Pollett Eyes the Next Engagement
Written by Lieutenant General Carroll F.
MIT 2010 Volume: 14 Issue: 7 (August)
DISA Director Focuses on Future Operations, and
the Partnerships Needed to Make Them Successful.
[Editor’s Note: Following are edited excerpts from an address given by Lieutenant General Carroll F. Pollett, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), during the agency’s Customer and Industry Forum, held in Washington, D.C., in July.]
There are two primary focuses that we want to address today. One is the next engagement, and we will talk about what that means. The other piece is partnership. That’s why I’m honored that we have so many people here today representing the COCOMs, services, agencies and industry. This isn’t about what DISA does, but what DISA is attempting to do in partnership with them.
The next engagement to me is very critical, because I’ve found over the years that no one is interested in what you’ve done yesterday or today. They always want to know what you’re going to do next. The purpose of talking about the next engagement, as we’ve looked back over the last eight years of war and the numerous natural disasters that the Department of Defense has been engaged in supporting, is to see what lessons we have learned. How are the dynamics of technology changing, and demanding that we assess, so we can determine how to get better? How do we anticipate the unexpected, if we don’t know where next incident or engagement is going to occur, or when? But there’s one thing that we do know—there is a huge demand signal out there for an information environment that is adaptive and responsive to the user.
My predecessors in this position over the years have built the conditions for us to take advantage of evolving technology that is more dynamic than it has ever been, in terms of our opportunities to be able to connect and integrate the force. One thing we have to be conscious of as we think about those capabilities, which are moving us to the concept of net-centricity, is that it’s giving advantages to our adversaries as well.
The question is how we shape the environment to deliver the right effects across the full spectrum of operations. If we think about that question, we know we have to support the warfighter, and our national level leaders. In that process, as we think about the operational aspects of what we have to do, we also have to not forget the DoD business processes that are associated with supporting the operational environment. As I’ve said before, the strategic world hasn’t collapsed on top of the tactical world, but inside it. It has completely redefined what tactical operations are, and we’re not going back. We’re seeing the evolution where technology has taken us in the war zone, to provide the demand signal that that’s expected in every AOR. It’s expected at home base and in the transition to the national training centers, and you don’t expect to have to reconfigure as you move through the different phases of moving to an objective, whether kinetic or humanitarian.
Understanding that, and the challenges we’re looking at for the next engagement, I don’t know how you address the problem unless you understand the operational environment and challenges you’re up against. We are talking about operating across the full spectrum of operations; it’s not cleanly and neatly defined like in the past. It’s constant and simultaneous. For the foreseeable future, we’re looking at a very persistent threat. How do we quantify those challenges and understand them, and what that demands from us in terms of shaping information capabilities? One of the top challenges we’re facing in this environment across the full spectrum of operations is the complexity. What I’m talking about is the information implications of the challenge.
COLLABORATION COMPLEXITY
What I’m finding as I travel to Iraq and Afghanistan, to SOUTHCOM or PACOM, is the complexity associated with being able to talk with more than your service, and across services. The joint requirement for collaboration extends now to agencies, coalitions and non-government organizations. Another twist is that leaders want to be able to do this across both the classified and unclassified environments, which creates significant challenges for us as we develop cross-domain solutions, to allow the common operating picture to give a true picture to the user to be able to make decisions.
The second challenge we face is the rapid change in the asymmetric environment we’re operating in, and trying to keep up with acquisition and technology processes that push capabilities to the field so they can have the latest technology to operate. As a leader said recently to one of our senior officials here, in some cases, we’re pushing technology to the field so fast that we haven’t even defined the concept of operations and how to execute that capability most effectively. If you put a capability or service on the edge, and manage it from the other side of the world, there’s a whole new dynamic in terms of how we have to operate. The user doesn’t care about the enterprise in terms of the architecture. All they want to do is to plug in—now and their way. That’s what they expect from us.
If your cell phone drops off more than twice, do you keep that provider? These days, if you can’t watch a ball game on your cell phone, you won’t keep that provider. If a deployed warfighter can watch a game on his iPhone, he may wonder why he can’t get a common operating picture at the TOC. He doesn’t care about our problems with the architecture—he expects us to solve them, so he can plug in and get information across both the classified and unclassified domains.
Persistent conflict is another challenge. Terrorism has redefined the threat, and added a whole dimension in terms of what we have to be able to deal with. Uncertainty is the fourth challenge. When I talk about uncertainty, I’m not just talking about uncertainty in the war zone or AOR, but about also the uncertainty of humanitarian and disaster operations. After the earthquake in Haiti, overnight we had 13,000 U.S. troops, 109 nations and 500 nongovernment organizations converged on Haiti to provide humanitarian assistance. The problem was not reallocating bandwidth—we had the resiliency and environment to do that. The challenge was information sharing and collaboration, and to integrate a commercial collaboration capability into the military collaboration system. It was a huge effort to rethink our processes and leverage different collaboration tools that we had developed in the Pacific Rim and in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring to them to bear in the new environment.
It’s clear that we’re looking for information dominance to meet the operational challenge. You can say information superiority or information dominance, I don’t care. My point is that the common denominator and optimal word in those phrases is information, and how you go about solving the challenges of information.
SHARING CHALLENGE
The first information challenge has to do with sharing information with our coalition partners and other agencies. During the last 120 days, based on a requirement from General McCrystal, the community came together between the agencies and services, and was able to build a VTC grid, deploy it and integrate it between NATO, coalition and U.S. forces. All those worked in parallel in partnership that included industry, while setting the structure in place, and they are ready to put that capability in now for General Petraeus.
The second attribute is that you have to have agility. I’m talking about agility from the standpoint of how you get the technical requirements aligned with the operational requirements. How do you have the ability to adapt to a changing environment? Look at the IEDs, and how fast the enemy is able to turn the technology as fast as we adapt to it. How do we get ahead of that learning curve so that we can stay ahead of the threat? And how do we adapt our partnership with the Navy, as we move from a point-to-point capability with Iridium to a netted Iridium capability, to be able to support the users on the ground, both in operations and movement?
The enterprise infrastructure has to be robust, protected and always on. When I started as director of DISA, somebody cut a cable in the Mediterranean, and I had to figure out how the process worked to get it fixed. I learned from the tremendous effort to resolve the problem, because it had a significant impact on operating ability. So we focused on every choke point in the world and started building out diversity and capacity, which in our terms equals survivability. We have significantly increased diversity and capacity, not just in Southwest Asia, because you can’t just look at one AOR. If we do the right thing in SWA, then we automatically are doing the right thing for other commands. The bottom line is that in Afghanistan, we have increased bandwidth by probably 100 percent over the last 10 to 12 months, and we have had a huge mission analysis on the space, air and terrestrial layers, and prioritized services to warfighters to optimize capabilities.
In the last 30 days, we have had 28 fiber cuts in the Middle East. It’s good that many people don’t know about that, because they did know about the cable cut 18 months ago. That’s the power of the robust protective environment that enhances diversification capacity, and the partnerships we’re building with telecom companies in that part of the world.
The focus has to be our responsibility to create an enterprise infrastructure, so the users will be able to leverage the GIG. At the top of the list of enterprise services that we are talking is identity management, so we can authenticate who we are talking to. We’re working aggressively with the Air Force in terms of how we do content delivery, and how they will transition their capabilities into the enterprise. We’re working aggressively with the Army in terms of enterprise e-mail. We have an opportunity in this partnership to develop what may end up being the joint solution. We’re working with all the services in terms of security architectures within the enterprise, so whichever AOR you’re in, we don’t constrain the user from having transparency as they move throughout the environment. Those are things that we’re focusing on as we try to address creating a seamless, transparent environment to achieve collaboration. ♦
