UP FRONT.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

JEDI Cloud on the Horizon

With a court battle still playing out for the Defense Department's multibillion dollar JEDI Cloud contract--which was awarded, and recently reaffirmed, to Microsoft but is being challenged by Amazon Web Services in the Court of Federal Claims--the Pentagon is taking steps to prepare for the eventual arrival of the system.

"We continue to work on what I... call the prerequisites to using the cloud," said Dana Deasy, the Defense Department's chief technology officer. "Everybody continues to be fixated on this contract and getting the cloud provider under a contract and getting us to 'go.' For me,... I'm seeing more and more evidence [that] the cloud is nothing more than a facilitated environment that allows us to do what really matters--and that's going to be the DevOps [and] agile development."

The Pentagon is preparing the services to move their development processes to DevOps, Deasy said during a recent meeting with reporters.

That way, "when the JEDI Cloud finally does get awarded, we're not starting at day one," he said. There is work "we can continue to do because it sits inside of our ownership already."

It's Not Your Daddy's Digital Engineering

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, is an evangelist for digital engineering, which he says can save programs time and money. But website commentators have been saying that they have been doing that since the 1980s.

These are new techniques emerging from the automotive industry, Roper said recently.

"What I encountered with digital engineering is a lot people saying we're already doing it. And I agree everyone uses computers. It's wrong to presume that using computers to design something equates to digital engineering," he said.

"It would be like presuming that all sculptures that are made with hammers and chisels all turn out to be Michelangelo works of art. They're not, and how you use the tools matter. There's a process for using the tools and there's an art to use it that matters."

Allies Study Berger's Plans for Marines

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger's vision to revamp the service to take on great power competitors such as China and Russia is being eagerly studied by his counterparts...