CUTTING EDGE
A Soldier assigned to the 780th Military Intel- ligence Brigade at Fort Meade, MD, sets up Low Level Voice Intercept equipment during a cyber integration exercise at Joint Base Lewis- McChord, WA, in October 2015. Cyber needs and capabilities evolve so quickly that there’s value in turning to nontraditional acquisition models like OTA. (Photo by CPT Meredith Mathis, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division)
requirements, is shaped in cooperation with relevant program executive offices (PEOs), the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Cyber Center of Excellence
and U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER).
Start to finish, the innovation challenge process takes less than six months. It begins with an industry day and call for white paper submissions, which the ASA(ALT) System of Systems Engi- neering and Integration (SoSE&I) Directorate evaluates for technical feasi- bility. Selected vendors are then invited to demonstrate the proposed solutions for an Army evaluation team in a laboratory environment, which for the initial chal- lenge was the TRADOC Cyber Battle Lab at Fort Gordon. Te demonstration and assessment are followed by OT awards for prototype capabilities, which are put in the hands of cyber Soldiers for operational evaluation to inform speci- fications prior to fielding decisions and potential broader procurement.
Along with earning potential OT agreements, small
business solutions demonstrated during an Innovation
Challenge could also feed into Cyber- Quest, a TRADOC exercise beginning in 2016 that will examine priority Army cyber requirements and relevant capabilities in an experimental environ- ment. Eventually, the Army’s goal is to hold three to four Cyber Innovation Challenges per year to help investigate priority requirements and to feed into CyberQuest.
CHALLENGE DELIVERS CYBERKITS Te initial challenge was launched on June 19, 2015, with the Army’s release of the Deployable Defensive Cyberspace Opera- tions Infrastructure (DDI) requirement. As a proof of concept for the consortium approach, we issued the request for infor- mation (RFI) through the Consortium for Command, Control, Communications and Computer Technologies (C5), which has an existing OT agreement with the Army through the U.S. Army Contracting Command – New Jersey (ACC-NJ), at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ.
Intended as an easily transportable kit of software and hardware, the DDI will support cyber protection teams (CPTs)
providing active maneuver defense on friendly networks when they need to deploy quickly to counter threat activ- ity. DDI will interface with other Army network capabilities, allowing CPTs to conduct countermeasures in real time and enabling commanders to take imme- diate action to execute network defense.
Te Army received 12 white paper responses in response to the RFI solici- tation and selected the four most likely to produce viable, innovative prototypes. Along the way, we found that OTA pro- vided tremendous flexibility and several benefits for small businesses compared with the traditional contracting pro- cess. First, it did not require a large up-front capital investment to compete and engage with the government, allow- ing companies of any size to participate. Additionally, some of the businesses that responded to the RFI had promising technologies that we hadn’t foreseen in the initial solicitation.
Under the usual rules, they would have been thrown out, or we would have had to reissue the RFI—losing either valuable innovation or valuable time. But with
ASC.ARMY.MIL 85
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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