As the Defense Department and Congress strive to streamline clumsy Authorization To Operate (ATO) procedures for software, the Pentagon also needs more computing infrastructure to test and experiment with new code.
“For certain use cases, it’s proving to have a lot of value,” said Col. Matt “Nomad” Strohmeyer. “It’s not this panacea, but it’s also not this Pandora’s box of evil. It’s somewhere in between.”
“The Minimum Viable Capability for CJADC2 [Combined Joint All Domain Command & Control] is real and ready now,” said Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks. “It's low latency and extremely reliable.” But budget gridlock blocks deployment.
Ryan Swann, a member of the Defense Innovation Board and chief data officer at Vanguard, argues in this op-ed that the Pentagon should make bureaucratic changes, but also "create environments in which DoD civilians and service members can express their innovative talents."
DoD "will prioritize technologies that can confound malicious cyber actors and prevent them from achieving their objectives in and through cyberspace," according to an unclassified summary.