Pentagon rolls out JWCC cloud accelerator initiative

A soldier with the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade sets up equipment during field exercises at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, on 5 May 2017. (US Army)

The US Department of Defense (DoD) directorate, tasked with executing the Pentagon's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), is initiating a cloud accelerator initiative, designed to rapidly introduce secure commercial cloud services to the US armed forces down to the tactical level.

Announced in December 2022, the JWCC was designed to “provide the DoD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from” cloud service providers (CSPs) to facilitate global accessibility to cloud-based capabilities through a centrally managed data distribution process and allow secure network access via tactical edge devices. The JWCC was developed after Pentagon officials scrapped the controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing programme in July 2021.

Two years into the JWCC programme, which has cost the Pentagon roughly USD9 billion thus far, officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) have partnered with CSPs at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, JWCC Program Manager Alee Long said. Those partnerships have allowed the US DoD to have “a direct relationship with those CSPs, [and] we are able to bring to our DoD partners the same commercial [services] but in a secure, sovereign cloud” network, Long said during a 24 October briefing.

DoD officials have also pushed commercial CSPs to provide “tactical edge offerings”, such as secure end-user devices and data centres, to the US armed forces, she explained. Getting those services down to the battlefield with low latency or network interference has been a key priority for newly minted DISA Director US Army Lieutenant General Paul Stanton, who took command of DISA in October.