Bit by bit, the U.S. military has been undergoing something of a communications revolution over the last several years: from an aircraft carrier suddenly having hundreds of megabits of bandwidth available on board to the Army moving toward a single network for both its enterprise and tactical communications and communicators in Indo-Pacific Command finding new ways to interoperate with new partners.
It’s largely due to recent changes — some policy-related, but certainly some cultural — that have pushed the armed services to embrace the same commercial technologies that have already made ubiquitous connectivity commonplace in most of our lives.
On board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, for example, it’s largely 5G technology and commercial satellite services that have started to deliver previously unheard of connectivity possibilities to sailors at sea.
But it’s not just about connecting people. The sought-after ubiquitous connectivity also brings new opportunities to connect data-producing devices in new and innovative ways.
“It could be anything, perhaps a sensor, a drone, a human. It could be wired of wireless,” said Ken Gonzalez, director of federal solutions architecture at Verizon. “It’s not limited to what you are connecting to. You need to access data that’s remote. You need to access information that is perhaps with the person who is 100 feet away from you. The reality here is that we are no longer bound by the communications constructs of the past five to seven years.”
New demand for upstream network flows
This new communications paradigm also has major implications for how networks are designed and what they need to be able to do. Both in the private sector and in the military, an everything-connected world doesn’t just increase the demand for bandwidth — it often means each network-connected node must be able to transmit as much data as it consumes.
Historically, that hasn’t been the case. Many end users have tended to be connected to networks with fairly large downstream data pipes and narrow upstream ones.
“We now use concepts like edge computing because some applications require that compute power be as close as possible to the user,” Gonzalez said. “But that is not always feasible, which means now you need to be in a position to understand that you need to have a network that can support massive amounts of data being transferred up to be processed and on the way down, as the result of a computation that will allow you to have the information that you need.”
The increasing use of artificial intelligence to parse and analyze data to aid in real-time decision-making also has changed connectivity demands, he said.
“You now need to upload as much data, or perhaps more data, than you’re downloading,” Gonzalez pointed out. That requires being smart both about the kind of data that an organization transfers and when.
“If you’re in a mission critical environment where the data needs to be extremely low latency, you need to be able to classify it as such and separate critical data flows from those that are not mission critical,” he said. “You need to be smart about how to leverage your network and perhaps suppress some types of data that don’t need to be transferred at a specific time — or data transfers that could be done at off-peak times.”
A move to transport-agnostic networks
One concept that’s risen to prominence within DoD in recent years is transport-agnostic communications. Military leaders want to give commanders the flexibility to use whatever data pathways happen to be available to them, wherever they happen to be operating around the world.
As Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of architecture, operations, networks and space in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, shared at a recent Army Technical Exchange Meeting: “We have tried to find a way to get to data-centric using agnostic transport to move the data as freely as possible to where it needs to go, a cloud-enabled asset to catch and move the data, and then, obviously, you need a layered security architecture. We want a multilevel security architecture where we can move the data from one classification to another seamlessly.”
This is a big change. DoD is largely accustomed to communicating over networks it controls. Now, the challenge is doing it securely over physical networks it doesn’t control — and in some cases, overseas for example, perhaps networks it doesn’t particularly trust.
But those challenges can be solved by applying zero trust principles and approaches like software-defined networking that abstract the network from the copper, fiber or airwaves DoD uses to move data around.
The key, Gonzalez said, is ensuring security is considered at the same time that these networks — even virtual ones — are being designed, not as an afterthought or a bolt-on.
“When we were used to point-to-point connectivity, there was a really good way to know what was connected to what. But as we’re going into a world in which you now have hybrid networks, you have elements that are connected through the internet. You have others that are connected through an overlay. And you still have other things that are connected point to point,” he said.
But hybrid network environments need a way to “homogenize” the connectivity, which can come in the form of overlays, Gonzalez said.
These overlays will “provide not only the connectivity but the segmentations over the multiple networks underneath,” he explained. “So when it comes to security, let’s make sure that folks are not separating the network and the connectivity when it comes to design, and the way they’re thinking about servicing the users.”
A shift in network procurement requirements
What’s more, Gonzalez said, security offers an area in which DoD and other federal agencies can improve their odds of success by designing procurements that are more outcome-based and less focused on predefined technical requirements.
Operating in a more outcome- or mission-driven way gives vendors much more latitude to propose solutions that might not arise during a more traditional and rigid requirements process, he said.
“Whenever we have the opportunity to understand the objectives, we are positioned to provide different thought leadership and bring forward ideas that today the mission owners may not be aware as possible. When you start with objectives first and then you define your requirements, everybody wins,” Gonzalez said.
“A lot of the limitations that we have as an industry are defined by the government. Every single one of these solicitations needs to be fair for everybody … but if the process — at the request for information or sources-sought stage — allows us to be a little bit more creative and provide solutions, we will be really leveraging the infrastructure and technical expertise that we have gained across an entire book of business and provide a better solution to meet the objectives of the mission.”
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