can access and leverage. But the technology leaders inside the agencies need to, first of all, commit that they want to move to the cloud and they want to use cloud and AI and security as a way of modernizing or digitally transforming.

You were at AUSA. If you look at the way the Army is, really, evaluating cloud, moving to a multi-cloud type of organization, really adopting AI and developing use cases to accelerate the mission, it’s super exciting.

There are other agencies that are not nearly as far along, so it really runs a continuum, depending upon who you’re talking to.

How has your defense experience — at Booz Allen, for example — shaped Google Public Sector’s pursuits thus far?

I ran the defense business at Booz Allen for a really long time. And what I know to be true is there are a lot of really earnest defense leaders that want to modernize and move quickly.

I think they are burdened with legacy IT and technical debt that they can’t resolve in a single budget year. They have incumbent providers that are super aggressive. So how can they overcome that? And then, thirdly, there’s a risk paradigm around technology, and particularly AI, that needs to be overcome.

As Jinyoung Englund said on the stage this morning — she’s the chief strategy officer for the algorithmic warfare directorate for the chief digital and AI office — there’s risk in everything.

Let’s not get mired in evaluating all of the risks. Let’s pick some use cases that are not complicated, that don’t create high level of risk for your organization. Maybe it’s a back-office use case, maybe it’s a security use case. It’s something. Let’s get started that way.

My advice for all of our customers has been ‘get started and move quickly.’

Now, to the point you made about drawing a distinction between an integrator and a Google, I think integrators own a lot of the dollars that are spent on technology on an annual basis. Our commitment is to partner very closely with integrators and be partner-first, so that we can really help them bring best-of-breed technology to their customers.

How would you assess the state of AI today, particularly for your government or defense consumers?

Well, I’ll back up and say the state of AI, globally, is that commercial companies are adopting it very, very quickly. I think that should tell you something about, No. 1, the economic benefit that it provides, as well as the mission benefit that it provides.

A significant number of our commercial companies, they’re not experimenting with AI, they are implementing and adopting it. When we have those conversations with federal and state and local customers, we’re like, ‘Let’s take some of the use cases that we’re seeing in our commercial sector, and let’s just apply them, and use them, in the government sector,’ because we think that there’s not a lot of risk in some of those proven use cases.

Now, where they are challenged is, in some cases, they’re not yet transitioned to the cloud. In order to really leverage the benefit of AI, you have to be in the cloud, because that’s where the compute power is.

Sometimes they have to back up and say, OK, in order to do what Company A, B, or C is doing, we need to first transition to the cloud, to get our data into the cloud, to be able to leverage our data enterprise to apply AI.

It might be a longer pathway for them, but it’s still very doable.

What is the cause of that adoption lag between private and public sectors? The Defense Department has been dinged, for awhile, for its slow adoption of new tech.

I think it’s what I talked about earlier.

It’s technical debt. They have to move to the cloud and get there rapidly. It’s a risk conversation that they have.

It’s great to do prototypes, but they have a scale issue, as well. So you need to move from prototypes and pilots to real, scaled implementations. And that scale within DoD is a very dramatically different scale. So leveraging the lessons learned from like a large Fortune 50 company — how did they do it — and applying that same approach.

What’s your read on the shift to zero-trust cybersecurity? Do you feel it’s as bulletproof or revolutionary as some officials make it out to be?

Google is a zero-trust company. We became a zero-trust company, we were really the pioneers in zero trust, because we were hacked in 2008, 2009. Well-known story. We can send you the YouTube links.

But we, Google, decided at that point in time that we needed to adopt an entirely different security architecture, because it was an existential threat to the company. We, over the past 13 years, have really been adopting and implementing zero trust across the board.

It starts with identity and access. That is a really hard thing, sometimes, for the government to get its head around.

If I can identify you as a user — what your appropriate accesses are, and that you are sitting at the computer you say you are sitting at — that is the trifecta of security. Now, do I believe that, at some point down the road, somebody would find a way to hack into that? Quite possibly. But right now, it is the most secure architecture there is.

That’s why we’re working, actually, with DoD to help them think through their zero-trust architecture and how they could move to it.

It’s not easy. I mean, Google has been migrating to this over a long period of time, and we are now in that architecture. It takes time, effort, resources to really dedicate to doing it right.

Is zero trust the right fit for everyone, for commercial companies and these massive government agencies?

The way I think about government and government transformation, if you will, you have to take it in its piece parts. If you look at it with the big picture, it seems overwhelming.

I always talk to our customers about what is the first step you can take today to modernize. I know that if you go out 20 years, this is where you want to be. But let’s back up to today: What is the first step you would take? Let’s take that step.

Maybe the first step is moving to the cloud. Then, once you’re in the cloud, securing your data in a secure way, so that the entire enterprise can leverage that data. So, just taking those incremental steps but with a bold vision.

‘Is zero trust right for everybody?’ is your question. I don’t know that it’s right for everybody, but I also don’t know that it’s not right for everybody.

If you look at the number of security incidents we’ve had as a company since moving there, it’s none. So, what is the value of being able to secure your enterprise in a way that you sleep at night?

Frederick Douglass Moorefield Jr., a deputy chief information officer for command, control and communications, was one of two men the Justice Department on Oct. 2 said was apprehended following an investigation into the alleged animal abuse and underground gambling. The other was Mario Damon Flythe.

The Washington Post reported the Defense Department was “aware of the criminal complaint” and that Moorefield was “no longer in the workplace,” citing a department spokesperson.

The deputy CIO for command, control and communications lends expertise and guidance on policy and technical issues related to defense connectivity and data-sharing standards. It also plays a role in spectrum-sharing decisions.

Police searched the Maryland homes of Moorefield and Flythe in early September. They rescued 12 dogs, according to the Justice Department, and recovered veterinary steroids, training regimens, a carpet “that appeared to be stained with blood” and a weighted dog vest. An electrical plug and jumper cables — likely used to kill losing dogs — were also found, an affidavit alleges.

Moorefield was released after being arraigned, records show. If convicted, he could face five years in prison.