U.S. Cyber Command intends to combine some of the software factories of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force under the Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture and establish a new program executive office using new acquisition authorities, Breaking Defense reported Thursday.
There are six program offices within JCWA and each has its own DevSecOps platforms.
Khoi Nguyen, command acquisition executive and director of the cyber acquisition and technology directorate (J9) at CYBERCOM, said the move to consolidate the platforms of those offices will help reduce duplication and cybersecurity vulnerabilities associated with operating redundant systems.
Congress mandates the creation of the JCWA PEO by 2027. The new office will be composed of six program managers from each program office: the Air Force’s Unified Platform, the USAF’s Joint Cyber Command and Control, the Army’s Persistent Cyber Training Environment, the Army’s Joint Common Access Program, CyberCom’s sensors and the Joint Development Environment, which is run by the Army and overseen by the command.
Nguyen said the planned consolidation will help CYBERCOM improve its ability to defend its supply chain for software development efforts and enable the program offices to use the same “technology stack.”
“In the effort to reduce redundancy, we’re looking to combine or develop a singular platform that then we would GFE [provide as Government-Furnished Equipment] to all the program shops and say, ‘Hey, this is a common platform, [like a] Kubernetes environment, that we’re going to define, and you will just deliver your applications as containers or as virtual machines onto this common platform,” he added.
Nguyen noted that the command expects the common platform to be deployed in the cloud, edge processing and other environments.