Pentagon dipping its toe into BYOD
F or years, the prospect of letting Defense Department employees conduct government business on their personal wireless devices has been a bit too nervous-making for the department to take a bring-your- own-device model seriously. That may be about to change, albeit slowly.
Terry Halvorsen, DoD’s chief information officer, told reporters last week that he plans to conduct a limited BYOD pilot this summer, while also making clear that for the vast majority of DoD users, policies surrounding personal devices aren’t going to change overnight, and for many of them, maybe never.
“It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “People need to do some homework on bring-your-own-device, where it’s working, and where it’s not. Lots of big enterprises are actually rescinding their BYOD policies. What I suspect will happen in DoD is because of our size and all the businesses we’re in, there will be places where it will work and a whole lot of places where it doesn’t. There are not going to be clean answers that say, ‘Yep, DoD is doing BYOD.’ I suspect at some point, particularly in things that are in more common business sets like retail and recreation, there will be some BYOD. In other cases, there won’t be.”
For the pilot, Halvorsen said most of the test users will most likely be employees working in headquarters functions since they’ll offer a large enough user base to set up a controllable test environment. He said he wanted to impose as few parameters on the pilot as possible, aside from ensuring that the security ramifications of transmitting and storing government data on personal devices can be reliably traced and studied.
“Making sure we meet the minimum security levels is the first question I’ve got to answer, and if it does, let ‘em go use it,” he said. “Then, how do I track whether people who are doing this are being secure? That’s the hardest thing. How to measure that in meaningful ways is the thing that’s driving me a little crazy.”
Halvorsen did not elaborate on DoD’s current thinking about how it will apply security to personal devices. But separately, for the latest generation of government-furnished BlackBerry devices it has begun fielding to small numbers of DoD personnel, the department has proved to itself that dual- persona technologies, which allow personal and official business to be segregated from one another on a single device, are sufficiently secure for unclassified data.
“For example, I can get my personal email on that phone, I can do applications like Pandora on that phone. It just makes for an integrated life-work balance for people,” he said.
Those devices have been deployed so far to roughly 1,500 senior leaders and what Halvorsen referred to as “high-demand” users. Those numbers, he said, will soon start ramping up “fairly rapidly.”
New high-level council will guide DoD’s ‘neglected’ electronic warfare programs
A s part of its “third offset” strategy — DoD’s near-and- long term effort to widen a narrowing technology gap between it and other potentially-belligerent militaries — the department says it needs a big focus on electronic warfare.
To that end, Bob Work, the deputy secretary of Defense, signed a memo last Tuesday creating a new electronic warfare programs council. It will be co-chaired by Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, logistics and technology, and Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its charge will be to examine all of the military services’ scattered investments in electronic warfare — an area DoD leaders think got short-shrift while the military’s been busy with low-tech adversaries — help coordinate their efforts and guide future programs.
“EW has often been regarded as just a combat enabler. Our adversaries don’t think so,” Work told the annual McAleese-Credit Suisse defense conference in Washington. “They believe it is an important part of their offensive and defensive arsenal. For relatively small investments in EW, you get an extremely high potential payoff, and our competitors are trying to win in that competition. We still have a lead, I think, but that lead is diminishing rapidly.”
The idea for a new council came from the Defense Science Board, which Kendall tasked to take a look at the department’s electronic warfare a year and half ago. The report the board produced has not been made public, but Kendall said the panel found major deficiencies.
“The study pointed to a number of shortfalls,” he said. “It laid out the fact that we have been neglecting electronic warfare for some time because we haven’t been focused on that kind of a threat. It’s one of the items on my list where the trends are not good, and we’re going to try to reverse that. We need to have some departmentwide focus, look for synergies, make sure we’re making the right technology investments and make sure we have the right projects in the pipeline, to the extent we can afford them. I suspect we’ll use the new council as a way to tee up budget issues so that they get the visibility they need.”
The military services have maintained various degrees of focus on electronic warfare since the last main EW threat, the Soviet Union, collapsed. The Air Force and Navy have made it a priority in some programs, but the Army freely acknowledges it let its EW know-how significantly dwindle in the post- Soviet era. It has lately been reconstituting its electronic warfare capability, including by building new career fields and promulgating new doctrine that fuses together EW and cyber warfare under the collective banner of “cyber-electromagnetic activities.”
Panel on Army’s structure takes shape
T he decisions the Army has made or proposed as part of its required drawdown from 570,000 active duty soldiers to 450,000 (and potentially 420,000) have caused a considerable degree of heartburn on Capitol Hill and strained relationships between the active and reserve components. So, at the end of last year, Congress ordered the Army to freeze some of those proposals and ordered up a new commission to study the Army’s future. We now know who will serve on that eight- member study panel.
The legislation gave four picks each to the President and Congress. On Wednesday, the White House named:
- Former Gen. Larry Ellis, who retired from the Army in 2004 and now is the president of VetConnexx, a firm that matches veterans with private sector jobs.
- Kathleen Hicks, until recently DoD’s number two policy official. She now is the director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
- Tom Lamont, the assistant secretary of Defense for manpower and reserve affairs from 2009-2013. He now runs his own consulting practice.
- Former Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, who retired in 2012 as Chief of the Army Reserve and worked for Proctor and Gamble for most of his civilian career.
The four Congressional appointments fell to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees, each of whom got one pick. They are:
- Bob Hale, who served as DoD’s comptroller and CFO from 2009 until last year, and is currently a fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton (Named by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the House Armed Services Committee’s ranking Democrat).
- Retired Gen. James Thurman, who served most recently as the top U.S. military official in Korea (Named by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee).
- Ray Chandler, who left the Army last year after a 34-year enlisted career. At the time of his retirement, he was Sergeant Major of the Army, the service’s top-ranking enlisted official (Named by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee).
- Former Gen. Carter Ham, who retired in 2013 as the commander of U.S. Africa Command (Named by Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
The new panel, which will report back by February 2016, has a broad mandate: “a comprehensive study of the structure of the Army and policy assumptions related to the size and force mixture of the Army.” But in creating the panel, Congress also instructed it to pay special attention to the “fully-burdened costs” of reservists compared to active soldiers, and explicitly ordered Army officials to freeze a key aspect of its aviation restructuring initiative that some members perceived as a weakening of the role of the Army National Guard.That plan, which the Army first proposed last year, would transfer the reserve components’ Apache attack helicopters to the regular Army in exchange for Blackhawk helicopters, which Army officials argue are a better fit for disaster response and other missions the National Guard fulfills in its non- federal role. Those transfers are barred entirely until October. After that, they are limited to 48 helicopters until the commission issues its report.
In light of some of that Guard-friendly language in the authorization bill, Gus Hargett, the president of the National Guard Association of the United States, said he was disappointed that no retired guard officials were appointed to the panel, but that most of the officials appeared to him to have “open minds” about future Army structure.
“The ultimate objective here is a blueprint for Congress to use to raise the Army of the future,” Hargett said. “I believe lawmakers seek, and our nation needs, a force that features integrated components — active, Guard and Reserve — with interchangeable units, one that can truly respond quickly but also has a significant surge capacity. Army National Guard experience, capabilities and cost- effectiveness have much to contribute to that force.”
DoD personnel moves
W e heard about several key personnel changes within the Defense Department this week, some of which the Pentagon has publicly announced, and some of which it hasn’t. To mention a few:
- Michael Vickers, the undersecretary for intelligence since March 2011, will retire at the end of next month. He is the third person to serve in the post since Congress first created it in 2003 as part of post-9/11 intelligence coordination reforms. The White House has not yet named a replacement.
- The official nomination is still pending, but the White House said last week that President Barack Obama plans to nominate Juan Garcia to serve as the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs. Garcia has been the Navy Department’s top manpower and reserve official since 2009, so the Pentagon print shop will have to change only one word in his title when he gets his new business cards.
- Stephen Welby is President Obama’s pick to be the new assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. The post would seem to be fairly important given DoD’s recent emphasis on technology superiority, but it’s been vacant since November 2012. Since then, Al Shaffer, the principal deputy, has filled the role in an acting capacity. He and Welby have worked together in the office for years. Welby is currently the deputy assistant secretary for systems engineering; Shaffer’s focus, in addition to leading the office in an interim capacity, has been on the research side of the enterprise.
- Bill Marion, the chief technology officer at Air Force Space Command, will become the chief information officer for the Air Force’s personnel directorate (A1) at the Pentagon. The SES appointment is official as of Apr. 5, he told Federal News Radio.
