Ahead of the announcement, Army officials told reporters that they’re looking to change the software buying model.

“The direction we’re moving in right now in the Army is this is going to be one of many enterprise licensing agreements that we’re looking at entering into,” Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga told a small group of reporters ahead of the announcement. “I think the big thing to think about is, as kind of we move forward, we’re finding some things, we have a lot of big software packages that are out there. They’ve been bought over several years, several program offices, several commands, [but we’re] not getting a lot of parity across the board on how they’re being delivered, right? Adding a lot of complexity to the environment. And we’ve been thinking through a couple things, right? One is, how do we reduce the complexity, right? So lower overhead to acquire capability, especially software. That’s kind of the first kind of tenet.”

The next piece, he said, is to figure out how to “make it a lot easier to acquire said software, right?” 

“I think the traditional model of, hey, we’re just buying software licenses and services … in combos kind of doesn’t work in this new environment and the way that things are being delivered,” Garciga said. “So how do we add enough fidelity, right, and an approach where folks can really get the software the way they need it?” 

The final piece, one that Garciga said he as the Army CIO cares “very much about,” is reducing cost. “How do we get better buying power across the board?” he said.

The 10-year deal with Palantir is worth up to $10 billion, although Army officials noted that they’re not committed to spending that much money. The move will consolidate 75 contract vehicles as the Army looks to streamline things, they said.

“This really has been our first kind of separate sense to go in and really get a large ELA. This is one of many. But our intent is to continue to move down this path, right, to really focus on reducing that complexity, adding agility to how we buy, right, and then the last piece … which is save taxpayer dollars as much as we can,” Garciga said.

The service is in talks with other vendors for similar types of arrangements.

“We have a couple of others that are teed up that we’re either already in negotiation with or starting the conversation to start negotiations with to do this across the board,” Garciga said.

A key aim of the initiative is to get better deals from a unit cost perspective. In the civilian side of the federal government, the General Services Administration is leading a similar effort to maximize government buying power for software licenses called OneGov.

“What I see across contracts is, hey, if I have more than one contract with the same vendor, have I bought the same thing more than once in a different way or at a different price? And just from a common-sense perspective, does that really make sense?” Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command, told reporters.

“Starting with Palantir and as we look at other ones, we’re looking at, hey, it makes sense to make sure … we’re getting the best discounts. So just like economies of scale buy, right? If I buy one widget, it costs X amount. If I buy 100, I should get a discount. And the more I buy at scale, the more of a discount I should [get]. And also …  just in general, across this whole initiative, we’ll look at, well, how are you selling this elsewhere? Should there be clauses in the contract that say, hey, you know, if you try and sell it somewhere else, we need to come back here and look at what the rate is on this and get a discount,” Moyer said.

She noted that the Army isn’t actually obligating $10 billion to Palantir, but the deal recognizes potential growth for the services and goods that are on that contract with the multibillion-dollar ceiling. While there is a minimum spend requirement on the contracts, the Army has no obligation to buy more than it sees fit across its enterprise. 

The Army is also trying to avoid vendor lock as it shakes up its buying practices.

“The other really important thing to note there is competition for future programs and things like that will still continue to happen. So, for example, if on all these ELAs — name the vendor — if we’re specifically talking about Palantir, if Palantir chooses to compete on, you know, whatever program or weapon system in there, the chosen awardee they happen to be at, then we would obviously leverage this agreement [to get] economies of scale discounts, buys, right, that makes the volume,” Moyer said. “We would leverage our buying power in the Army to get maximum discounts. So those are probably, from a contracting perspective, the things that … we really want to make sure that we hit home, which is robust competition is still a thing.”

The Army also wants to make sure it doesn’t overbuy and acquire licenses it doesn’t need.

Officials used a food analogy, comparing previous software buying practices to all-you-can-eat buffets or combo deals where customers essentially pay for things they might not consume.

“As we look at the way we’ve done kind of historical contracting … we typically will, kind of sometimes overbuy, because we’re trying to kind of calculate what expected growth is and whatnot. So this [enterprise agreement] is meant to help shape that, to say we’re buying just in time into that growth pattern, right? So, instead of saying, OK, I need 100 licenses, I only have to buy 50 now based on the real usage versus buy 100 because that’s where we have to fix a contract that’s meant to be for a longer period of time. So shifting that mentality is to say, OK, now we could just do just in time, kind of delivery of services,” Gabe Chiulli, chief technology officer for Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, told reporters.

Officials want a more flexible range of options, sort of like an a la carte menu where they can just pick exactly what they want.

Garciga said early efforts to set the stage for the new model began during the previous administration, but he suggested that the focus on improving software acquisition at the Defense Department under the Trump administration has provided additional momentum.

“We have been working on this since November of last year. And I think that there was just an inherent understanding, you know, almost two years ago now that we needed to start moving in this direction with a handful of our vendors,” he said. “There’s been a lot of prep work and foundation being laid to have this conversation. If anything, what I’d say is the change in the environment has allowed us to move a little bit faster than we would have normally, and I think, a willing acceptance by a lot of our commercial partners to rethink the way that they integrate and work with us in the government and what our contractual agreements are going to look like moving forward. So I think … we’ve had a little bit of a catalyst over the last like quarter and a half that’s just be able to get this like really over the hump, to get a really good deal for the Army.”

Moyer said the new way of doing things will also improve transparency into what the Army is buying.

“It’s easy [to keep track] when you buy things that you can see, right? When you buy a tank, right, you can probably see the brand of the wheels on it. It’s pretty, pretty easy. Well, when you build, you know, a weapon system that might have some software in it, and that software vendor — name the vendor — is a subcontractor, we don’t always have visibility on who those are. So I think this initiative in general will provide us visibility into how often are we buying the same software that is essentially a component or a subcontractor through somebody else,” Moyer told reporters.

The Army, as a huge organization that buys a ton of software, should be able to get better deals, Garciga suggested.

“When I look across the landscape, there’s … both software and hardware procurements that we’re doing out there with major IT companies where it would be advantageous to get an enterprise agreement just to get value at scale, right? I mean, think [about] the Army [having] 1.3 million people, right? I mean, we’ve got more endpoints than some countries do,” he said.

The Army is also looking to prevent middlemen from jacking up costs for software.

“What the enterprise agreement allows us to do is to get a much better kind of understanding when we do actually compete new work on what some of those baseline costs are going to be, because we’re kind of making it so folks have to use the enterprise agreement to buy the software, as opposed to what we’ve seen traditionally, which is like, hey, somebody’s going to go out buy this, and then a company is going to go buy it … and bump our cost up considerably for the same piece of software at scale. So I think our intent, like from especially from the CIO’s office, is to focus on where we have a considerable amount of use across Army commands and Army programs, can we engage with those companies to get value at scale, right, and in no way to get in the way of competition,” Garciga said.

ELAs are also seen as a way to help the Army keep pace with fast-moving software developments.

“We don’t want to be in the business of just buying this big block of software and then, you know, three years from now, we’re trying to figure out how to modernize that. No, on the contrary, I think this puts us in a much better position to be able to get that refresh happening organically from the commercial space. And again, it’s about flexibility too, right? It’s having that CLIN [contract line item number] structure that really allows us to as things grow and shrink, have the opportunity to adjust those levers and those rheostats to get us to kind of a baseline,” Garciga said.

He continued: “The next big step, right, and I think we’re going to see this with a lot of our vendors, is this idea of, like, hardware as a service and hardware subscriptions. I think we’re going to see that come in, too. That’s one that we’re working especially for fixed and garrison locations, is where do we have opportunities to rethink where traditionally we’ve done bulk buys and then, you know, five years later, we’re trying to figure out why we can’t lifecycle maintenance it. Now we’re going to kind of as a service, right? And we’ll work with the vendor to make sure that happens. But on the software side, yeah, definitely this is a lot easier.”

Moyer said under the enterprise agreement framework, the Army would be in a position to negotiate better deals over time.

“The other thing that you know we’re working across all the enterprise agreements we’re looking at is, once we get to X number every year … then we’re going to potentially negotiate on all these either A, a true up, or B, a discount for the next year,” she said.

Garciga noted that in the past, the Army has sometimes lost the space to negotiate.

“What we’re seeing right now is, how do you build a vehicle that allows you to … true up, true down, right as the environment changes?” he told reporters. “The larger we get, the bigger the discount. And we may be here for, like, you know, X amount, and then, you know, if we go to the next level up, we’ll get an even bigger discount, right? So I think that that’s going to be the big thing, is continuing that negotiation.”

Another important aspect of the enterprise agreement framework is that it will give the Army flexibility to jump around from a capability-acquisition perspective, he noted.

“If we want to move to the next major … platform that we want to do an enterprise agreement with, and we want to get off the one we’re on, we can gracefully exit that without having kind of put a lot of capital in front that we can’t recover,” Garciga said.

Moyer said the enterprise agreements will have minimum guarantees.

“Once you meet that, you don’t ever have to use that contract again. So if any point it doesn’t make sense … to use that vehicle, there’s somebody different or better, we could always do something different,” she told DefenseScoop. “But … just using my own common sense, why wouldn’t I try and get the best deal for as long as possible and write things in there like maximum discount buys, matching commercial prices, right? So, like, not necessarily for this specific EA, but just a general EA.”

There are many vendors out there that the Army could have enterprise agreements with, officials told DefenseScoop. And, there could be opportunities for the other services or DOD writ large to pursue these types of agreements.

“The service CIOs are all talking and we’re talking with DOD CIO,” Garciga told DefenseScoop. “If you’re already a year into your negotiation, like, we’re gonna put our requirements in and you finish up. If we’re a year into our negotiation and we’re like about to award, like, hey, we’ll get your requirements agreement. So I think we’re really at this point, I think the whole department is really pushing harder to move in this direction. So this [deal with Palantir] is just one of our first off the chute kind of big ones.”

The other services could potentially piggyback off the Army.

“There are discussions that are currently ongoing and … they’ll figure out what makes sense for them,” Moyer told DefenseScoop. “But we will position ourselves to make sure that, you know, if we can use taxpayer dollars in the most efficient way possible to get the biggest discount for any of these enterprise agreements we’re working, that is what we’re going to do.”

The post Army plans big shakeup in software buying practices, starting with new $10B enterprise deal with Palantir appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The memo, signed by Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun and acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Brett Seidle, established a new DON-wide policy for “containerization technology usage.”

Containerization is a software deployment process that “bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run on any infrastructure,” according to an AWS description of the concept.

Navy officials see major benefits in adopting that capability for the department.

“Software containerization offers transformative advantages for the DON’s IT infrastructure and software deployment capabilities. This technology enables the Department to deploy applications consistently across highly varied environments while enhancing security, reducing computing resource overhead, and accelerating development cycles. Prioritizing containerization technology aligns with the Department’s software modernization goals and supports mission-critical operations with greater reliability and efficiency,” the memo states.

The new directive, publicly released Wednesday, applies to all new software development efforts across the department’s commands and programs enabled by cloud services and deployment models where enterprise container platforms and DevSecOps pipelines exist or are in development. It comes as the Navy and Marine Corps are pursuing wide-ranging software and IT modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption and migration.

“In the drive to increase operational agility, resiliency, optimization of our investments, and to achieve an organically digital state; we must advance to modem, proven software development and delivery practices. Securely accessing and transporting data across boundaries at the speed of relevance requires operating in a cloud-enabled ecosystem and software must be designed to effectively maneuver within it,” Rathbun and Seidle stated. “Effective immediately, all software development activities transitioning to the cloud and/or upgrades that are hosted in a cloud as outlined above must utilize containerization technology to the greatest extent practical.”

Seidle signed the directive July 17. Rathbun had previously signed it.

Officials can request exemptions to the policy, but they must provide the designated cybersecurity technical authority with a detailed justification.

“Exceptions will be granted where the risk of not leveraging containerization technology is deemed acceptable or the implementation would be prohibitively expensive. Potential exceptions may include production representative digital twins (where production cannot be or is not containerized), alternative cloud scaling capabilities like serverless technologies, or virtualization technologies for hardware in the loop. An itemized bulk exception can be granted,” per the memo.

The policy will be reviewed and updated annually, according to the directive.

The post Navy rolls out new software policy on containerization technology usage appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The most recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities relied on more than 30 Tomahawk missiles fired from an attack submarine. Early last year, more than 80 Tomahawks struck targets in Yemen to kick off a month-long American and British campaign against Iran’s Houthi proxies. However, more Navy cruise missiles were expended in these two brief operations, against militarily unsophisticated adversaries, than the Pentagon requested and Congress funded over the same period.

America’s anemic production rates of these and other crucial munitions loom large in deterring aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Here, the vulnerability of U.S. bases and aircraft carriers would require the U.S. military to have the ability to hit an enormous number of Chinese targets well beyond the range of most of its land- or carrier-based combat aircraft. A series of think tank wargames concluded that a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would consume multiple thousands of long-range strike munitions that would exhaust available U.S. inventories within three weeks.

“God forbid, if we were in a short-term conflict, it would be short-term because we don’t have enough munitions to sustain a long-term fight,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, warned during a recent hearing.

The potential gap between our military needs and industrial throughput is jarring. It calls not only for expanding the numbers and variety of munitions suppliers, but also for deploying the most innovative software in the Defense Department to proactively and assertively oversee them for outcomes. 

America’s traditional defense industry — working through the traditional defense acquisitions system — continues to make the world’s advanced weapons with often spectacular results, as we saw with the B-2s and bunker busters in Iran. But the process is akin to the artisanal production in medieval guilds. Each advanced munition — from long-range strike missiles to missile-defense interceptors — costs millions of dollars to produce and several years to build.  

In recent months, the Defense Department has provided seed funding under the Defense Production Act for more suppliers of solid rocket motors and energetics, stood up a “Munitions War Room,” and engaged the prime contractors directly and pointedly to boost production rates.

Congress has done its part by, after years of DOD requests, authorizing the use of multi-year procurement for long-range anti-ship and air-to-ground missiles (LRASM, JAASM) and missile interceptors (PAC-3 “Patriot”).

The Pentagon should take advantage of non-traditional technology companies — hardware and software makers alike — to furnish a constant flow of actionable options, alternatives, and expanded output. That also involves the DOD articulating a “good enough” set of specs for cruise and interceptor missiles that meet minimum requirements for range, payload, speed, precision, electronic warfare shielding, and compatibility with existing U.S. air and naval launch platforms.

“We need to look at other vendors,” Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby told the House Appropriations Committee. “They may not be able to produce the same exact specifications, but they might be able to produce a missile that’s effective, which is more effective than no missile.”

New industry entrants are stepping forward with alternative offerings. Others are taking advantage of 3D printing and modular design to produce cheaper missiles that can still get the job done. The question is whether they will get orders from DOD and, equally important, whether they can deliver at scale and on time. The same goes for traditional contractors who are willing to introduce lower-cost alternatives to their profitable incumbent munitions programs.

The usual market solution — increasing orders (and thus demand) for needed munitions — is necessary but insufficient. The underlying structural challenge is capacity and supply — an American industrial base that is not big enough to generate enough materials, metals, chemicals, batteries, sensors, and micro-electronics to surge long-range munitions while also supplying other military weapons systems and commercial products.

For example, after a series of corporate consolidations there are now only two qualified providers — down from six in the 1990s — of military solid rocket motors, a leading cause of munitions production delays. Other rocket motor vendors — Anduril, X-Bow, and Ursa Major, for instance — are coming online with DOD support, while still years away from commencing new production.

The problem is systemic across multiple advanced munitions systems that share and compete for the same scarce components.

Yet, defense supply chains are still mostly tracked and managed as individual programs, often in manual spreadsheets, without the relevant puts and takes on the broader industrial base. For crucial components information, DOD depends way too heavily on the willingness of prime contractors to divulge their own data. Defense leaders lack the modern data capability to hold the primes accountable, and the primes’ own ability to harness the industrial base is more mid-20th century than early 21st. What defense planners need is the AI capability to track and prioritize scarce items across the broader munitions supply chain enterprise, and enable action. The good news is: that AI exists today, out-of-the-box.

Modern data science and analytics make the difference by providing a comprehensive view of supply chains from final assembly at the prime level, down multiple tiers of sub-components, and further down to the smallest washers and widgets. AI-enabled software integrates both internal program data and publicly available information (on competing demand, alternative parts, shipping routes, company financial health, foreign ownership, etc.) to identify vulnerabilities and gaps while generating alternative solutions. For example, identifying a commercial part with 95% commonality to the item holding up military production. 

Reversing the post-Cold War consolidation and withering of America’s defense industrial base — for munitions and everything else — might be the work of years, decades even. But, harnessing the industrial base we have exponentially better than we currently do is within our power now, with defense acquisition software to increase yield. 

By opening the door to new partners, better utilizing our existing industrial bases, and enabling speed and affordability, America can regain its strategic edge and ensure its forces are never left wanting for the munitions they need to win.

Jeffrey Jeb Nadaner is a senior vice president at Govini, the defense acquisition software company. He served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy in the first Trump administration.

The post Fixing munitions shortages demands better hardware and new software appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“We’re using technology to help reduce the time, because that’s been the real problem with software,” Katie Arrington, the senior official performing the duties of Pentagon chief information officer, said Friday in an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop. “When we bring it into the building, we have to find a lab, we have to find a person, we have to get it resourced. And what we should be doing is accepting as much as possible and looking at it rapidly, because software is only as good as it is relevant.”

Since returning to the Pentagon in March to perform the duties of DOD CIO, Arrington has waged war on the legacy processes used by the department to buy software capabilities — namely the lengthy Risk Management Framework (RMF) and beleaguered authority to operate (ATO) approvals. 

“I’m blowing up the RMF. The RMF is archaic,” Arrington told a crowd of defense industry representatives at the UiPath on Tour Public Sector event in April. She later added that by next year, she hopes that ATOs are “something I never hear about again.”

Both the RMF and the ATO process have guided the Pentagon’s acquisition process for all of its systems for more than a decade. The RMF is a structured set of guidelines used to identify and manage cybersecurity risks on the Defense Department’s networks. After a system goes through the RMF process, it must receive an ATO that gives the final approval to operate on the network.

Many of the military departments have done some disparate work to automate the RMF process and embrace continuous ATOs, which use automated monitoring and security controls to approve software without need for reauthorization. But recently, Arrington initiated a Pentagon-wide effort to overhaul the RMF.

She told DefenseScoop that the “old school” processes are obsolete and no longer representative of the modern technologies the Pentagon needs.

“Why I say an old school ATO doesn’t really hold any validity anymore is because an ATO is granted at a very specific time in the network, the architecture of the network, the iteration of the software. Everything is like a snapshot in time, it’s a static moment,” she said. “But software is dynamic, it changes — every patch, every iteration, every version. So why wouldn’t we move to a continuous ATO and look at the RMF process as the building blocks?”

The RMF revamp will focus on how the process can be integrated with automation and continuous monitoring capabilities for an entire program’s lifecycle, a Pentagon spokesperson told DefenseScoop. They added that the framework will remain “a structured process which integrates security, resilience, zero-trust and related cybersecurity considerations to design, build and monitor DoD technology.”

To help the department move away from cumbersome checklist-based authorizations, Arrington also created the Software Fast Track (SWFT) program that she said is designed to allow the Pentagon to integrate software capabilities much faster than currently possible. SWFT is separate to CIO’s effort to reform the RMF, but the program looks to optimize the RMF’s software assessment process and streamline capability delivery.”

SWFT will have companies receive a third-party assessment based on 12 risk factors outlined by the Pentagon, ranging from a company’s cybersecurity posture to its financial health. Vendors will also be required to submit their own software bill of materials (SBOM), as well as an SBOM from a third-party assessor to see if there are any differences in the evaluations, Arrington explained. 

“When that information comes into the department, we’re going to have AI and large language modeling on the backside so that we can detect anomalies,” she said. “If there’s a variant between one SBOM and another SBOM, we’re going to validate all of the data.”

And while replacing institutional processes like the RMF and ATO is an arduous task, the Office of the DOD CIO is moving as quickly as it can. After Arrington announced SWFT in an April memo, the program officially began on June 1. Concurrently, the office is conducting a 90-day sprint to develop a framework and implementation plan that defines specific requirements, security verification processes, information-sharing mechanisms and risk determinations “to expedite the cybersecurity authorizations for secure, rapid software adoption,” according to the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the office is reviewing responses it received for a trio of SWFT requests for information published in May that asked for industry’s input on specific tools, external assessments, and automation and AI-enabled capabilities, respectively. The CIO received over 500 responses across all three RFIs, demonstrating that industry is onboard with SWFT and eager to get the ball rolling, Arrington noted.

“I’ve committed to reading through all of them to really understand what [are] the best practices in industry,” she said. “What does real continuous monitoring look like? Do we need commercial red teams? What are risk factors if you’re doing continuous monitoring or you have a disruption in software? What are the proper and right risk mitigation processes? All of this is wrapped into acquisition, how we’re really approaching this modernization effort.”

Arrington noted that SWFT’s implementation is being done strategically and in partnership with other key stakeholders across the Defense Department, including the service CIOs, chief information security officers, the acquisition and sustainment directorate and Pentagon directorates that support command, control, communications, computers and cyber.

Before the end of June, the DOD CIO plans to release another RFI to industry that outlines five tenets for how the Pentagon plans to execute SWFT, Arrington said. Some ideas her team is considering include a tiered approach for the roles and responsibilities of cybersecurity service providers and different aspects of continuous monitoring.

“Industry’s part of this is going to be over the summer, and then hopefully I can get those responses [and] we can come together and start with a fundamental, new approach in early August or early fall,” she said.

Moving fast on SWFT will be integral for other reasons, as well. Arrington will exit her CIO role once President Donald Trump’s nominee for the position is approved by Congress. In May, the administration tapped Kirsten Davies — an IT and cybersecurity professional from the private sector — to serve as DOD CIO, but her confirmation hearing has not yet been scheduled.

And although the program’s attempt to reform the Pentagon’s software acquisition process has been met with positive reception — while also being in line with broader efforts by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth aimed at increasing use of innovative procurement authorities — Arrington acknowledged that SWFT’s success will depend on how well the department can adapt to the cultural shift it requires.

“We’re so risk adverse that to be relevant, we have to assume a little bit of risk in moving forward. And I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge set for the department, is culturally learning how to operate within that little bit of risk factor. I’ll take a 90 percent solution and work on remediating the 10 percent while we’re developing it,” she said.

Updated on June 12, 2025, at 4:15 PM: This story has been updated to add comment from a Pentagon spokesperson and to clarify that SWFT is separate from the CIO’s effort to reform the RMF.

The post Inside the Pentagon CIO’s push to overhaul antiquated software acquisition practices appeared first on DefenseScoop.

A recent test of the technology came at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 event in March at Fort Irwin, California, a joint experimentation venue for the services to test concepts for interoperability in the vein of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of the framework, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

The Marine Corps Software Factory, located in Austin, Texas with the Army’s Software Factory, developed what it dubbed Crusader software to see if it was a viable alternative to the current commercial middleware used by a lot of units to control these radars, such as Furuno and eventually Simrad, which was not tested at Project Convergence.

While the government and Department of Defense have been pushing the use of commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities as much as possible, the Corps noted several benefits of developing government-built software in this context.

First, radar systems can be complicated and not necessarily geared toward the way troops must employ them. By developing their own software, the Marines at the Software Factory can build tools specifically for Marines at the tactical edge and more easily interface with them as well as other joint service members.

Second, creating government-off-the-shelf software can be cheaper than relying on commercial products.

“It doesn’t cost the government anything more than our salaries to develop it. Whether I develop eight applications in a year or one, we pay you the same,” Capt. Brian Atkinson, a full-stack engineer at the factory, said in an interview.

Moreover, that means there aren’t licensing fees associated with the software, which can not only be costly, but if not managed properly, can expire at the worst possible times.

Atkinson noted he’s experienced licenses expiring in the middle of exercises and been unable to reach out to the vendor to renew it — an untenable situation in real-world operations. Solely relying on vendor support while troops are forward-deployed isn’t always the best option.

The Crusader software, which has been in development for about four months, was an improvement to the existing system, officials said, noting the old software was difficult to use and didn’t fit the plans the Marine Corps had.

The concept behind the new software is that stand-in forces — units based in close proximity to the enemy — need to be able to remote into commercial radar systems such as the Furuno. Those capabilities provide sonar, collision detection and navigation, which overall will give those stand-in forces the ability to extend maritime domain awareness.

Those commercially available radars fit well into the commandant’s Force Design vision because the radars are relatively inexpensive and readily available when compared to traditionally fielded systems, Sgt. Max Idler, a coder and developer, said. Thus, they provide an attractive option when the service can rapidly procure a capability and repurpose it for the joint fight.   

At Project Convergence, categorized as a big success, Crusader and the radars it controlled provided the maritime situational awareness data for the Southern California area for the experiment, which benefited all the joint partners participating. Officials said they processed Furuno radar data, produced tracks and targets off of it, and fed that data through the Secure But Unclassified-Encrypted network.

Officials noted there were tweaks that they needed to make in order for the software to be more user friendly.

Following Project Convergence and working with the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic, the Marines plan to include Crusader on a commercial-off-the-shelf radar kit that will be distributed to the Fleet Marine Force sometime in the next year. If that field user evaluation goes well, Crusader will be the centerpiece of radar processing software on the kit.

The Software Factory is also discovering that there is wider interest and larger demand for Crusader. Given it is government developed, it can be applicable to all elements of the joint team members and potentially coalition partners that wish to use commercial-off-the-shelf radars for situational awareness.

The demand comes from wider DOD interest in using different maritime surveillance capabilities for various mission sets, such as special operations forces.

Officials from Marine Forces Special Operations Command have voiced their desire to use Crusader given it doesn’t require licensing to the radars themselves.

“That is a strategic add to how MARSOC likes to operate,” Idler said, noting they’re looking to test Crusader with them off a tech stack they developed using Raspberry Pi’s.

The post Marine Corps developed software to control commercial radars appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The CIO’s recently released software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2025 and 2026 marks another call from Pentagon leadership for the entire department to improve delivery of software-based capabilities. The document lists three key goals for the next two years — focusing on software factories, enterprise cloud and transforming processes — as well as specific tasks for each goal that aims to improve overall software modernization.

The goals and tasks in the document build upon the DOD CIO’s first software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2023 and 2024. According to the new roadmap, the Pentagon completed 27 out of 41 of the tasks outlined in the previous plan, carried 12 tasks over to FY25 and FY26 and combined two tasks with others in the updated document.

Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer for the deputy CIO for information enterprise, said that while working through the goals in the first implementation plan, the office realized that some of the associated tasks weren’t mature enough to fully execute on.

“For a small portion, we learned that we didn’t know enough about a couple of those activities, so we dropped them. And then some of them, we were maybe over aggressive or they evolved,” he said Wednesday during a panel discussion at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference. “I’ll say, from an agile perspective, we didn’t have the user score exactly right, so some of these stories have continued into the implementation plan two.”

The first goal outlined in the new plan is to accelerate and scale the Pentagon’s enterprise cloud environment. Along with its multi-cloud, multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the department also has a number of other efforts aimed at providing cloud infrastructure overseas and at the tactical edge. 

Vietmeyer said that even though JWCC has been a relative success — noting that the department has awarded at least $2.7 billion worth of task orders under the program — the contract vehicle was “suboptimal” for large acquisitions. The CIO is currently planning for what it calls JWCC 2.0, a follow-on phase that adds more vendors and different contracting mechanisms to the program.

Beyond JWCC, the implementation plan calls for the establishment of additional contract options for cloud innovation — specifically geared towards small business and “niche providers” — that can be awarded before the end of fiscal 2026.

“In the implementation plan, we’re trying to build that next-generation cloud infrastructure and extend it. Not just looking at JWCC, but we’re also looking at how we extend for small business cloud providers,” Vietmeyer said. 

The document also offers guidance for Pentagon efforts to expand cloud access to the edge, such as through Stratus or the Joint Operational Edge (JOE) environments. In the next two years, the department will develop a reference design for an “underlying cloud mesh” that facilitates data transport, software development and information-sharing across different infrastructures overseas, according to the plan.

The mesh architecture would allow warfighters from one military service to access a cloud node operated by a different service, or one owned by the Defense Information Systems Agency, Vietmeyer explained.

“We’ve seen that one of the challenges is moving to a mesh type of architecture, so we can identify where computing infrastructure exists and allow the warfighters to take advantage [of it],” he said. “How do we start to build the ability for applications and data to scale across that infrastructure in a highly resilient way?”

Along with enterprise cloud, another goal within the updated implementation plan focuses on creating a Pentagon-wide software factory ecosystem that fully leverages a DevSecOps approach. The CIO intends to take successful practices from the various software factories in DOD and replicate them across the department, according to the plan.

“DoD must continue to scale success and bridge the right disciplines together … to ensure end-to-end enablement and realization of the software modernization vision and adoption of software platforms and factories organized by domain,” the document stated.

The CIO will also work to remove existing processes and red tape that prevents software developers from accessing critical tools and capabilities; increase the number of platforms with continuous authorization to operate (cATO) approvals; and create a DevSecOps reference design for artificial intelligence and software-based automation deployment.

Lastly, the implementation plan outlines multiple tasks geared towards evolving the Pentagon’s policies, regulations and standards to better support software development and delivery — including creating secure software standards, improving software deployment in weapons platforms and growing its workforce.

Although work to accelerate the Pentagon’s software modernization has been happening for years, leaders at the department have begun pushing for more focused efforts to remove bureaucratic red tape through new guidance — such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Modern Software Acquisition memo released in March, and the CIO’s new Software Fast Track (SWIFT) program.

“For modern practices to become the routine way of developing and delivering software, policy, regulations, and standards must be reviewed and updated,” the implementation plan stated. “DoD must work with DoD Components to update policy and guidance to reduce the barriers to adopting new practices and to accelerate software delivery and cybersecurity approvals to enable adoption of the latest tools and services.”

The post Pentagon sets out two-year plan to scale enterprise cloud offerings, software factories appeared first on DefenseScoop.

This partnership between the two contractors will allow military operators to have a software-defined solution built to deploy fast and operate anywhere with Palantir’s stack running natively on Menace systems.

Menace is described as is a family of fully integrated, turnkey command, control, communications and computing capabilities for users at the tactical edge and on the move. To outpace evolving threats in contested environments, it’s designed to equip operators with automated and resilient comms, data and software.

The two companies are working on a new Menace-I configuration that supports Palantir Edge. This will allow Menace customers to access Palantir capabilities such as Gaia — a geospatial map overlay providing operations and intelligence integration — Target Workbench — a target management system that enablers users to centrally manage intelligence and target identification — and Maverick. Another system known as Menace-T, will be used for on-premises and edge customer deployments.

“The goal is simple: give people in the field access to the software they need on hardware that’s built to withstand the conditions they actually face,” Tom Keane, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, said in response to questions.

The U.S. military anticipates it will be operating in austere environments in the future where forces will have to move rapidly to avoid being targeted on an increasingly transparent battlefield, with limited reachback to enterprise capabilities and in congested information spaces.

“The tactical edge is where missions succeed and fail. It’s the most challenging environment- from rugged terrain and spotty communications to the extreme temperatures and external threats,” Keane said. “This partnership ensures that warfighters have near real-time information when and where they need it most. Menace provides more reliable communications pathways, portable systems to bring computing to where it is needed, and durable and rugged hardware. It’s also incredibly quick and easy to set up – and enables warfighters to be up and running in minutes.”

The two companies have been working together for some time, but Keane described this partnership as a formalization of the ongoing collaboration.

He explained that Menace systems supported Palantir software at recent field events, such as Project Convergence Capstone 5. Menace was the compute platform for Palantir software in disconnected and mobile environments and ran Andruil’s Lattice software, acting as a node within the broader Lattice mesh network and demonstrating how multiple tools can operate side-by-side in a single system.

The post Anduril’s Menace tech now preferred hardware for Palantir’s Edge software appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Congress directed the establishment of the pilot in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act to explore the use of “consumption-based” contracting.

In the conference report on the legislation, lawmakers defined “Anything-as-a-Service” as a model “under which a technology-supported capability is provided to the Department of Defense and may utilize any combination of software, hardware or equipment, data, and labor or services that provides a capability that is metered and billed based on actual usage at fixed price units.”

A key purpose of the effort is for officials to measure the cost and speed of delivery in comparison to using other buying processes at the regular intervals that are customary for the type of solution provided.

The Trump administration is now moving forward with implementation. The Defense Pricing, Contracting, and Acquisition Policy (DPCAP) directorate recently announced the establishment of the pilot program “to promote greater use of ‘Anything-as-a-Service’ as a concept to fulfill DoD mission requirements under FAR-based contracts or Other Transaction agreements.”

A May 1 memo from John Tenaglia, principal director of DPCAP, implemented statutory authority to employ the model “targeting an initial set of Product and Service Codes (PSCs) for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), and Space-as-a-Service (facility, including classified space as a service).”

For SaaS, that includes Business Application/Application Development Software as a Service, DA10; Compute as a Service: Mainframe/Servers, DB10; Data Center as a Service, DC10; End User as a Service: Help Desk, DE10; IT Management as a Service, DF10; Network as a Service, DG10; Security and Compliance as a Service DJ10; and Storage as a Service, DK10, according to an attachment to the memo.

DaaS includes Data Center Support Services, DC01; Mobile Device as a Service, DE11; Network: Satellite Communications and Telecom Access Service, DG11; Platform as a Service: Database, Mainframe, Middleware, DH10; Information Retrieval, R612; and Data Collection Services, R702; Special Studies/Analysis-Scientific Data, B529; and Special Studies/Analysis-Scientific Data (Other Than Scientific), B506.

For space-as-a-service, that includes Rental of Office Buildings, X1AA; Rental of Conference Space and Facilities, X1AB; and Rental of Other Administrative Facilities and Service Buildings, X1AZ.

DPCAP officials “will consider contracting officer proposals to include additional PSCs,” Tenaglia noted.

The memorandum was sent to the commander and acquisition executives of Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and Transportation Command, as well as the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for procurement, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for procurement, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting, and defense agency and DOD field activity directors.

Contracts accepted into the pilot can be exempted from certain requirements related to certified cost or pricing data and full and open competition.

To participate in the program, contracting officers must request approval from DPCAP.

If given the green light, contracting officers “shall, to the extent practicable, enter into a contract or other agreement under the pilot program within 100 days of synopsizing the contract action or posting the justification,” Tenaglia wrote.

The post Pentagon moves to implement ‘Anything-as-a-Service’ pilot program appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Marine Corps Software Factory was launched in 2023 as a three-year pilot in Austin, Texas. The aim was to demonstrate a scalable software development capability led by servicemembers. Personnel there have been training others and building apps and other tools for different elements of the force.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide commanders with the organic software development capability to rapidly research problems and deliver scalable solutions into the hands of warfighters. After going through our training pipeline, these Marines will return to the [Fleet Marine Force] with the critical skills they need in order to provide this service to their units. And that’s something that they can do in perpetuity, that just would become essentially their new job, a new role in life,” Capt. Brian Atkinson, a full-stack engineer at the factory, said during a presentation Thursday at the Modern Day Marine conference.

There are several different types of jobs at the software factory, including product manager, software engineer, “user interface” Marine, platform engineer and AI engineer, he noted.

About 15 Marines are working there now.

Officials are pondering what comes next and how to move forward once the pilot program ends and the software factory becomes a more permanent organization.

“Right now, we’re going through the DOTMILPF [doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, and personnel] working groups to actually figure out what the lifecycle would be, because, unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just … ‘go forth and do great things.’ You have to figure out what the career progression would be, because you’re essentially creating an entirely new MOS,” Atkinson told DefenseScoop, using an acronym to refer to military occupational specialty.

“Without trying to speak out of turn, the general idea is that once we become a real unit, this becomes its own MOS, we would grow in size from the 15 that we’re at now to about 50 or 60 — and that’s again subject to the Marine Corps’ approval. And then from there we would have the potential to either start recruiting people before they even show up to boot camp, get them to sign up to be a software engineer as their actual primary MOS, or we would open it up to the rest of the Marine Corps for [lateral] moves just the way that we’ve done now. Like, I’m an infantry officer who came over here to do this. So we’re not really sure yet, subject to the DOTMILPF working group, but the idea would be that we would be about triple in size. And that would be just one cohort of students per year producing about 20 new Marines … to go out to the fleet,” Atkinson added.

Marine Corps leadership hasn’t signed off on the idea yet, he noted.

“But how we envision it would be, you would have a software engineering MOS. And … kind of the analogy I would draw is, so we have the 03XX occupational field, right? So infantrymen. And there are subsets of the infantry field where you have a rifleman, a mortarman, a machine gunner. Something that we’re toying around with as well is maybe having kind of a similar spin where you have a guy who’s a product manager and he trains to the product manager job. You have a UX guy, you have a software engineer, software development engineer, an AI specialist. There’s a lot of different directions that we’re looking at going,” Atkinson said.

After Marines finish their time at the software factory in Austin, they could undergo a permanent change of station and join a team working with a larger unit, such as a Marine Expeditionary Force.

“Our vision — and something that the Marine Corps is figuring out right now — is you would then PCS to like a software development platoon, if you will, that’s co-located with the MEFs … with the ability to generate capacity for the commanders, co-located with the commanders. And how the commanders use them is totally up to them at that point. But the idea would be you have a different software development unit that is organic to … all the large-scale units within the Marine Corps,” Atkinson explained.

Those experts could solve problems for the units they’re assigned to work with.

“We’ll stick with the MEF, because that’s kind of where we’re thinking right now,” Atkinson told DefenseScoop. There could be “a group of software engineers at the MEF who can answer problems for the MEF specifically. So if the MEF has a unique data requirement that they just need, they need something while they wait for a lasting solution from the acquisitions community, or there is nothing coming [and] they just need something on their own, like a TAK plugin — these would be the guys that would handle that stuff. So it’s not so much that they’re like software techs to help with like IT problems. It would be building solutions for the MEFs specifically.”

The post Marine Corps could expand software factory, create new MOS appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Under the Software Fast Track (SWIFT) program, the Pentagon will use artificial intelligence to replace legacy authority to operate (ATO) and Risk Management Framework (RMF) processes when buying new software. Acting DOD CIO Katie Arrington signed a memo authorizing the new effort, and it will officially launch May 1, she said.

“We need to change our thought process, because having software in an ATO that is a static environment doesn’t help the warfighter,” Arrington said Tuesday during a keynote at the UiPath on Tour Public Sector event, produced by FedScoop. “What changes every single day is the network, the software [and] the environment. Why are we so structured to stay in a static position when our adversaries are always dynamic?”

As the Pentagon becomes more dependent on software-based capabilities, leaders have looked to pivot away from traditional ATO frameworks encumbered by lengthy administrative processes and manual paperwork that can stifle modernization. Some organizations have begun exploring continuous authority to operate (cATO) methods, which use automated monitoring and security controls to approve software without need for reauthorization.

Instead, SWIFT will do a third-party assessment of companies’ cybersecurity postures based on 12 risk characteristics. Vendors will also be required to provide a software bill of materials (SBOM) “from production and sandbox” that is certified by a third party, Arrington said. 

“I have AI on the backside — large language modeling — that will determine if there are any anomalies, if there’s something in your source code that’s bad. If not, you get a provisional ATO,” she said.

Arrington added that SWIFT will allow the department to pivot away from the current RMF, a structured set of guidelines used to identify and manage potential cybersecurity risks on networks. For more than a decade, the framework has guided the Pentagon’s acquisition process for all of its systems — from development to sustainment.

“I’m blowing up the RMF. The RMF is archaic, it’s a bunch of paperwork,” Arrington said. She added that in the next year, she hopes that ATOs are “something I never hear about again.”

SWIFT comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is pushing the entire department to speed up procurement and delivery of digital and software-based capabilities. In March, Hegseth issued a memo that calls on Pentagon leaders to use innovative acquisition authorities — from the Software Acquisition Policy to commercial solutions openings — to rapidly buy software.

“We need more innovation. The [secretary of defense] has told us, bring software, bring [commercial-off-the-shelf] into the building faster, at a more rapid rate,” Arrington said. “And our job is to ensure that we are doing the best to ensure that we have lethality, that we’re ready and that we’re efficient.”

When the program launches, Arrington said she plans to bring together all of the department’s CIOs, chief information security officers, the acquisition and sustainment directorate and other stakeholders at the Pentagon. In the near future, the department plans to release a request for information (RFI) to gather industry input.

The post New Pentagon program to speed up software acquisition set to launch May 1 appeared first on DefenseScoop.