‘Sense of urgency’: Army’s NETCOM says it will transform IT and cyber ops by the end of next year

WASHINGTON — As part of the Army’s C2 Fix initiative, the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, is planning to transform from solely a network provider to an information technology and cybersecurity provider by the end of next year. 

Gen. Jacqueline McPhail, commanding general of NETCOM said the move will allow her office to become more of an operational force spending less time on fixing IT and cyber issues and more time focused on progressing and protecting the DoD’s Information Network, or DODIN. 

This change will “not only deliver that network, but everything that’s going through that network, and then making sure everything that goes through that network is protected,” McPhail said during a panel at the Association of the US Army’s annual conference on Monday. 

She said the transformation will happen at the “global level,” but the process will be theater-aligned. 

“It’s enabling that global collaboration. So allowing theaters to collaborate amongst themselves, as well as vertically within the Army, we also are making sure we have that seamless movement across the globe. So as you go from the enterprise or from your base post camp station, and you deploy to another environment, whether it’s CENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility], INDOPACOM AOR, it’s seamless movement,” McPhail said during a media roundtable Monday. 

One of the biggest changes this “pivot,” as McPhail calls it, will bring is that soldiers will no longer have to reimage their computers when they move from theater to theater. (Reimaging is an often lengthy process that completely clears a computer’s hard drive and reinstalls the operating system.) 

“The days of having to image your computers every time you go to a different theater, those days are coming to an end,” McPhail said during the roundtable. 

This initiative to cut down the reimaging process is something the service invested heavily in back between 2016 and 2017, then called Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or, WIN-T, however, the program eventually fell flat. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff of the G6, assured reporters at Monday’s roundtable that won’t happen this time around, mainly because there’s a stronger “sense of urgency” within the Army to make such changes and the operational environment is much different. 

“It is literally trying to get after things with a sense of urgency,” Morrison said. “Where we were at in 2017 is not the operational environment if we are seeing today. We know that the capabilities that we had were not ready to fight tonight, and why, we got very focused on C2 Fix, and it was an all-of-Army-effort to make sure that we were going to put capabilities into the hands of our operational formations to make them more survivable, made them more maneuverable, gave them the operational capabilities they needed,” he later added. 

Another capability the transformation will yield is the increased use of software-as-a-service and identity, credential and access management (ICAM), with strict zero trust protocols.

“When we start talking about zero trust, that’s your step one. Everything that we plug in gets scanned and yes, it is compliant and is authorized to connect to the network. And then that also includes making sure that our endpoints are secure,” McPhail said at the roundtable. 

But while NETCOM aims to widen its portfolio, it’s not getting out of the IT fix-it mission at its core. A big push for the command is the Army Enterprise Service Management Platform (ASMP), which McPhail compared to a help desk to assist soldiers with any network or IT issues they have out in the field. 

“That is a help desk, but it’s not just a help desk, right? It’s probably the most robust help desk support that I have seen in my 30 years in the Army,” she said. “It really means being able to pick up with your system and not have an image, right? And that is a huge thing. Any of us that have gone through all these different deployments in our career, having to reimage over and over and over.”

McPhail said NETCOM hopes to provide each new capability by the end of 2025.