‘A lot … at once’: Army cyber and network officials take stock 1 year after organizational shuffle

WASHINGTON — It’s been a little over a year since the Army took its three network and cyber Program Executive Offices, rearranged their teams, and emerged with two new offices, ideally set to meet the requirements of modern warfighting.  

In Pentagon bureaucracy terms, a year isn’t actually that long. But speaking to Breaking Defense in recent weeks, the leaders of the two offices say the reorganization has helped the service create a more holistic environment where warfighters can better communicate with each other — though not without a few bumps in the road. 

“It really kind of tested a lot of our theories and a lot of our premises on our organizational agility and our talent management. It probably stressed them to the point where we realized that we’re doing the right thing,” Gen. Ed Barker, program executive officer of the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors told Breaking Defense. 

“But, man, it was a lot to throw at us at once,” he said.

As of Oct. 1 of last year, Program Executive Office C3-Tactical (PEO C3T) and PEO IEW&S absorbed several programs from the PEO Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), which was slimmed down and now is officially known as PEO Enterprise.

(As a sign of how things are still fluid, PEO C3T this week rebranded as the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Networks, PEO C3N, which is how the office will be referred to in this story.)

PEO C3N absorbed the Integrated Enterprise Networks program from PEO Enterprise and its four product management offices: base emergency communications system, global enterprise network modernization-Americas, global enterprise network modernization-OCONUS and wideband enterprise satellite systems. The office also took charge of the enterprise service’s enterprise identity, credential and access management (ICAM) and allied information technology, the latter being part of the EIS’s defensive cyber operations (DCO) portfolio. 

RELATED: Here’s how the Army is reorganizing its network, cyberops offices

Meanwhile, the PEO IEW&S took over the rest of the DCO portfolio: the technology application office, the cyber analytics and detection program and the cyber platforms and systems program. 

Basically, IEW&S now houses all of the Army’s cyber efforts from a PEO standpoint, while C3N houses all of the Army’s network efforts. It’s a streamlining that, both men say, better reflects how the service actually operates.

C3N Closer to Standing up an Army Unified Network 

A year in, Mark Kitz, program executive officer of C3N, said that his office has seen real movements towards the Army’s goal of creating a unified network — breaking down the dozens of siloed legacy networks, mostly separated by tactical and enterprise portions, to create a more cohesive singular network. 

Or, as Kitz describes it, “having the enterprise network and the tactical network integrated into one organization so we can gain efficiencies and deliver a better product to our army customer.” 

Kitz is open, however, that the direction from here is not always clear, especially when identifying and creating new opportunities to uphold this unified network. 

“This vision of a unified network is very ambitious. For a very long time, the Army has been building tactical and enterprise infrastructure in two very different ways,” he said. “And so how do we identify those opportunities? How do we identify the challenges, and how do we identify the roadblocks?” 

Another challenge in creating this unified network is the geographic distance between soldiers. Kitz said he is working on “improving how my organization is geospatially dispersed, how we build a culture that incentivizes getting after one Army network,” which includes both enterprise and tactical elements. 

While the unified network is his major overarching focus, Kitz pointed to a number of efforts his office has helped guide over the last year that he sees as wins. Those include pushing forward on software-defined networking, where networks are put together digitally instead of relying on hardware, like switches and routers, to manage the system. 

“This software-defined network capability could really be a potential game changer for not just how the enterprise solution interfaces with DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) and the DODIN (DoD Information Network) and our network, but how tactical users can now really diversify the way they enter into the network,” Kitz said. 

“As we deliver this capability, over the next year, we’ll be able to integrate not just the enterprise users, but also our tactical systems, our tactical users,” he added. 

This should allow users to access their usual network regardless of their geographic location, he said. 

One other area of improvement Kitz has seen since the reorganization is with the C3N’s ICAM project, which is a capability designed to help build the Army’s unified network by creating a secure environment for authorized users to access the data they need when they need it. 

“This is one of those programs where we have a separate material solution for tactical and enterprise. And so by consolidating under one organization, now we have an integrated approach on how we plan to deliver access management,” Kitz said. “Whether that’s a tactical user who may or may not have a persistent network, or an enterprise user leveraging the enterprise capabilities delivered by PEO EIS. That is one sort of example where the enterprise and tactical network are converging on a single architecture.” 

IEW&S Developing Stronger Relationships 

As the IEW&S has become the PEO responsible for the Army’s entire cyber portfolio, the office has developed stronger communications with Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) and the joint force’s Cyber Command. The IEW&S was responsible for the offensive cyber operations in the service, and is now also responsible for defensive cyber operations after the reorganization.

Barker added that he’s “really realized efficiencies of having [the] offensive and defensive cyber operations under one PEO, and how that relates to our relationship with Cyber Command [and] ARCYBER as well.”

The “integration of [defensive cyber operations] is going, going really, really smooth, and they’re just really part of the family now. The offense, you know, informs the defense, and defense informs offense,” he said.

There was no “terrible surprise” during the transition process, Barker said, but he acknowledged one wrinkle that was more work than expected: learning to work defensive operations with ARCYBER while CYBERCOM was also undergoing its own major effort in standing up the Joint Cyber Warfare Architecture.

“When you’re juggling that level of change internally to us, that level of change — when it comes to Cyber Command and bracing their new authorities, and, oh, by the way, operating in the cyberspace, both from an offensive and defensive standpoint, and the pace associated with the threat in those spaces — it is dynamic,” Barker said.

Still, aside from the stress it put on the system, Barker sees positives from the relationship between his PEO shop and CYBERCOM, and the fact they went through a transition together.

“We’ve been able to help Cyber Command as they’ve kind of navigated this new mission and growth and what they want things to look like when it comes to the different joint capabilities that they have to provide,” Barker said. “Then the other part of that is that continued relationship with Army Cyber because while Cyber Command is standing up, there’s going to be, think of it in terms of putting a ‘j’ for ‘joint’ in front of, you know, a lot of programs, like the joint development environment and things like that.”

‘Joined At The Hip’ 

Barker said as the Army moves forward in adopting its unified network plan and its Next Generation Command and Control initiative — the service’s plan to create an integrated C2 structure focusing on data centricity “at every echelon,” which will serve as the data transport portion of the unified network — his office and the C3N must stay in constant communication with each other. 

“Anything we do on this, on the cyber, on the defensive cyber front, specifically, is tightly linked with PEO C3N,” Barker said. He said that IEW&S and C3N are “joined at the hip when it comes to making sure that anything we’re doing in, kind of, the day-to-day space matches to where they need to go from a future standpoint.”

Kitz echoed the importance of this relationship between the two offices, but also made the bigger point of being in close contact with other forces as well, especially when it comes to standing up the DoD’s sprawling Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) program, which works to create an all-seeing, all-connected battle network.

“I have very close relationships with the Navy and the Air Force, and specifically on how we interoperate data. How are we sharing data? How are we defining how we’re going to share data? Because in the end, that network is going to provide a pathway, but if I get a pathway to a data that I can’t use or consume, that’s meaningless, right?” Kitz said. 

“So really trying to foster these joint relationships between the PEOs and CDAO (Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office) has become a big part of this conversation. How do I meaningfully understand the situation between the joint forces? So the PEOs are really trying to define and ensure that we can interoperate,” he added.