To make the transition to cloud computing, which is now the preferred method of operation for the majority of American enterprises, the Pentagon has struggled for years. Even though there are fears that the cloud is not secure enough for sensitive military usage, it continues to struggle. An earlier endeavor by the Defense Department, which was infamously referred to as the JEDI cloud, was unsuccessful from the beginning. This was since Amazon and Oracle filed a legal challenge against Microsoft’s victory in the contract. To get things going, the Pentagon began a new process in December 2022, which involved dividing a new contract worth $9 billion among four different vendors. These vendors were Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
A year into what is known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), however, less than two percent of the nine billion dollars that was designated for the program has been committed. Even while the Pentagon’s digital planners argue that this program is essential to moving the United States into next-generation fighting capabilities, the tardy start is a reflection of persisting anxieties over the security of commercial cloud technologies.
In an interview, Lily Zeleke, who is the deputy chief information officer for the information enterprise at the Defense Department, stated that “cloud software are the backbone of the development, the application, and advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning.” “They are an essential component of our efforts to modernize them.”
Several defense analysts believe that the delays may have an impact on the competitiveness of the United States military. “The time that we lost with JEDI was really painful because you need a computing structure to train AI models,” said Paul Scharre, a former technology officer at the Department of Defense. He was referring to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, which was the predecessor to the Joint Warfare Command Center. “To make progress with artificial intelligence, the Department of Defense needs to have that cloud infrastructure in place.”
The Chief Executive Officer of Google Public Sector, Karen Dahut, who had previously served as a Navy officer, stated in October at a conference hosted by the Association of the United States Army that the Department of Defense had a tendency to “think too long and hard” about the possible dangers posed by new technology.
