Part 10: Rethinking Government: How Technology Can Move Us Forward (2019)

By Chris Lynch, Founding Director, Defense Digital Service, USA, with Lauren Lombardo, Harvard Kennedy School

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest bureaucracy on earth, employing more than 3 million civilians and members of the military. It has a global operating budget of $690 billion, and it manages the most technical and complex missions across the globe. It does all of this while being held captive to outdated products and services and relying on technology that lags behind U.S. private-sector standards.

In 2015, I co-founded the Defense Digital Service (DDS), an agency team of the U.S. Digital Service, to create an insurgency of technologists within the heart of the Pentagon. Our aim was to bring the best engineers, product managers, designers, and strategists to hack through the bureaucracy and help the DoD fundamentally transform its approach to technology. We found people who want to work on problems that matter and empowered them to work at a department that is filled with extraordinary problems of impact.

One of the first projects we worked on was the Air Force Operational Control System (OCX), the system that operates the Global Positioning System (GPS) used by civilians and military across the globe. We discovered that OCX, a $5 billion program, was running on engineering practices that dated back to the ’90s. By introducing some simple cloud computing and DevOps best practices we were able to help the Air Force bring the development time for a unit of software down from 80 hours to three.

Our collective experience at the DoD proved to me why it’s incredibly important for technologists to have a seat at the table, and to help create a better approach to how the government buys, builds, and implements technology for our citizens and national security. In just under four years, we have made progress toward this goal on multiple fronts.

Some examples include:

• We rewrote code to unblock the transfer of medical records from the DoD to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. This 45-day project ensured that tens of thousands of veterans can access proper care after being incorrectly denied due to lack of interoperability between two legacy systems.
• We launched Hack the Pentagon, the federal government’s first bug bounty program, which enlists the help of the “white hat” hacker community to discover and disclose thousands of vulnerabilities in select DoD systems.
• We founded Jyn Erso, a partnership between Army Cyber Command and the Defense Digital Service to leverage and support the DoD’s internal tech talent alongside the private-sector talent recruited through the U.S. Digital Service.

With each of these achievements, it became increasingly apparent that despite our broad impact, we were only skimming the surface of a deeper institutional problem. Frankly, the work we did wasn’t particularly innovative; our efforts were not focused on propelling the DoD to the cutting edge of futuristic technology, but rather on helping it transition out of the past and into modern-day standards. It’s easy to become distracted by new advances in science and technology, but we will never be able to leverage those capabilities to their fullest extent without a strong, reliable infrastructure.

The DoD contains entire industries, from healthcare and logistics to education, humanitarian aid, and intelligence. Technology is the undercurrent of all of these operations, but the foundations upon which these industries were built are sometimes severely outdated, leading to inefficiency, exorbitant costs, wasted time, and frustrated users.

We live in a world where a teenager can get access to nearly unlimited computing power and services with a simple swipe of a credit card. At the DoD, most people don’t have anything that resembles such power or simplicity. Cloud computing, which was designed to be simple and easy to access, is a frustrating, bureaucratic struggle within the federal government. Many departments simply don’t have access to the infrastructure required to transform their operations to match technological advancements, due to outdated policy restrictions, limited funding, and lack of empowerment for highly technical civil servants to make procurement decisions.

It became increasingly clear to me and others at the Pentagon that in order to best carry out the department’s mission we would need to fundamentally shift the DoD’s approach to technology. That’s where JEDI comes in.

JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) is a unified vision to provide everyone across the DoD enterprise with the same cloud-computing capability. The JEDI contract will enable a single platform to deploy a capability across all classification levels to every place where the mission of national defense lives — all the way to the front lines of battle. It was built to provide the DoD with the same computing advantage that the rest of the world has easy access to.

This singular vision is the core value that JEDI brings to the department. The DoD already lives in a multi-cloud environment (both commercial and custom-built), yet an ongoing issue is interoperability and data sharing between several siloed solutions purchased by separate programs and running different systems that do not communicate with one another. Simply having access to cloud capabilities isn’t the answer; the DoD needs a unified approach to enable modern capabilities across all operations.

JEDI aims to create a cohesive operational environment that will reduce much of the complexity that currently exists between DoD systems today. This, in turn, will allow the department to transform internal operations into faster and more efficient processes to better serve the DoD’s mission. Sharing information will be far faster than the sometimes year-long integration projects that are underway to tie together a patchwork of disconnected systems. Newly deployed algorithms and machine learning models that advance the department’s use of artificial intelligence will be able to take advantage of the latest hardware platforms. The DoD will grow its intelligence and decision-making power by enabling users to further understand the enormous swaths of data at their fingertips. And importantly, the department will greatly benefit from the innovation that millions of commercial cloud customers demand in this highly competitive space.

JEDI is not only a revolutionary way to think about how to do the work of defense, but it also calls for a fundamental shift in how the DoD carries out the technology procurement process. The length of a typical DoD contract procurement is measured in years. The process is driven by acquisition teams who are far removed from the mission, the technical experts, and the core users that the contract is expected to support. Programs rarely bring in users or subject-matter experts to understand what a successful product or platform would look like or how it would perform, which often leads to user dissatisfaction and decreased relevance to the mission.

For JEDI to work at the necessary scale, it had to be different. We empowered a world-class team of DDS technologists; leveraged the expertise of exceptional contract specialists, lawyers, security experts, and policymakers; and listened to civilian and military feedback.

At the end of the day, the JEDI contract is aimed at procuring commercial best practices and standards. It did this in several ways:

Creating JEDI has been a monumental team effort. JEDI has the ability to fundamentally transform technology at the DoD, and provide a platform to maintain technological superiority on the world stage. In doing so, it also demonstrates what can be done when technologists have a seat at the decision-making table.