SPEAKERS       CONTENTS       INSERTS    
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??–???
2005
  
[H.A.S.C. No. 108–46]

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE: ARE WE ON THE RIGHT PATH TO ACHIEVING NET-CENTRICITY AND ENSURING INTEROPERABILITY

HEARING

BEFORE THE

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
FEBRUARY 11, 2004

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TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

JIM SAXTON, New Jersey, Chairman
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
JEFF MILLER, Florida
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado

MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
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BARON P. HILL, Indiana
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
RICK LARSEN, Washington
JIM COOPER, Tennessee

Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Jean Reed, Professional Staff Member
Uyen Dinh, Professional Staff Member
William Natter, Professional Staff Member
Curtis Flood, Staff Assistant

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2004

HEARING:

    Wednesday, February 11, 2004, Department of Defense Information Systems Architecture: Are We on the Right Path to Achieving Net-Centricity and Ensuring Interoperability

APPENDIX:

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    Wednesday, February 11, 2004

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2004

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE: ARE WE ON THE RIGHT PATH TO ACHIEVING NET-CENTRICITY AND ENSURING INTEROPERABILITY

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

    Meehan, Hon. Martin T., a Representative from Massachusetts, Ranking Member, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee

    Saxton, Hon. Jim, a Representative from New Jersey, Chairman, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee

WITNESSES

    Boutelle, Lt. Gen. Steven, Chief Information Officer/G-6 for the Department of the Army

    Quagliotti, Maj. Gen. Marilyn, Vice Director, Defense Information Systems Agency

    Stenbit, Hon. John Stenbit, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration
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    Thomas, Brig. Gen. John, Director Command, Control, Communications and Computers, C4, and Deputy Chief Information Officer, United States Marine Corps

    Tillotson, David III, Director, C4I, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Architecture and Assessment, Department of the Air Force

    Zelibor, Rear Adm. Thomas, Deputy for C4 Integration and Policy and Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Department of the Navy

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers can be viewed in the hard copy.]

Mr. Bartlett
Mr. Meehan
Mr. Saxton
Mr. Thornberry

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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE AND NET CENTRICITY

House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, February 11, 2004.

    The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 3 p.m. in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jim Saxton (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JIM SAXTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

    Mr. SAXTON. Good afternoon, folks. Why don't you have a seat? That is good.

    Ladies and gentlemen, the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities meets this afternoon to learn more about each of the services' information systems architecture, how they interface with the Global Information Grid, also known as the GIG, and how they interoperate with each other. The subcommittee is interested to learn more about the GIG and each of the services' architecture—and how each of the services' architecture will operate in a collaborative environment. We would like to know how the Department of Defense (DOD) is working to reduce redundant noninteroperable and stovepipe systems and to eliminate the parochial interests to better support the Nation's warfighters.
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    As the Department transforms itself from an Industrial Age organization to an Information Age one, it needs to identify the critical elements of network-centric warfare, to assign roles and responsibilities for promoting it, and to describe how it will organize to implement transformational capabilities.

    The subcommittee will examine defense transformation this year, and today's hearing begins that effort. We wholeheartedly support the Department's goal to have a Joint Network Centric Distribution Force, capable of rapid decision, superiority, and mass effects across the battle space.

    However, there is much work to be done between now and achieving that objective. Realizing these capabilities will require great cultural changes in the people processes and military services as well as strategy to control DOD information systems to include managing interoperability issues among the services.

    DOD's first step in creating the GIG architecture is a good foundation to build upon the GIG commercial-based technology that integrates legacy command control, communications computers, intelligence surveillance, and reconnaissance systems and permits full exploration of sensor weapon and platform capabilities for joint fires. While the GIG potential capabilities would be an enormous boost in supporting warfighters, I am concerned that warfighters may not be able to tap into these capabilities if individual services' architectures limit interoperability.

    That is the focus of today's hearing: How are DOD and the military services designing information architectures to build a fully functioning network that every service man or woman may access and exploit, and how will these architectures resolve the interoperability issues that plague the services today.
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    There are several information systems issues that should be addressed during today's hearing. For example, how does the GIG architecture allow for the various service architectures such as the Air Force C–2 constellation, the Navy's Force Net, the Army's Future Combat System, FCS, Warfighting Information Network - Tactical, WIN-T, and the Marine Corps' expertise network to function with the GIG? How will these service-specific architectures interoperate with each other to provide a seamless transfer of data in communications?

    I am concerned that the lowest level of compliance will be the result of these endeavors, rather than the maximum cooperation and collaboration between the services, because of the competing demands within each service. These and other fundamental issues must be addressed as the U.S. military transforms to defeat conventional and assymetric threats in the 21st century battle space. We cannot ask our young men and women to put their lives on the line if we do not provide them with superior means and tools to perform their duty. This is a responsibility that the subcommittee takes seriously, as do our witnesses I am sure. And we will continue our efforts to ensure proper oversight. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Saxton can be viewed in the hard copy.]

STATEMENT OF HON. MARTIN T. MEEHAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MASSACHUSETTS, RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

    Mr. SAXTON. And at this point, I would like to yield to the Ranking Member, my friend and partner, Mr. Meehan.
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    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me join you in welcoming today's witnesses. With ''transformation'' the watch word in the Pentagon, and the Information Age well upon us, Information Technology (IT) investment decisions will provide the foundation for all future military capabilities. The disciplines of intelligence, command and control, and targeting all require accurate and timely information, and American industry is making information dominance a reality for the United States military.

    It won't be easy to ensure the availability of information in a secure fashion anytime and anywhere. Some challenges are technological and others are organizational. The coordination of the requirements and budgeting process should be of paramount concern. In the past, joint weapons system, planning and budgeting has not always succeeded. There is no denying it. Redundancies continued and joint programs have failed.

    I understand the issuance of an IT portfolio management policy is soon expected from the Department. I am told that this policy will guide the investment decisions to ensure compatibility, interoperability, and the efficiency of DOD IT systems. But let's be honest, policies come and go. Without focused attention to execution, even the best policy will fail. Perhaps our witnesses can provide us with some additional insight with this regard.

    And, Mr. Chairman, again I thank you for holding this hearing and I look forward to hearing the testimony of those witnesses before us. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Meehan can be viewed in the hard copy.]

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    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you Mr. Meehan.

    Mr. SAXTON. We have one panel of witnesses today. I want to welcome our witnesses, who are the Honorable John P. Stenbit, Assistant secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and Chief Information Officer for the Department of Defense; Lieutenant General Steven W. Boutelle, Chief Information Officer/G–6 for the Department of the Army; Major General Marilyn Quagliotti, Vice Director, Defense In formations Systems Agency; Rear Admiral Thomas Zelibor, Deputy for C4 Integration and Policy of the Department—Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Department of the Navy; Mr. David Tillotson III, Director, C4I, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Architecture and Assessment Department of the Air Force; and Brigadier General John R. Thomas, Director Command Control, Communications and Computers, C4,—and Deputy Chief Information Officer at the United States Marine Corps.

    Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I look forward to hearing your testimony, as I am sure the other members of the subcommittee do.

    At the outset, I would ask unanimous consent that all members' and witnesses' written opening statements be included in the record. Without objection, so ordered.

    I would ask unanimous consent also that the articles, exhibits, and extraneous and tabular material referred to be included in the record. Also, without objection.

    Secretary Stenbit, the floor is yours.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN P. STENBIT, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR NETWORKS AND INFORMATION INTEGRATION AND CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
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    Secretary STENBIT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is indeed a pleasure to be here. I did take the liberty of bringing along with me one potential extra witness—not with an opening statement—Rear Admiral Nancy Brown who is a deputy J6 in the Chief of Staff (CS)—but their role in the regulatory regime within the Department I felt would be appropriate as we got into some of these questions that you quite properly raised about how were we going to get from here to there.

    Once again, Mr. Chairman, I am really pleased to be here to continue what were in fact a set of very interesting discussions between ourselves and the committee last year with respect to both formal and informal. I am extremely gratified to hear your endorsement of the—in your opening statement—goals and where we are trying to head.

    And what we hope to do today is give you some confidence that we have a path, not particularly certain to get to perfection, but certainly one that is going to move us forward in this transformation as rapidly and as efficiently as we possibly can.

    You quite rightly described the transformation toward net-centricity and why it is important, so I am not going to dwell on that. But I think today our real goal is to talk about the global information grid architecture and tell you how we are using this architecture to drive the three primarily departmental processes; one of which is requirements definition; the second of which, of course, is the budget; and the third of which is the acquisition programs. We have to succeed on all three fronts or we will not in fact get to the vision that we have both expressed.

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    So I think the best way to talk about this is to talk about the global information grid as the organizing construct for achieving net-centric operations and warfare in the Department of Defense. We define the GIG as a globally interconnected end-to-end set of information capabilities, associated processes and personnel for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating, and managing information on demand to the warfighters, policymakers, and support personnel. It is important for us to recognize that this GIG is actually a vision, an entity, and an architecture, and its application is different in those three definitions. I will see if I can get there.

    As a vision, the GIG establishes the conceptual framework for the ''to be'' information environment of the DOD. It will provide information and communication services wherever they are needed in the DOD, be they warfighting or business in nature. And it will, in fact, move us toward net-centric operations. As an entity, the GIG comprises many systems that interoperate to provide the right information at the right place when needed. Thus, if you would like to think of it, it is a private World Wide Web. It is not the World Wide Web because we have significant requirements that are different from the normal Internet. We have security requirements. We have information assurance requirements. We have mobility requirements.

    And actually, if we achieve our vision that virtually every element of the Department becomes part of this network, we actually need more addresses than are available in some sense in the general World Wide Web, if in fact every Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) is going to have an Internet Protocol (IP) address. So it is better to think of this as a private Internet rather than the World Wide Web, but it has many of the same issues. It is standards-driven. It is a collection of networks that work together, as opposed to one managed across the entire enterprise at a time, and that it allows the same transformation within the Department of Defense that has been going on in the commercial world both in the industries and government and others on a global scale; and that is the transformation toward net-centric world.
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    It is also an established and documented architecture that is the Department's enterprise architecture that defines the enterprise-level information environmental blueprint. These are the kind of words that are common in the Clinger-Cohen Act and the IT portfolio management world. The architecture comprises three perspectives or views: (1) an operational view,—if you want, think about requirements (2) a systems view,—if you want, think about acquisition (3) and the specifics of a given program and a technical view, and if you would like, you can think there in terms of the interoperability and the kind of constraints that are on the system to make sure that it will in fact work end to end.

    As such, the architecture represents the structure of GIG components, their relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design, operation, and evolution over time.

    The responsibility for the GIG development and maintenance belongs to me in the Office of Secretary of Defense as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Pentagon. The architecture is used to determine the interoperability and capability requirements, to advance the use of commercial standards, to accommodate the required accessibility, and also keeping people out that shouldn't be there.

    We have a currently approved version of the GIG architecture which is version 2. Version 1, which was developed a couple of years ago, was not in fact moving toward net-centric, so we have a living document, if you wish, which will have a subsequent version which will refine these issues even further. But the GIG version 2 does represent a joint force and a coalition force net-centric perspective on information support. It also includes those ideas represented in the post–9/11 world with respect to the enhanced role of homeland defense special operations, continuity of operations, and in particular our outreach to our allies.
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    This year, the GIG architecture and its development process were very favorably reviewed by the GAO as part of its review of executive branch enterprise architecture, and is being worked to align with the Federal enterprise architecture as well. You will hear later from each of the services that their transformation initiatives flow from this overall DOD perspective, and I will let them describe how that connection works from their perspective.

    As a result of the work done on the architecture, the Department has defined five key programs to facilitate this enterprise information environment. We talked about those quite a lot last year, and we really do thank you for your support that allowed us to move forward with those five key programs: the GIG Bandwidth Expansion, the Transformational Satellite System; the Joint Tactical Radio System; the Network Centric Enterprise Services; and the Information Assurances. Those programs, of course, have to meet the same architectural standards as all the other programs.

    As a result of this work, in concert with the core DOD enterprise-wide programs, the services are planning and implementing a number of complementary programs required to realize that the end-to-end goal that you expressed so poignantly in your opening statement can be realized. These programs will in effect provide interoperable subnets of the GIG and will, when completed, become integral parts of the GIG, much as the World Wide Web becomes an ever-growing entity, even though there are independent management activities that work on the subsystems. And you will be hearing more about that later.

    As I said earlier, we need to extend these transformations to our allies, and I think there we need to be realistic and that we are going to have to use legacy systems early, because they are not going to be as fast with this transformation as we are, but we are going to have to include them in this transformation as quickly as we can.
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    The primary means for verifying conformance to the GIG architecture—and are we in fact moving in the right direction—are embodied in two documents: ''The Joint Technical Architecture'' (JTA) and the ''GIG Architecture's Net-centric Operations and Warfare Reference Model (NCOW).'' the JTA is a document that is cosigned by myself as the CIO and it was signed by Mike Wynne, the Acting Acquisition Under Secretary for Acquisition and Logistics. That is the document that in effect says if you are going to develop a program within the DOD acquisition system, you must meet these building codes in order to do it. The transformation of that Joint Technical Architecture from previous versions, which were mixtures if you wish of the old world and the new, to the new version 6 which is in fact a net-centric version, is crucial to the beginning of our ability to manage this kind of an opportunity. The Net-centric Operations and Warfare reference model defines in detail the specific operational attributes, system interfaces, and technical standards profiles. It is a reference document against which programs can be looked at, and in fact it is sort of the cookbook about how to be able to pass the oversight requirements of the Defense Acquisition Board and the Joint Requirements Oversight Board.

    I might point out here that within the Pentagon we have a requirements process which is led by the military and the joint staff in general, and by the acquisition side of the house with the civilians in Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the services. The jta and the ncow are used as the core documents for both of those processes. In addition, the controller has been working on a Business Enterprise Architecture for the business domains, in order to be able to pull them together within the Department. That, too, is in conformance with version 2 of the GIG, and is, in fact, an extension to a ''to be'' architecture for the DOD enterprise of the future for those business processes.
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    There are other processes that help this along, such as architecture frameworks and data storage and some others which I will leave in the statement, but those are the key documents; JTA and the NCAL. As I stated previously, this architecture is playing an increasing role in the three of the Department's primary business processes: requirements, budget, and acquisition. The new requirements process initiated by the joint staff, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development Systems, uses the GIG architectural description of information technology as the authoritative view of interoperability and information assurance for use in defining joint capabilities. They have also recently approved a mandatory Net-ready key performance parameter (KPP) which applies to all new systems going through their requirements process. That particular KPP increases the Department's emphasis on information assurance and data interoperability through the NCAL and its application to new programs.

    In the recently revised DOD acquisition process—now we are on the other side of the House—the GIG architecture is recognized as the underpinning for all mission and capabilities architectures developed by the services and agencies. In addition, the Department requires the development of a GIG conformant C4I support plan for each program that in detail tells the information operability and the content needs and dependencies of individual programs. So now——

    Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Secretary, because of the number of witnesses that we have, and we are going to be interrupted by votes sometime during this, could you summarize?

    Secretary STENBIT. Okay, sure.
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    Mr. SAXTON. Thanks.

    Secretary STENBIT. I am sorry.

    Congressman Meehan talked about the portfolio management process which is about to come forward. That is another part of this. It is described in the statement. And we are in fact very grateful for your support of the horizontal fusion portfolio and programs. Those are used as experiments and have been very successful at pointing out how great it will be, once we get to net-centricity and those are complemented by a system engineering and test regime.

    So, in summary, we are in the middle of a transformation. We have got some key programs moving forward. We have some regulatory processes and some documents, and we look forward to having you share your understanding and our understanding of that. And let me pass it to Steve.

    [The prepared statement of Secretary Stenbit can be viewed in the hard copy.]

STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. STEVEN W. BOUTELLE, USA CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER/G–6 FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY

    General BOUTELLE. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I am Lieutenant General Steven Boutelle, Chief Information Officer of the Army, the G6 of the Army. Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on the Department of Defense information systems architecture and interoperability.
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    Today we are an expeditionary Army, supporting the Nation on the global war on terrorism. But our Army is also in the midst of a massive reorganization creating modular brigade combat teams as fighting units that can rapidly deploy around the world. Our forward-deployed forces must have the capability to reach back from anywhere in the globe through global networks and tap intelligence resources and collaboration tools on a real-time basis. Forces will continue to deploy as part of an integral team of a joint force, and often as a coalition team, as we continue to fight the global war on terrorism.

    As part of a joint or coalition expeditionary force, interoperability is not an option. Our existing systems that must interoperate are made interoperable. All of our new systems, as Mr. Stenbit has said, have a key performance parameter that requires them to be interoperable. The good news is that a lot of our systems now have achieved interoperability. Many of our communications systems and networks are based, as Mr. Stenbit has said, on the Internet protocol. That is the commercial IP Internet protocol version 4, foundation of the World Wide Web. It is a mandated standard by the Department of Defense Joint Technical Architecture and this and other commercial-based technology protocols and standards are a foundation for achieving joint interagency and multinational interoperability.

    The Army has nearly completed the migration to an Internet protocol or IP-based network as part of the larger joint network. In accordance with the DOD's Technical Architecture and current DOD guidance, we are moving to IP version 6 (IPV6) for a more efficient and effective network. In practical terms, interoperability exists today at the network level and extends through space-based and terrestrial systems. These transmission systems serve as part of our newly named lan/warenet, which is the Army's portion of the GIG. So each service provides a portion and we provide our lan/warenet, made up of the National Guard net, U.S. Army Reserve net, and then our active Army networks.
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    The DOD GIGs data strategy directs a more complete migration to commercial-based Web technologies which will further strengthen our interoperability across the joint interagency and multinational environments.

    Network level interoperability is vital to all organizations within DOD. The example of this interoperability is a user with an Apple computer sending e-mail to a user with an IBM computer. Both computers have different operating systems, probably different e-mail programs. The network is comprised of piece parts from many manufacturers, Sun, Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft. However, the common and enforced standards such as those that reside in the Joint Technical Architecture ensure successful delivery.

    This is obviously not as easy as building your own network at home. The soldier requesting artillery fire digitally to save his buddies cannot wait because he hasn't been upgraded from a phone line to a cable modem.

    Our security requirements add a complexity to the interoperability issues we are facing today. But we are accomplishing them. An example of the military application of network interoperability is the Joint Blue Force situation awareness or Blue Force Tracking you heard about in our last session, implemented in Operation Enduring Freedom and also in Operation Iraqi Freedom. While each service used different platforms and different computers to track blue or friendly forces, the network interoperability standards enabled commanders on the ground to enjoy near real-time visibility of friendly forces on dissimilar systems from individual trucks, tanks, helicopters, command centers, and even here in Washington in command centers.

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    As the Army transforms to the future force, we are developing a lighter, more mobile, more modular and strategically responsive organization, fully enabled by a more robust network of satellites, fiber optic cables, radios and tactical communications, battle command capabilities tied together; but these networks will be the bridge from our current to our future force, and enable expeditionary joint force commanders to fully conduct interdependent globally dispersed network-centric warfare. Battle command is the essential operational capability that fundamentally enable us for future operations.

    Our chief of staff had 17 focus areas, one of which is networks. In fact it was his No. 2 focus area after the soldier. As we realign into the new brigade combat teams and modular units, we are adjusting the architecture of these units to exploit the successes we saw in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and to realign and align with the Joint Technical Architecture. We are now, in fact, restructuring the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart since its return from Iraq, and we are redesigning that unit to be flexible, adaptive, and more joint.

    Such systems as the Joint Tactical Radio System, the JTRS, the Warfighter Information Network—Tactical, the strategic tactical entry points, the teleports, and the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIGBE) are absolutely essential to support those warfighters with secure simultaneous real-voice data, imagery, and video.

    We are actively involved in synchronizing our information systems architecture. Our systems are being developed in accordance with the guidance of the Joint Technical Architecture in OSD which continues to provide adequate oversight.

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    We are in the midst of a global fight on terror. The future success of the Army depends on its ability to transform to a fully integrated force.

    Thank you again, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for the opportunity to appear before you today. I stand ready to answer questions you might have.

    [The prepared statement of General Boutelle can be viewed in the hard copy.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much, General.

    General Quagliotti.

STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. MARILYN QUAGLIOTTI, USA VICE DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY

    General QUAGLIOTTI. Sir, thank you very much for allowing me to testify today. I have provided some charts to frame my remarks. If you would follow along, I would appreciate it.

    On chart No. 2, I would just like to talk about things that we have learned coming out of Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. We have learned that we need to adjust our organization to take into account the new challenges ahead. One of those, we think, is the ability for the Department to have a joint acquisition organization.

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    As a result of the lessons we learned and direction from our civilian leadership, we are reorganizing to establish a joint acquisition organization as part of our agency.

    The second bullet there indicates end-to-end engineering is the key future element that we must have in the agency. As you have already pointed out, the networks are incredibly complex and will cause us to do detailed engineering, end to end across the network. We are developing that capability.

    In addition to that, another element that you talked about earlier is the ability to operate the GIG end to end, to support warfighting missions.

    I would like to emphasize this by moving to the next chart, No. 3, that you have there. As you recall, General Franks did not move his headquarters forward during Afghanistan. And, in fact, he took quite a while to move his headquarters forward in Iraq. One of the reasons for that is because of the connectivity that was provided back to his headquarters.

    This is just a simplistic diagram that indicates that we have a lot of CONUS participation in ongoing operations. And this is not new. It really started during Kosovo, but it has grown through every operation where we leave more things behind, and we do what is called ''split-based operation,'' or ''reachback.''

    General Franks was able to command and control his forces from his headquarters back at MacDill. And also indications in this chart tell you the complexity of this, because as you look at the services involved in this, as indicated before, each service has a part of this network to operate. Yet no one is responsible for it end to end. As a result of that, DSA in coordination with the services is working on a new concept called Network Operations. And NetOps will give us the CONOPS and the TTP to operate the network from end to end.
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    Next chart, please. One of the challenges today that we have in the lower-echelon formations is the way that we have designed our systems so that they support a single mission. So as you see in this diagram, the information flow normally goes between sensor, those who decide whether to shoot, the weapons system that is located on the platform in a very linear way. There is nothing wrong with this design except it is not network centric.

    If you will go to the next slide, what we see in the future is we have a common backbone today. We need to operate it as a common backbone and we, under the leadership and guidance of the Network and Information Integration (NII), are establishing a post process where you post your data on the network and anyone who has access to the network can pull that information.

    What this will cause in the future, if you turn to the next chart, it will allow us to do what is being termed joint forces integration rather than interoperability. And if you look at the information pattern on the left there, you will see that today a Special Operations Forces (SOF) team has a small amount of information available to them. And if you just follow it down the line, you can see that each warfighting entity there has a subset of information that is available in each individual system; each has a piece of that information but no one has all of it.

    The future capability that we are looking for in network-centric warfare is the pattern emergence that you see there, which is to post all your information—on the right of the chart—is to post all your information on the network so that who has access to the network can pull that information and use it. Which means that the SOF team that might be out in the field, that has a network, would be able to get imagery that is available at the C-FLAX headquarters, the Combined Forces Land Component Command, or a joint headquarters. They would have the same ability to see what the higher echelon was seeing.
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    The program that allows us to move in this new direction is Net-Centric Enterprise Services. It basically imbeds in the network the capability to reach that information and deliver it to the end user. And then every program would post their information on the network.

    So this is a totally different way of operating, and we expect that this will be a cultural challenge for us as we move through this program and as we learn and evolve into a new way of operating.

    The next chart. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has many programs that are contributed to net-centric operations. But in the near term, the programs that we believe that must be executed properly to support DOD's ability to conduct net-centric operations are listed here.

    And, Mr. Chairman, that is all I have. And thank you very much for the opportunity. I look forward to your questions.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much. A very clear, and, I must say concise statement.

    [The prepared statement of General Quagliotti can be viewed in the hard copy.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Admiral Zelibor.
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STATEMENT OF REAR ADM. THOMAS E. ZELIBOR, USN DEPUTY FOR C4 INTEGRATION AND POLICY AND DEPUTY CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY

    Admiral ZELIBOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members. Appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee today to discuss the Navy, and, I might add, in partnership with the Marine Corps, our approach to information technology architecture, which we call FORCEnet, and how we are interfacing with the Department's global information grid initiatives.

    As the deputy for C4 Integration and Policy and the Department's Chief Information Officer Deputy for the Navy, I am responsible for the execution of policy processes and compliance with Sea Power 21 goals, which are our transformation goals.

    I would like to take the next few minutes to tell you about FORCEnet and how it interfaces with the GIG architecture and our current challenges. FORCEnet operationalizes the concept of network-centric warfare for the Navy and the Marine Corps. FORCEnet serves as the underlying foundation for Sea Power 21, Navy's vision for aligning, organizing, integrating, and transforming to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

    Sea Power 21 consists of three major pillars: sea shield, sea strike, and sea basing. The chief of Naval operations defines FORCEnet as the operational construct and architectural framework for naval warfare in the Information Age that integrates warriors, sensors, networks, command and control, platforms and weapons, into a network-distributed combat force that is scalable across the spectrum of conflict from the seabed to space and sea to land.
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    FORCEnet is not a program, but it is a forcing function for organizing, planning, and investing in the Navy's IT architecture.

    DOD services and agencies are all working toward the same end state. But under the leadership of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration, Mr. Stenbit, the services and agencies are working together to develop a consistent set of information technology policies, strategies, architectures, and standards.

    For our architecture, a simple analogy to illustrate the way the Navy views this and our role in the GIG architecture development is the GIG initiatives like GIG Bandwidth Expansion could be viewed as the national interstate highway system. The Federal Government builds this interstate highway system in coordination with the States, while the States build roads that connect to the interstate highway system. All users of this highway system employ the same traffic signals and signs for interoperability.

    FORCEnet builds the Navy's roads to the GIG interstate, using common standards and interoperability such as the Joint Technical Architecture. Instead of developing our own architecture and standards from the ground up, Navy is participating fully in DOD's architecture and standards development process to ensure interoperability. The FORCEnet architecture is based on GIG architecture development and is the Navy's means for implementing seamless integration.

    For example, the Navy fully participates in the development of all of the systems that Mr. Stenbit mentioned earlier, like the transformation of communications architecture, the GIG Bandwidth Expansion, teleports, the Joint Tactical Radio System, GIG Enterprise Services, Information Assurance Initiatives, and Internet Protocol version 6. We do have challenges. A major challenge for us is maintaining legacy architecture while defining future ones and migrating to these future architectures.
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    Synchronizing the integration of our existing systems into joint architectures, while ensuring we remain connected with our allies and coalition partners, continues to be one of our biggest priorities. Additionally, we are in a process of developing an integrated road map for both tactical and nontactical networks.

    In summary, the Navy remains heavily engaged with Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) NII and others in creating a joint interoperable GIG architecture. Through agreed upon standards and business practices, we are breaking down the traditional stovepipe approaches and are working toward achieving joint and coalition interoperability.

    I appreciate your efforts to help us be responsive to this changing world and in supporting our sailors, and I thank you again for the opportunity to be able to address you, and I look forward to your questions.

    [The prepared statement of Admiral Zelibor can be viewed in the hard copy.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much, Admiral.

    Mr. Tillotson.

STATEMENT OF DAVID TILLOTSON III, DIRECTOR, C4I, SURVEILLANCE AND RECONNAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE AND ASSESSMENT, DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
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    Mr. TILLOTSON. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee. Like my colleagues, I am very pleased to be here today to have an opportunity to speak to you about the Air Force's contribution to the global information grid and net-centric warfare.

    I want to start by first taking an opportunity to thank you for the continued support of the men and women of the Armed Forces. The work of your committee and others is very important in our ongoing efforts. I say the contribution to the GIG, like my service colleagues, I need to reemphasize Mr. Stenbit's point. We depart from—not depart from but take from the Global Information Grid Architecture and its subcomponents as our departure point for designing architectures and designing the standards to which we build.

    The Air Force's contribution to this concept is the Command and Control (C2) constellation, which are the Air Force components of the GIG. The C2 constellation is a family of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) ISR systems which share information horizontally and vertically. I think General Quagliotti said that much more cleanly than I did when she talks about the issue of sharing information not just in a linear fashion, but sharing it across and between the systems as well. It is both an operational construct and an architectural framework and, much like the Navy, C2 constellation is not a program. It is a way to drive Air Force programs to conform to the net-centric standards that have been handed down by the Department and the joint staff. And our objective is to provide decision superiority and air and space dominance in support of the Joint Force Commander.

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    Our key elements of this constellation include the various platforms and sensors the Air Force contributes to the joint war fight, key programs that support command centers like the Air Operation Center which is the JFAC headquarters, Joint Force Air Component Command or headquarters, and the distributed common ground segment system which provides a global backbone for processing and disseminating ISR information. And I will be happy to address questions on either of those efforts later.

    In addition, we provide transportation layer components of the DOD GIG under an effort we call ConstellationNet. We envisage, much as the GIG does, a seamless airspace and terrestrial network that allows information exchange and a free flow of information amongst commanders and warfighters to ensure that we can create the right effect at the right time in the right place in the battle space. Key elements of this include the Air Force's portion of the GIG Bandwidth Expansion, essentially that the program is working through the services.

    The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS). We need to be able to expand the IP framework to airborne platforms. And we see the Joint Tactical Radio System as a key element of making that expansion happen. And included in that is the installation of beyond line of sight terminals on large platforms so that we are able to extend what is essentially now a current line of sight environment to a globally integrated framework for airborne platforms.

    And, finally, we are responsible both as a service and as the DOD executive agent for space for providing a large chunk of the space segment of the GIG and including programs like the Advanced ehf Satellite, Wideband Gapfiller System, and the Transformational Satellite Program, which actually winds up extending the IP network into the space segment.
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    Each of these Military Satellite Communications (MILSATCOM) programs represents a progressive expansion of the Global Information Grid both in terms of capacity, protection, and the ability to provide IP routing into space. And again I will be happy to address elements of that. That program in particular derives directly from a jointly held architecture, and may be a good example of how we are actually running multiple service programs under a joint oversight through the DOD space executive.

    I want to conclude by saying the Air Force, like the other services, is committed to realizing a vision of providing a comprehensive terrestrial airspace and information capability that is global, robust, survivable, interoperable, secure and reliable. That is the key underpinning we are talking about. Nice set of words, but the challenge will be getting there. We believe that the architectural foundation and the standards foundation that the Department has laid down and that the services are extending serves as the fundamental underpinning to make that happen. And I think you will be satisfied as you ask us questions that we are in fact committed to realizing the vision of interoperability.

    Thank you for your giving me the opportunity to be here and I look forward to your questions.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Tillotson can be viewed in the hard copy.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much, sir.

    General Thomas.
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STATEMENT OF BRIG. GEN. JOHN R. THOMAS, DIRECTOR COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPUTERS, C4, AND DEPUTY CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS

    General THOMAS. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the subcommittee. I am Brigadier General John Thomas, Director of C4 and Deputy Chief Information Office, U.S. Marine Corps. Thank you for this unique opportunity to appear before the committee to discuss the Marine Corps' involvement in DOD system architecture efforts, how we are leveraging it to fill new information technology capabilities and to facilitate the horizontal fusion of information across the battle space.

    Now more than ever, we are stressing interoperability in all of our warfighting endeavors to include our information technology programs. Today's operating environments are defined by joint and coalition operations. The Marine Air/ Ground Task Force concept has taught us as Marines the real power and necessity to operate as an integrated joint combined arms team. Our expeditionary nature, together with experiences from OEF and OIF, reinforces the principle that we must emphasize jointness in our operational mindset in the systems we acquire.

    To that end, our IT enterprise must not only be internally consistent and interoperable, it must be also be interoperable with the rest of DOD. We are working closely with OSD, the joint staff, the combatant commanders, and the other services and agencies to synchronize our architectural efforts across a variety of missions and mission areas to achieve this goal.

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    The Global Information Grid is the DOD framework for achieving net-centric operations and warfare. Aligning with the Federal Enterprise Architecture, the GIG architecture is the standards that the components and the services and agencies are adhering to. As already has been stated by Rear Admiral Zelibor, FORCEnet is the Department of the Navy's component of the GIG. And currently we are working with the Navy to identify the essential command and control and IT capabilities of FORCEnet.

    The Marine Corps Enterprise Network is the Marine Corps component of FORCEnet and the Global Information Grid. It is our enterprise framework for IT, supporting all information exchange requirements for marine warfighters and our supporting establishment. It is our end-to-end IT capability and infrastructure, spanning both our warfighting and business domains for sharing information.

    The Marine Corps' transformation to net-centric force is inextricably linked to the evolution of FORCEnet and the GIG. As both evolve, we are coevolving our architecture and adjusting our underlying programs to leverage transformational capabilities. And a number of them have already been highlighted here today.

    A critical enabling initiative for the Marine Corps in its net-centric transformation is the Marine Corps Enterprise Information Technology services. This is our framework for realigning, collapsing, and consolidating all of our IT environment. It realigns the Marine Corps environment of applications, databases, networks and facilities into an integrated layered architecture to deliver capabilities based on a common infrastructure and shared services. Our goal is to leverage the capabilities inherent in programs like the GIG Net-Centric Enterprise Services and the Navy/Marine Corps Internet. It supports IT portfolio management, addresses technology, processes, standards, work force and governance, satisfying our IT objectives that are laid out in the Navy Marine Corps strategies.
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    In conclusion, the Marine Corps is rapidly becoming a net-centric force through the application of joint standards and adherence to a single DOD architectural framework.

    Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, thank you again for your support, and I will be happy to answer any of your questions.

    [The prepared statement of General Thomas can be viewed in the hard copy.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you all very much for kicking us off here with your great opening statements. Let me just ask what I think, at least for me, is a very basic question here.

    We all as Members of Congress very much appreciate and agree with the objectives that you have set forth in the use of a technologically advanced system to increase our capabilities. That goes without saying. Now, the Air Force C2 Constellation is a system which has been developed by the Air Force. The Navy's FORCEnet is a separate system that has been developed by the Navy. The Army's Future Combat System and Tactical Win-T is a different system. And the Marine Corps' Enterprise Network is yet a different system.

    And I think what I would like to know, or what I would like to walk away from today's hearing with, is an understanding of how we are going to in reality bring these systems together to accomplish the great goal that we all have.

    And what I would like to do is start with General Quagliotti.
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    And then go to each of the services and then finish up with a conclusion with Secretary Stenbit. So, ma'am, if you would like to start I would appreciate it.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. I know it is difficult to hear all these different names and understand that it is really the same network. It really is the same network. The way the network responsibilities are broken down is that DISA is responsible for wide-area networks, and services are responsible for post, camp, base and station, networks. And services are also responsible for deployed networks that support lower-echelon forces. So, although we are calling it different names, it is really the same network.

    The challenges, as you highlighted earlier, really have to do, how do we operate this at a global level so that we have an information sharing from top to bottom, from side to side? The best way I can describe that is to tell you that we have done a mission analysis. We have looked at the functions that should go across from bottom to top of the network, and that is what I alluded to before in the NetOps concept. And all the services are on board with that.

    We are getting ready to stand up an organization to do this and establish a global command and control system for networks so that they will operate end to end. I hope that answered my part of the question.

    Mr. SAXTON. Let me just amend my question just a bit. What plans do you have to tie or replace existing legacy information systems into the service or into your plan?
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    General QUAGLIOTTI. DISA is really not responsible for that part of it, sir, and so I would say that our responsibility is to build out the infrastructure. We are doing that with GIG BE and we will phase in the Defense System Network (DSN) pieces into the GIG BE as we roll out the program. So we do have plans to do that. There are road maps to get that done.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you. Mr. Tillotson.

    Mr. TILLOTSON. Yes, sir. Thank you.

    I think, playing on General Quagliotti's point, it is not different systems. And C2 Constellation, as I said in my opening remarks is not in fact a system. It is an architectural construct that allows us to organize our systems and bring them together to meet the net-centric goal. So the systems that underpin that, for example, the GIG BE component, is much as General Quagliotti described it, my portion of that highway system, if you will. I am looking for the point where DISA stops delivering the product and I start delivering my base modification and upgrade. The standards I use to do that are straight commercial standards. I will use straight commercial products to deliver that capability. So in this case, I will buy from a portfolio of products that, quite frankly, we hope to take advantage of more kind of commercial buys on.

    At a more specific level, you asked for an example of ways that we could start to retire or reduce service-specific components. And while it is very much in its infancy, the problem that General Quagliotti mentioned earlier, Network-Centric Enterprise Services has embedded within it a number of key initiatives that we in the Air Force are, quite frankly, looking forward to with high interest. One of them, as an example, is the provision of collaboration services.
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    Right now within the Department of the Air Force alone, I can point to 10 to 15 collaborative tools and pieces of software that exist across my networks that various agencies and entities use. DISA is proposing to move that forward on a more enterprise scale and, quite frankly, I just presented to our CIO and our chief of communications a proposal that said we are going to throw our efforts behind that, start to phase out and wean ourselves from our systems. And we are putting a warning notice out to our Major Commanders and senior commanders saying, ''Stand by. As soon as this program kicks off, I am going to force you on to this standard.''

    So there is a specific case where once—as the infrastructure is built, I am looking ahead to make a conscious decision to eliminate portions of my unique systems, if you will, or at least the collection of systems that aren't even unique to the Air Force but represent the plethora of systems that are proliferated and move to a commonly agreed standard.

    But I think the key in moving this forward is in fact to have that happen, we have to be able to put something forward, demonstrate it, and then move toward it. And because we are operating in a framework, an understood framework which the architecture foundation work that NII has started and the services have continued to flow down, I now have a very real means of having that conversation.

    We are doing it also laterally. Within the construct of the C2 Constellation, the Air Force put forward a proposal, took forward an initiative to replace its distributed common ground station, which is within our ISR framework, our ISR processing systems, to upgrade it because we were basically reaching end of life. We took a proposal forward that met the open systems standards of the network-centric vision and the DAB endorsed that as a lead-the-Department-exercise or lead-the-Department-activity that, quite frankly, the other services are now supporting. Our requirements were adjusted to reflect all service requirements, and we are now issuing and have issued a request for proposal on behalf of the Department as the lead agent. So I think these activities are having real consequence.
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    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you.

    Thank you. General Boutelle.

    General BOUTELLE. Yes, sir. I think General Quagliotti has made a great point on there. And the three networks, Constellation Net, FORCEnet, and our LAN/WARnet, which has all the pieces, are essentially one network. It is much like Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon. It is not in Verizon's best interest to build a phone that can't call somebody who has an AT&T phone. They all use the same standard. Much the same as ours. We are all using the standard, and that standard was put out by OSD and the Joint Technical Architecture, and that happens to be IP Version 4 right now, Internet Protocol Version 4. And they have also put out the Network Centric model, the NCOW model that we are using. So as far as anybody driving that together, you don't have to drive it to get them, any more than Verizon would want to go off on their own and not talk to an AT&T phone.

    The network is relatively simple once we agreed upon the standard, and in fact the standard is a commercial standard. They adopted the commercial standard. So I can send an e-mail or a video or imagery from a military network to a commercial address if I desire. All the same standard.

    At the next level, at the next level where you get the application, what hangs off it? A fax machine, an answering machine? Once again, you want to meet the standard to ride the AT&T network or Verizon, or in our case a LAN/WARnet or Constellation Net. But when you get to the next level of the applications, the Air Force application working with the Army, that is the piece that is a bit more onerous, but in fact I think we are making great progress on the requirement side with our Joint Staff and our Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) and Functional Capability boards as we drive those together on information requirements of what should interoperate with what.
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    Now, we have a lot of legacy stuff out there, truth in lending. We didn't have a joint technical architecture until 4 years ago, 5 years ago, and now we are all building——

    Secretary STENBIT. And it didn't constrain you very much.

    General BOUTELLE. It didn't constrain us very much. We have had that discussion, Mr. Stenbit.

    Now that we have one that is being converged and actually making much more restrictive, it is driving us to bring those systems into that common standard. But we have a lot of legacy out there. And many of you, most of you have visited Iraq, and you saw a lot of legacy and you saw a lot of commercial off-the-shelf. The commercial off-the-shelf that we took over there meets the common standard. Some of the legacy stuff, a lot of it we put black boxes in, but we have to interface, and that is a painful expensive process.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, sir.

    Admiral?

    Admiral ZELIBOR. Yes, sir. I won't expound any more that we are all on the same network. I think that point has been made. But what I will talk about, is, okay, how do you get compliance with those kind of standards. And one of the things that we initiated in the Navy and the Marine Corps was a FORCEnet compliance checklist. And at three different levels, the operational, the requirements, and also the technical level, we have put together a document that everybody will have to conform to in order to be in compliance with the GIG architecture and also the Joint Technical Architecture. So I think that is a big step forward. And if it doesn't pass the check during that process, then the system, or whatever it is that is going forward, will not be approved.
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    Also, I just want to say one thing about the systems. We are no longer viewing individual systems. I view the network as the system, and individual programs then plug into that, and they have to be able to communicate across that domain. And that is the approach that we are taking on this.

    And I will pass to John then.

    General THOMAS. Just a couple comments, sir. I would just add that, first, FORCEnet is not a system, it is a framework. The Marine Corps Enterprise Network is not a system but a collection of system, or systems of systems. As you take a look at the future, and moving to a net-centric environment—I will give you an example.

    We have got thousands and thousands of radios that are out there right now supporting our forces in OIF. Those are all, many of them are circuit-based radios. If we are going to truly transform the force, we need to move to a network radio as an example. That network radio is JTRS. So when you start to take and dissect the network, there are many components and many systems that make up the network, and again they are all a part of the global information grid.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much.

    Mr. Secretary, let me just clarify what all this is. We have got two votes coming up here, the first one just started. It will last about 17 minutes, and then the second vote will last 5 minutes. So we will have to run off here in about 10 minutes.
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    Secretary STENBIT. I won't take that long, sir

    Mr. SAXTON. No, that is good. I was going to say, everything seems to have been fairly consistent among the answers so far. And so if you could summarize, perhaps, Mr. Secretary, that would be good.

    Secretary STENBIT. Well, it sounds as if it is all a well-rehearsed issue. I think I need to put some perspective on this. We have done this in the past. We built voice systems that interoperated the same way. We had a long-haul system at DISA, we had service voice systems.

    If it is just commercial, it turns out to be easy. Then we put in secure voice on top of it, and that started to make it a little harder because some of us use different voice coders and so forth. We have used this same technique in the past to get this kind of a job done. I guess we failed to tell you that particular analogy in the past. I think it is key for you to understand, from my point of view, we could not have been as proscriptive and narrow in the standards we will allow until we were confident that we were going to have the base programs there to provide the bandwidth to allow us to go net-centric.

    So had you had this hearing last year, you would have not heard what you heard today because we didn't know with sufficient clarity that we were going to be able to kick off the transformational communication satellite, that we were going to be able to build the GIG Net with expansion program.

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    So it is the very fact that we built those core programs—and thank you very much for your support in allowing us to move forward on those—that we are now able to have the confidence to start to use the regulatory regime that we used in the past for voice and for data and for other things to now use that same process on the IP world.

    So I think that is really what you are hearing is a time warp of our confidence we are going to get there, and now we need to get on with the program of adapting our regulatory regime to the future instead of the past. I hope that helps.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much.

    Mr. Meehan.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief.

    Secretary Stenbit, the Department says it wants better coordination among IT requirements, budgeting, acquisition. But since the passage of Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the creation of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, jointness has been an institutionalized goal with formal mechanisms to achieve it even as the Department identified the development of information technologies as a priority.

    How is the current effort to better coordinate joint initiatives an improvement over what we have done in the past, and why should we have confidence that it will prove more successful?

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    Secretary STENBIT. I am going to ask for some help from my friends. But one of the ways I would look at that is because we are now in a commercial standard world, we really are borrowing from the World Wide Web and other issues, more people are able to instantaneously join each other. In the past, when we had very special purpose systems that we had to work very hard to make interoperate, it was very difficult to join the club. And so actually I am very much more optimistic that the information underpinning of our jointness is easier today than it was in the past. Not because we are geniuses, but because we are now able to use commercial standards. And everybody buys Microsoft and everybody buys IP, and it is not that difficult anymore.

    I think at this point, if I may, we have talked from the service and acquisition side. If I may have Admiral Brown discuss a bit about the requirements end, because it is just as important that the warfighter requirements reflect these same requirements. Is that okay with you?

    Mr. MEEHAN. Sure.

    Secretary STENBIT. Please, Nancy.

    Admiral BROWN. I think what you have asked is a very significant question. And you mentioned that JROC process. And there is probably no one at the table that would disagree with me to say that the old process emphasized service-centric systems. And we knew that there were some real shortcomings to that system, and so we have implemented a new system that we call the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, or JCIDS. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed that out in June, and we have started on a new path of how we determine what warfighter capabilities are, where the gaps are, where the overlaps are, and what are the areas that we need to emphasize in determining how we move forward to this net-centric environment. And the JCIDS is really based on a top-down process. It starts with the national security strategy, flows into the national military strategy, and then we have joint operations concepts. And those joint operations concepts along with the other documents provide the conceptual and the architectural framework for how we are going to move forward.
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    We have developed in conjunction with this five or six functional capability boards, and they review all new systems that are coming forward. They are also doing significant analysis work on determining, through integrated architectures and what the—how the warfighter has told us they are going to fight in 2015, where the gaps are and what we have today and what we need to be able to fight that warfight that the combatant commanders have told us that they are going to need.

    And we use those functional capability boards to do those things and to validate things as they come forward to the JROC that this actually is net-centric, it fits into the integrated architecture that all the services have agreed to that NII has provided through the GIG architecture framework. And only those things that are endorsed by the FCBs then go forward and get funding and approval through the JROC process.

    So I think you will see that that is a very different process.

    And Mr. Stenbit also mentioned the net-ready KPP, which goes hand in hand with our new JCIDS process, where we validate through four pillars information assurance, we use the Network Centric Operations Warfare Reference Model which was provided to us by NII. We use key interface profiles to determine whether or not a system is net-centric. And we are looking not just at new things, but we are also looking at legacy systems. How can we make that net-centric, or does that need to transition to a new system that is coming on-line, and what is that transition path. So I hope that addresses your question.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Yes, it does. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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    Mr. SAXTON. Folks, we are going—well, we already have run off. We are going to go vote, and we will be back in 10 or 15 minutes.

    [recess.]

    Mr. SAXTON. Okay. We will get started again.

    I know that Mr. Larsen just hit the chair there, but he and I were chatting on the way over the vote and he has some interesting questions and thoughts. Mr. Larsen.

    Mr. LARSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I guess my return indicates the value of showing up. I have some questions. My first question is a general question. I am not sure it is answerable as much as it is maybe reemphasizing the point of this hearing today and why the chairman sought to call it. So I will ask it rhetorically, I suppose, but then I have a follow-up that I think is a specific question that is maybe answerable.

    The rhetorical question is this: At what point could, say, the Admiral give the General's presentation? And at what point could Mr. Tillotson give General Thomas' presentation to us today? And in other words, just how much are you all coordinating to the point where someone else's work is—that you know someone, another service's work so well that we can be assured that the steps that Secretary Stenbit is coordinating on the GIG is in fact becoming that integrated? And that is the general sort of rhetorical question.

    Mr. SAXTON. Ask them
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    Mr. LARSEN. All right. Well, since I am saying the word general, General, you get to go first.

    General BOUTELLE. I think of course some of it depends on your background and how you have come up. But at the highest level, we probably could do it today as long as we are talking about the joint architectural level and major programs.

    Now, as you peel the onion back on any individual service, you will find varying levels of knowledge. You know, we work very closely with—I do—with the ESC, HANSCOM Air Force, very closely with the Marines, because they know their ground combat arms. I couldn't peel the Admiral's back as close as I could peel Electronic Systems Command (ESC), HANSCOM's and the Air Force's back. But at the highest level you would probably find pretty good commonality today of names of major systems and how they work together.

    Mr. LARSEN. Admiral.

    Admiral ZELIBOR. Yes, sir. I would agree with that. And, you know, at the upper level we are doing that today. And there is an effort that was started about 6 to 8 months ago where we were doing C4ISR integration talks at the high level. And it initially started with just the Navy and the Air Force, and we were focused around the time sensitive targeting thread. But now the Army and the Marine Corps are also involved in that. As a matter of fact, General Boutelle and his group will be hosting the next one, where we are trying to break down the language barrier so we understand what are the things more at the—the individual programs that really are affecting this. So I think we are on that path to do that, exactly what you said.
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    Mr. LARSEN. Does anyone else want to offer?

    General THOMAS. Let me follow up on that, just if I might. I will tell you, those of you that really know the Marine Corps recognize that we are the smallest of the services sitting at the table, but we have got the biggest budget. That is a joke. And so what we do is we obviously leverage, you know, the work that goes on in the other services to the maximum extent possible. And I can give you numerous examples of where, you know, the development takes place in one of the other services and we buy or procure through one of their contracts. And we do that routinely.

    Not only do we do that. When you have—when you take a look at it on the major programs that the Army is developing right now, you have mentioned some of them, the FCS, WIN-T, and so forth, the Marine Corps is heavily involved in that and participating in that process to fill the capability because we are going to take the best that the Army has developed and employ it if we can.

    On the Navy side of the house, I will tell you, if you take a look at FORCEnet, FORCEnet is another good example. You know, the FORCEnet capabilities list that is proffered as a part of FORCEnet is a combined effort on the part of the Navy and the Marine Corps. The concept, the operational concept that supports FORCEnet is signed off by the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Chief of Naval Operations. So I mean, we are working very closely on all of these initiatives across the board.

    General BOUTELLE. I have to tell you, when I was a colonel I was the program manager for the Marines and the Army for field artillery, multiple launch rocket systems. And as a Program Executive Officer (PEO), I also built their radio satellite systems as an Army officer and had Marines assigned within my organization
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    Mr. TILLOTSON. And certainly I will endorse the comments at the table. I have participated in those same forums that Admiral Zelibor mentioned, where we started off with the Air Force and Navy dialogue here at the headquarters level largely, but also with the senior commanders of our development agencies.

    And I think the characterization General Boutelle makes is correct; at the top level we could all speak reasonably well about the other's major systems. What is even more encouraging, from my point of view, is as much as that is useful and important to set direction, we are seeing the same thing take place at the next echelon down. So at the detailed engineering level there is a very active dialogue going on between Spy War Communications Electronics Command (CECOM), and ESC, HANSCOM at the details level, at the no kidding, let us connect the wires, make the nuts and bolts, walk and talk level. And so that dialogue is now taking off as a result of the start at the air staff level. And it is connected in turn to Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) recently as they have started to stand up their architectural efforts.

    So what most encourages me is not just the fact that those of us sitting here at this table could say that, and say that with candor and honesty, but more importantly I can pull in a group of colonels at the next echelon down, have them sit here, and probably really bore you to tears with the kinds of details they are working on.

    And that is positive. That is the question I think that, put on the table, of how is this really going to get institutionalized, something beyond a policy memo.

    Secretary STENBIT. I would like to reflect back on what I answered to Congressman Meehan. It is easy for us to say what we are saying today because we are using IP as a goal, Internet Technology. If you had asked that question 25 years ago, the optimization of radio in the Army, which needs to work over the hills and in trees, which is different from the one in the Navy et cetera, would have caused the end goal of being able to communicate with voice, for instance, to be a little too ethereal, so it wasn't worth the effort.
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    The fact that you are going toward a net-centric issue and we have the joint tactical radio system which allows you to go backwards to whatever your radio optimization is, and then go forward in the net-centric world, I think is an enabler for us to be able to be as positive as we are.

    So here is a case where technology has broken down some potential bureaucratic barriers that would have been there if the technology hadn't have come along

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you. Let me ask a follow-on question to my first question. Several of you just mentioned understandings, capabilities, and cooperation at the highest levels—or at high levels, I guess maybe you said. Keeping in mind my original query, how will this cooperative effort, understandings, activities be—how will they permeate through the force structure?

    Secretary STENBIT. Let me start by—the word high level was used several times, and I believe that meant at the standards level and at the detailed communications level. If you think of this in the IT world and the layers of the IT world, it is the other way around. We are very confident at the transmission level and the services level, going to IP and net-centric enterprise services.

    I think General Boutelle remarked in his opening comments it is when the applications have to interoperate where the complexity will be greater, because the actual concept of operation of how military forces are operated by the Army is different from what happens in the Navy and much closer and much more closely aligned.
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    So even as you go further down into this process, which means the actual operation, or if any information stacks, you go up toward the applications, I believe you will hear the same things, which is the Army and the Marines are closer than the Army and the Navy. The Air Force and the Navy, when they are doing airplanes, are closer by definition.

    I used to laugh that the Navy was closer to the British Navy than they were to any U.S. service. I think we have overcome that. But there was a tradition of that in the past. So they have specialty requirements, sir, and I think they should speak for themselves. But at the fundamental ability to interoperate and be able to pass data back and forth, we are pretty comfortable. I don't think anybody is going to use the same software for the same job across the entire Department. It is probably not even the appropriate thing to do.

    Mr. SAXTON. Throughout the force, what will be the basis and standards upon which decisions are made about technical acquisitions?

    Secretary STENBIT. The two basic standards are the Joint Technical Architecture, which is a book, and the net-centric Operations in Warfare reference document, which are a set of ways to look at how you put those standards together in various scenarios. Those have to be living document. Commercial standards will change, our standards will change. So there will be an evolution to that. Those two in conjunction with the architectural frameworks of the GIG, at the system, technical, and operational level, will in fact be the issue.

    But, Steve, maybe you can talk about your checklist when you go through a system.
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    General BOUTELLE. I think this Joint Technical Architecture you have heard so much about is a very interesting document. When we received that document from OSD, from Mr. Stenbit's office, it says: Here is what you are authorized to buy today, these standards. And in the second part of each chapter says: And here is what we are considering putting in next year's edition of the standard. And each of the services comes back and says, I kind of like it, I don't. Have you thought about this?

    So we really have a period of time to negotiate, where is industry and commercial technology going? And then hopefully we get it back next time they have incorporated the services' recommendations. And then that primarily is all of the services looking at what is out there commercially, what is coming down the line, what is Cisco building or Juniper or Sun, or whoever it may be, IBM and, looking at that, saying where are these technology and protocols going. And then we input it, and hopefully when it comes back we are all headed in the same direction.

    Mr. SAXTON. General, what will keep the lieutenant colonel at base X from saying I have got this job to do and I need a system to do it. And he goes and gets one that is not compatible. How do you——

    General BOUTELLE. I think it is like anything else in our business or your business, and it is a resourcing.

    Mr. SAXTON. Yes, sir

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    General BOUTELLE. And at least in the Army, what we went up against that last year—we review right now in the CIO—and a lot of that is because Clinger-Cohen is a very strong, strong document. We review every purchase over $25,000 in the Army. And if they go off on a tangent, we remove the money. So it once again comes back to resourcing. We watch the resourcing very carefully and the buys. And that is really the strong point we use.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, sir

    Mr. Kline, sir.

    Mr. KLINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    And thank you very much, lady and gentlemen, for being here today. Every time this subject comes up we are by necessity forced into a discussion of leveraging and facilitating and nets and architecture and systems and net-centric and so forth and so forth. And I would like to—I have got a couple of questions, but I want to start with saying how much I appreciate the comparisons or analogies used today about highways, major highways and streets feeding into them. And, more importantly, about General Quagliotti's description that said that—in fact, actually the Secretary and I think the General both said this is like a private World Wide Web. And the General said that we are looking at a, quote, ''totally new way of operating.''

    But it sounds to me like, in the larger picture, what you described, General, was what we see every day on that not private World Wide Web. That is, people have a Web site, information goes up there; if you want it, you go to the Web site and take it down. Is that what you are describing?
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    General QUAGLIOTTI. Actually, it is more sophisticated than that, sir. The way I would describe it is this way: We will have services embedded in the network, and so instead of hauling around a set of servers at a headquarters, for example, you won't really have server forms anymore. What you will be able to do is if you want to download an application for a certain mission that you have to do, you will be able to do that off the network. And you will be able to then pull data elements from several different locations and present those elements on a screen to do that mission. So right now what you have on the World Wide Web is really word documents that are available to people. And what we are really talking about——

    Mr. KLINE. Or music, for example?

    General QUAGLIOTTI. Right. But what we are talking about is data elements. You put the data in once on the network, and then you are able to construct or compose the picture that you want to see based on the application that you are using and the data that is available on the network.

    I don't know if that helps describe it.

    Mr. KLINE. Could I just sort of by a nod of the head or a simple yes or no, is that description what all of you have been talking about for these last couple of hours? Are we all agreeing that that is in fact what we are talking about?

    Mr. TILLOTSON. Yes, sir.
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    Secretary STENBIT. Let me give you two analogies. One thing that happens that we have to be able to do faster than the commercial Web is, if you get married and you want access to your wife's bank account——

    Mr. KLINE. Good luck

    Secretary STENBIT. It is very much more complex than just doing a new password. You have to go get a notary to sign something and send it in. We can't afford to do that. We have to be able to dynamically assign privileges that are different because the job changes in seconds as opposed to—so there is a case where that is a harder problem for us than the commercial one.

    There is another case, which is—I think it is General Jumper who says there are no hourglasses on our systems. You can't wait for that little thing to show up on your screen while you are waiting to shoot somebody.

    So we have some different requirements, but intellectually you are correct, it is the same general thought process.

    Mr. KLINE. With the more difficult problem of security and having to have that security access immediately.

    Secretary STENBIT. Yes.

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    Mr. KLINE. Okay. Thank you. But there is a sort of a nodding of heads, though, that that is what we are talking about, going to a site and being able to pull down information, data, photographs, everything, and consolidate them for your use. Is that correct?

    General THOMAS. Actually, that is true. But I think, sir, that the other thing that we would put emphasis on is establishing the authoritative data. General Quagliotti talked about it. And that was, once you post the data, then you know that that is the authoritative source for that, whatever it is might be tracking information. On the Web right now you can't do that. I mean, you put in your Google search and you get tons of hits, but you don't know who the authoritative source is. That is a challenge that we are dealing with as a part of the effort.

    Mr. KLINE. Got it.

    Mr. TILLOTSON. And a final point, to extend your analogy. If I use the Web environment like that you are talking about that you use every day, you go look for things. We also want to add the layer that says, I would like to define the kinds of things that are important and have the system go look for things and then go at it.

    If you will, it is more analogous to the things we see in the stock market where you have automated trading routines that watch trends and cue the operator to say, okay, you need to go buy, sell, do that. So there is a layer of that, that actually has some commercial basis that we can begin to exploit as well. So this is not, again, new technology; this is an issue of applying a commercial standard at a next level. Kind of, if you will, tailoring your Web page.
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    Mr. KLINE. I guess that is why I was struck a little bit by General Quagliotti's statement that this is a totally new way of operating.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. It is.

    Mr. KLINE. It doesn't sound like it, but perhaps it is

    General QUAGLIOTTI. No, it is.

    Admiral ZELIBOR. For the military.

    Mr. KLINE. For the military, I will accept that. I think she is saying no.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. I guess if you look at my information chart that shows the level of information that is exchanged and available to people on the network today and the way it will be available when we finally get this done, that really implies a different way of operating.

    For example, if you are a private today and you have access to a network, you don't get the same information as a four-star general. There is different—there is different levels of information that are available to people based on their job, their duty position, their function. So what we are talking about is a change in the way we operate in that the information is available if you are given access to it.
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    Mr. KLINE. Right. The general may be given access to things that the private isn't. And in a perfect world it might work the other way.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. Correct. But today——

    Mr. KLINE. I was just making sure the generals were awake.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. Sometimes that is true. Today, what we have is not so much that we don't want to share the information, but that the soldier who is looking for the information just can't get it because it is tied to an application—the data is tied to an application that is operating in a linear way on the network.

    Mr. KLINE. Got it.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. So what that means, sir, is that the guys on the top of the organization and the guys at the bottom of the organization have the same information. And how does a leader change the way they lead when the led has the same information that they do potentially? That is what I am talking about.

    Mr. KLINE. Okay. Thank you.

    I am sorry. Admiral—I should have thrown admirals in there. I am sorry

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    Admiral ZELIBOR. That is fine. One thing that Marilyn brought up that I think is important, and that is she threw out a term called ''composability.'' and that is something that the Navy is really looking at in FORCEnet as one of the ways that we can do business differently. It is a culture change. And when you look at any capability that you try to field, you can look—visualize this as a pyramid. At the bottom you have a platform, and then you have some sensor or weapon that goes on that platform. Then you have a communications layer. Then as you go up you have some kind of computing layer. Then you have an application layer, and there is some kind of human interface.

    Well, in the old days we would build capability A through Z, and they would do very well at vertically integrating all those layers in that pyramid.

    And then as an afterthought we would say, how do you—now we want these two things to talk to each other, so you do middleware or something. It gets very expensive and it is very difficult to do.

    Well, composability is a concept that is pretty interesting, because at each one of those layers, if you have a common way of capabilities talking to each other, let us say at the sensor weapons layer you use eXtensible Markup Language (XML) language, at the coms layer you have IP. We have already told you that. All the way up to the human interface, which is point and click, drop and drag. These are all things that we know. If we build to those standards, now you can compose capabilities on the fly. And that is where the real power of network-centric warfare comes, because if you can compose capabilities, then you can compose operational forces and then you can compose your doctrine or training. It is really an interesting way that this could happen in the future when you look at it.
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    Secretary STENBIT. You have got a pretty complex, yes, but there are differences. I think that is the key we are trying to emphasize. But in general you had the right framework of the commercial IP Web.

    Mr. KLINE. Thank you. Understanding that there are some complexities and perhaps may be more sophisticated,I am going to strain my chairman's patience for one more question, if I could. And I am sort of following up on the chairman's question about how do you keep the lieutenant colonel or the major or anybody else from going out and buying his or her own hardware and/or system, arguably? And I think back to 15 years or so ago when we had enterprising lieutenant colonels and majors in the Marine Corps who discovered that they needed to be able to talk to people, and a cell phone, which back in those days was bigger and blockier, would be a good thing to have. And they went out and bought them with Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funds.

    And, General, your response to the chairman's question was, well, we are going to keep our eyes on resourcing; and if it is over $25,000, we are going to know about it and we will step in. Now, I admit that it would be hard to set up a local area network or much less a binary network, with $25,000, but not difficult to go buy hardware and software for an office or two offices or three offices. So I am still sort of pursuing that question.

    General BOUTELLE. Great question

    Mr. KLINE. And if you can just put my mind to rest there

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    General BOUTELLE. Most of us are working enterprise contracts. Now, we signed an enterprise contract for Microsoft products about 3 months ago for 6 years, and we are standardizing on Microsoft products across the Army

    Mr. KLINE. Excuse me. Across the Army?

    General BOUTELLE. Across the Army. The Air Force is working with us, they are going to do the same thing, although we have found as we have looked at it, does it make sense to go larger and make one big one? No. When you reach about 10,000, you max out on cost efficiencies. But we are doing it across the National Guard, the Reserves, the active duty component Army, Defense Agency (DA) civilians, and all Army supporting commands. We signed that contract for 6 years. That is being implemented now. The first packages went out worldwide in January. And so we will standardize—although we will still have some other products out there, we will probably be about 97 percent Microsoft. And we have already directed out of our G3 that anything that is not the latest versions will be taken off-line on January 30th because we have some security issues we are very concerned about and we are trying to bring the whole Army worldwide up to the same level, so what we have done is we have direct funded that. We pulled money back from the commands and direct funded that Armywide. And the next thing we are doing is we are copying the Air Force on their centralized buying on hardware. And so we are working very closely with the services on enterprise buys.

    Mr. KLINE. Well, that at least partially answers the question. If the enterprising lieutenant colonel—I am not sure why I am picking on them today, but they are an enterprising lot—goes out and buys something, it at least would probably be a Microsoft. But it doesn't answer the question of what about the Navy? What about the person at Joint Staff? The question is still the same: Is there something department, DOD wide that would discourage that from happening, and do it in a way that doesn't keep us from growing? I mean, I would argue that if we were relying on the JROC system to buy computers 10 or 15 years ago, if we hadn't had people go out and buy them, we may not have the mess we have today, but we would still be using typewriters and hand-cranked Xerox machines.
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    Secretary STENBIT. You hit it exactly on the head, which is there is a balancing act here between ossification of a bureaucracy to save money but actually costs more by filling in the forms and, unfortunately, sometimes costs more than just money.

    I think you have heard the leadership at the table say we are going top-down. The big acquisitions, the big expenditures of funds, we are going to control as best we can. Nobody should tell you that we can control every purchase of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or a cell phone or whatever. Many people buy it on their own money. That is also something that is wrong if we can't in fact provide the right kind of funding to be able to have somebody have a GPS when they need one.

    All of the services are doing that differently. We all have the same techniques. Steve talked about ordering agreements that we try to get, make it more attractive to them to buy if they are going to do it in a decentralized way, stuff that is approved, if you want to think of it that way. We have other problems like collaboration tools where it doesn't work if you don't talk to each other. So we get a lot more ruthless about that, that you must take one that meets our standards; and if you don't buy the right one, we are not going to collaborate with you. So there are forcing functions. The Navy has an amazingly forward-leaning outsourcing which is quite notorious, for both good and bad things called NMCI. But it is a technique that the Navy is using to try to grab hold of what used to be the enterprising people doing everything differently and having some configuration management. That program has had some difficulties, I think everybody knows that, but it has had some amazing successes, which is why we now have much better security, for instance, and trust in the Navy desktop environment than we had before.

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    Each service is doing it differently. The point you are bringing up actually adds up to quite a lot of money.

    General THOMAS. Sir, I would like to give you a Marine perspective, sir, which is perhaps a little bit——

    Mr. KLINE. Easier for me to understand?

    General THOMAS. It will perhaps bring you up to date on the Marine Corps side of the house.

    We now do centralized IT procurement. All IT procurement is centrally controlled with a CIO at the top of that. We have a waiver process, so if we have a command out there that wants to spend their O&M dollars to buy IT, they in fact must come through my office to get approval to do that. And when that happens, it is my responsibility to ensure that we have looked at the architecture, we understand the ''to be'' architecture, and we make a decision based on that. So we have a process established there. We also have published what we call a software baseline to all of our forces, both operating and supporting establishments side of the house, with a list of approved software products. And these items make the list because we have enterprise licenses. We leverage the enterprise sustainment or enterprise software initiative that OSD sponsors that they have collectively come up with enterprising licenses for DOD that we leverage. We have a governance process where the operating and supporting establishment play in. They sit at the table as we are deliberating on policies that we are implementing to take and enforce these standards that I have talked about.

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    So I think we are a little bit more ruthless in our approach across the board.

    Mr. TILLOTSON. In addition to the procurement activities, I think as everybody has talked about and we are all implementing, there is one other step, and General Quagliotti referred to it

    Mr. KLINE. Could I interrupt for just a second? And you are next anyway. I would like to find out, if you are not as ruthless as the Marine Corps, what you are doing. We got an answer from the General, but, I mean, the Marine Corps has now centralized that procurement and I am just sort of interested in what the Air Force and——

    Mr. TILLOTSON. No problem. In fact, General Boutelle mentioned it as well. We have an Information Technology Commodity Council that has been established to do commodity procurements across the Air Force. We have provided that at this point in the highly encouraged mode, but we are moving rapidly to the you must buy mode.

    Mr. KLINE. That is not quite ruthless yet?

    Mr. TILLOTSON. It is not quite ruthless yet, but it is about to be ruthless. Part of the reason is we are within certain domains, within certain activity spaces and sets of equipment, we have pretty much made it—not pretty much. We have made it mandatory to go look and buy these things off of this procurement buy. And, quite frankly, it is so fiscally attractive that we really haven't had any trouble getting the enforcement at the top level in the sense that the price break is so significant that at least one of our major commands tripled their buy with the same budget. So there is nothing like a positive inducement as well as a negative inducement. By doing that step, we created a very positive impact, and more importantly, all the commands are coming back and saying we want more of that because there is high payoff.
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    But that still doesn't quite get at your question, which is, okay, so I am still Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bag of Doughnuts, and I can still go to my local store with my procurement card and I can still buy my computer. I can do all of those things, and I can still do that. There is a final step that we are all working on that I don't think we have addressed. So I was kind of not trying to avoid the one question, but let me jump to the other side of the street.

    It is the net ops piece. The Air Force has been working very actively to consolidate network control centers at the MAJCOM level. And that provides not just an external looking defense, but also provides monitoring of the performance of the network and an active program to test the security of the network. And part of that activity is aimed at finding people who have attached themselves to the network in an uncontrolled and unconfigured fashion. And that information assurance component is as much an essential part of this activity as anything else we have talked about.

    So part of the reason for the ruthlessness in configuration control is all the kinds of fiscal good stewardship issues that we have all recognized, the power of the dollar, et cetera, et cetera. Quite frankly, that is equally balanced in our minds on the Air Force by the compelling need of needing to provide this private worldwide network as opposed to the publicly accessible worldwide network that we live in in our day-to-day existence. So our consolidation efforts have looked at forming a series of—we actually have an Air Network Ops Center that—and part of our growth path on the GIG-BE is to provide these Network Ops Centers working in conjunction with DISA that provides oversight and visibility into who is using the network, how they are connected, when they are on it; and, if we detect presences on the network both external and internal, then how we go after them.
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    So there is an enforcement mechanism that prohibits and a discipline that is instilled to say, when that lieutenant colonel goes and buys his or her computer, it still has to go through a configuration check. And commanders are literally the folks who are charged and accountable for making sure this does get connected. So there is another side to this enforcement mechanism down at the detailed level.

    Mr. KLINE. Okay. I am really guilty of hogging my time here, but, General, you pretty much answered the question in your earlier discussion about controlling resources. But could you just—do you have a central clearing authority like General Thomas does in the Army?

    General BOUTELLE. We centrally clear those. And we also have the same thing on the Network Operations Centers, and we also have a CIO executive board which is much the same as the other services have to bring the CIOs in. So it is a series of processes to go through.

    Mr. KLINE. Okay. And Admiral?

    Admiral ZELIBOR. Yes, sir. We do, and we are probably as ruthless as the Marine Corps, but we are not quite as mean as those guys. That is their job. But we have two parts that we do. The first one that Secretary Stenbit mentioned, NMCI, nothing goes on that network. It can't. It won't even allow you, because of our Network Ops Centers you cannot put an application on there. And without the thing—it will just reject it. It can't happen. And what we have gone from, the Navy was like the other services I am sure, we had about over 1,000 different networks inside the Navy. We had almost 100,000 applications. We have been very ruthless about cutting that down. And when you really look at it, you know, every application, I don't know what the ratio is, but equals lots of servers, and lots of servers equals lots of money. Well, we have reduced from around 100,000 applications down to around 6,000 now with the goal of going down to 2,000 applications. And we are doing that by really being very strict on what are the business functions that we need to do on our nontactical IT side that will fit within that NMCI framework, which is I think very important.
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    The second thing that we are doing is what I will call a capital planning process. It is the first time I think that we have ever gone out and really tried to categorize both the nontactical and tactical IT in one place where we are putting strict rules and guidelines on what you will and will not buy. And it is centrally—there is central oversight, and it is something we call the C-Enterprise Board of Directors. And as the CIO for the Navy side, I report directly to that C-Enterprise Board of Directors, who is chaired by our Acquisition Executive and our Vice Chief of Naval Operations, And nothing goes unless those guys say it.

    Mr. KLINE. Thank you. That strikes right to the heart of it, that you are putting out rules about what you can and cannot buy. And thank you very much for your answers. I appreciate your patience with me.

    And, Mr. Chairman, I really appreciate your patience.I yield back.

    Mr. SAXTON. Well, I owed you.

    Mr. Larsen, do you want to jump in here?

    Mr. LARSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I want to ask a question that is probably first most appropriate for Secretary Stenbit and perhaps for General Quagliotti regarding legacy systems. In someone's testimony they mentioned exactly how we are planning to take care of legacy systems. We have talked about how—I will use another analogy. The GIG is sort of the sun around which each individual world revolves. And you visit the GIG in order to get to the next world, and on top between each other, I think we have established that, that analogy, certainly in terms of the highway system. But if you have these legacy systems say down the organization within each organization and you are having to then—it sounded like I thought I had heard you, it sounded like you were going to be essentially reprogramming these systems to be able to travel from place to place. Do you—what is the cost of doing that? And do you lose the effectiveness of creating that integrated system that we are trying to get to through this reprogramming of the legacy systems?
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    In other words, if the Navy's legacy systems and the Army's legacy systems are so different, so old and so different, how do you get them to catch up with where everyone else is higher up the chain? Let us start with the Secretary first, from a global view.

    Secretary STENBIT. I don't think you should think of it as higher up the chain. I think it is happening at the bottom as well as—actually, probably faster at the bottom than it is at the top. The Secretary doesn't have a computer in his office, to my knowledge, at least. But it is inverse with age. It is okay.

    Your question is an extremely good one. We are not going to be able to replace all of the Defense Department's electronics gear instantaneously. So what we are talking about is the process at the leading edge of this business, which is what are we going to do this year with the money we have? We are going to emphasize moving toward net centricity, and we are going to deemphasize moving forward on other kinds of systems. That doesn't allow us to just junk them all instantaneously. As a matter of fact, probably quite a lot of the discussion that will go on between the Department and the Congress will be over how much—because we are risk averse. You know, we have to go out and fight wars. So how much are we going to continue to put into legacy even though we know that there is a better world out there is an important attribute. Our goal is to get to the future as fast as we can. Once we are there, we are going to have to adjust to look backwards to people who didn't go as fast as we did.

    Let us pick our allies is a great example. I talked about that in our statement. We can't do operations without allies, and they are not going to be anywhere near as fast as we are about moving forward. So even when we are in the forward leaning posture, we are going to have to learn how to look backwards. The good news is the technology allows us to emulate. So you can make an IP thing look like a voice circuit; in fact, voice over IP is exactly that. You can't make a voice circuit look particularly like a data centric network.
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    So your point is exactly correct. Part of the force, that which is net-centric will do better, be able to perform better than the part that is in the legacy world. But there have always been parts of the force that have a better tank or a better airplane than some other part.

    So it is the same general problem. The only good part about that is that these are commercial standards so that everybody can get with the program I think easier than it would have been in some highly complex way. I think each service is going to deal with this differently.

    General QUAGLIOTTI. If I could add to what the Secretary just said. It is that we have an active program in DISA to review everything that we are spending money on with an eye toward killing those things that we no longer need to spend money on, and putting the money toward network centric solutions. And I think that you have to have an active program, it has to be a detailed review of everything that you are doing to make sure that you are reorienting your whole organization toward a network centric solution. And you really have to aggressively go after it, because people who own programs are very proud of what they do, and they don't want to give them up. So it has to be a leadership issue of really going after it.

    Secretary STENBIT. I think one way to look at it is you need to cut the R&D off at the legacy programs first and ruthlessly. The procurement is second.

    Mr. LARSEN. This is a follow-up question. This is yet another analogy, and I am sure the Admiral will appreciate this. There is a scene in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, where they are actually going around the Cape. And I forget which mast breaks off, but one mast breaks off, and there is one of their sailors on it and it is dragging the boat back, it won't let the ship go forward. And at some point he makes a decision, they are going to cut this mast loose and in this case lose a sailor. But they have to do it to move forward.
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    At what point then do you cut the mast loose on somebody's legacy system so that we can move forward?

    Mr. TILLOTSON. I think the Secretary hit the nail on the head. Each of the services is looking at their programs through a capital investment planning process to make those very decisions. Based on what we need to achieve, based on what functions we need to maintain, based on which of those systems are critical; which can I immediately jettison all together because they are duplicative. Which can I cease R&D on, because I—although I have to maintain it, I don't have to make it any better, and those that I unequivocally have to maintain. And we are all pretty seriously bending things into those categories and saying these are the ones I am targeting to move forward, these are the ones I am targeting to hold. And I will cease R&D, but at least I have got it maintained. And then the good news is there is probably enough out there, enough chaff out there that we can go, and I think Admiral Zelibor had some very good statistics from where the Navy put things on the table, but we do as well, saying I have got X number of systems doing the same thing, I can just start by making some of those go away.

    So a detailed capital investment planning process where portfolio review, which is what we are calling it in the Air Force, from the CIO level down across all the activity base is really the way we are tackling this problem to free up, to address and free up the resources to move forward. And I would reinforce General Quagliotti's point. This is not a bottom-up process. This part of the process is very much leadership top-down. Within the Air Force, this group, this team is being headed right now by the Air Force CIO and the Defense Communications System (DCS) warfighting integration. We report out directly to the Chief and the Secretary on this matter. And there aren't a lot of in betweens about it.
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    Mr. LARSEN. Anybody else want to comment?

    General THOMAS. I will just jump on a couple of comments.

    First of all, I mean, we recognize that there is a delicate balance between legacy and future. And my comment is when somebody asks me the question, I always say today's legacy system was yesterday's future system. So you are going to always be caught in that delicate balance.

    Going back to Admiral Zelibor's comments earlier relative to applications, there is an example where the Navy reduced from 100,000 or so applications with a goal of going down to 8,000 and even further. Likewise, on the Marine Corps side of the house, we started out with over 8,000 applications and our target is 500. We have already reduced it close to 80 percent now already.

    Now, there are some users out there that had to give up some capability as a result of that effort. And, again, you know, what we said was that if there is another application out there that satisfies 75 percent of your requirements, then that is better for you to move to that one than to pay for two applications where both are achieving about 75 percent of the capability out there in the applications.

    So we are making those kinds of trade-off. We are doing that, going through that same process on the systems side of the house, whether it be trying to decide to take and drop a legacy radio and wait for JTRS to be filled. We are looking at all that. We have our transition road maps that tell us when the break-even point is relative to a specific system. So we are looking at all of that.
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    Admiral ZELIBOR. There is two ways that we are doing it, and I will do it from the warfighting side since I already mentioned the nontactical IT side. And in our requirements process, we have—we do campaign analysis to show where our requirements needs are, where there may be gaps or, what is more important, where there may be redundancies. When we do that campaign analysis, then what we are doing is we are working with our systems command, which is Space & Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) out in San Diego, and they are doing a systems analysis on, okay, what is it that we can really get rid of here so that we can start moving on to the future, because we want to be able to recapitalize and start getting out there. And between those two things, it turns into a pretty interesting process where, when you start peeling back that onion and you look at the functionality that you need at each warfighting level, of how many programs you may have that all say they are doing the same thing. And so that system's command analysis then really helps us in making those rational decisions.

    The part where it gets difficult is when you look at—we have some systems in the Navy that are just two, dot, four systems. I mean, it is just amazing that basic messaging. But when you look, you can't just say, well, you are not going to do that anymore, because you have to make sure that the capability exists for us to move on, on those particular ships, but more importantly, the Navy probably does a significant amount more of coalition work in the sea side than maybe the other services have to deal with. And so I can't necessarily just cut the umbilical cord and expect that our coalition guys to be along with us. But I also don't want them slowing us down too much. So there is this balance that we play.

    Mr. LARSEN. General, did you want to comment?

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    General BOUTELLE. Just a quick one. In the resourcing, you know, we just put together this week, I was working on OIF–2 for Iraq. We still have 20,000 radios out there I had when I was a second lieutenant 33 years ago. But we stopped buying them waiting for the JTRS. So you make a—first of all, it is a long buy when you buy as many as you do for the Army.

    The second is, a lot of your major platforms, you just can't throw away. The M1A2 tank is not a bus tank; the M1A2-SEP. The SERUP-J847 hasn't got a bus in it, but when it goes to recap we will probably bus it.

    So the major end items like that doesn't make much difference, because you know you are not going to build a new tank today or next year or in probably the next 20 years, so you end up recapping those, bringing those on. And in some cases you wait for a future system.

    So there is a lot of things you go through, and we are all going through our programs program by program to decide what to do with each one.

    Mr. LARSEN. Mr. Chairman, two more questions for Mr. Stenbit.

    Mr. SAXTON. Sure. Just make them quick, if you can.

    Mr. LARSEN. First off, I—actually, I will boil it down to one question. And this is either a soft ball or a curve ball, I don't know, sort of the $100,000 question.

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    What you have heard today, is any of this a surprise to you?

    Secretary STENBIT. No. The issue is that we are in a transformation. That means that we are accelerating change. The obvious nature of how great it is going to be at the other end is gathering steam quite a lot. And I was very gratified to hear the chairman's opening statement, which quite clearly put us both on the same side of that. We are going to someplace which is good; now we are going to discuss how we are going to get there.

    There are all kind of complexities. We are not going to do it the same way. It is not appropriate that the Army do it exactly the same way the Navy does, because there are specialty issues. But at the big picture, and even at the little picture, because of this fundamental commercial soundness, I am very confident that this evolution is well under way and is going to do quite a good job. No, I am not particularly surprised. Some of the detailed stories are interesting.

    Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much. Mr. Larsen, great questions.

    Mr. Secretary, all of you seem to be on the same page in terms of explaining your success in developing interoperability to the point where I think it is fair to say that you sound like it is not a problem. Can you then explain why there is a need to fund pilot programs to resolve interoperability between systems? Specifically, the net-centric Enterprises Services Program and the Horizontal Fusion, which, if I recall—I can't recall the exact numbers that you have requested, but it is probably somewhere between the two systems, between 100 and $150,000 million.
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    Secretary STENBIT. Right. I actually believe it is probably higher than that, maybe 200. But——

    Mr. SAXTON. We will take the higher number just for emphasis. And tell us why, if the interoperability issues are kind of behind us, why we need to spend this money.

    Secretary STENBIT. Well, there is two issues, because those two programs are doing different things. The net-centric Enterprise Services is in fact the enabling device to allow most of what we were talking about. So it is crucial to our ability to achieve the interoperability that you have heard. If we are not able to in a common way across the enterprise assign access, assign privilege, find data, discover data, it is those services that is in fact the exact output of the net-centric Enterprise Services contract (NCES) program.

    So absent that program, you would not hear the optimism that you heard from this particular group. It is in fact one of the five linchpin programs.

    The Horizontal Fusion Program operates at the next level up, which is the applications level, which is where we all think and believe it is going to be a little bit more difficult, which is, assuming we get to a well-integrated transport layer and data layer, how do we then maximize the achievement of the benefits of such systems at the application level and as General Quagliotti talked about, how do we optimize this change in how we do business so that we have learned how to do it.

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    And that is the purpose of the portfolio of the Horizontal Fusion Program, which is to take several ongoing processes that are not net-centric, and put money into them to create them—to move them to be in a net-centric world so that we can then put them together in groups and discover the dynamics of how that works.

    Secretary STENBIT. So I don't mean to miss—change how you asked the question, but the NCES is crucial to the issue of the interoperability of the enterprise. Without those services, I don't believe we would be anywhere near as optimistic as you heard today. So we basically testified assuming that we were going to continue to get support on that.

    Horizontal fusion, as I say, is a set of experiments—a portfolio of experiments not to test interoperability but to test what happens when you take a program which is not net-centric and put it into the net-centric environment. So I personally believe both of those are very important and hope that you will continue to support them. It allows us to test how the culture changes, I think is the right way to put it.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you.

    I have two more questions, one that I would like to address to General Boutelle. There has been a strong connection drawn between FCS and the Internet and the general Internet program, and I am curious to know how strong that connection is. I understand that there must be a connection because future combat systems will essentially work and draw information and give information to the entire network. So how closely are they tied together?

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    General BOUTELLE. The future combat system has really traded armor for the net-centricity and for data and information and intelligence. What they have done is—you know, it is a family of three things. You have manned vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles. But all of those are tied together and enabled by this satellite system such as teleport, advanced DHF, the Tactical Computer System (TCS TFAT), the step sites, the GIG bandwidth expansion. If they don't operate within that system, if that is it not out there providing them that pervasive network and information that they have been talking about here, if all that information is not coming from sensors and intelligence platforms and resources, FCS will be unsuccessful. It is more a C–4ISR system than it is an armored system.

    Mr. SAXTON. The FCS system that I have seen described in the past has been explained in terms of conventional warfare. How does the FCS work or how do you expect it to work in terms of asymmetrical warfare, the war against terror, scenarios like we see in—that we are seeing now in Iraq, for example?

    General BOUTELLE. I think the FCS strength is when you made that smaller—much smaller platforms, not the heavy armored platforms, not the M1 Abrams tank, not the Bradley but smaller platforms, and then you enable it with unmanned platforms.

    First of all, the mobility of it will be tremendous. You can put it on C130's, small airplanes, move it very quickly to get you there. But, once again, your enabling against asymmetrical warfare will be the information flow and the intelligence flow for you to be able to close upon whatever particular target you are after. You have traded off that heavy weight armor and size for a very small platform.

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    Mr. SAXTON. And what kind of armor will they have? What do you think?

    General BOUTELLE. I am not going to broach that now. I have worked with it. Very honestly, I don't spend that much time on the armor side. It is on the network side and the C–4I side and the sensor side. But we have traded off the heavy armor we had.

    Mr. SAXTON. Well, this probably isn't the place for this, but I just got back from Iraq over the weekend and the number one problem that we have is finding the bad guys. The number two problem we have is protecting our people, because they don't have armor.

    So I hope that we are not, you know—again, this is not the forum to discuss this in. This is a different strategic kind of a question. But I am just very much concerned, and having you here today I just wanted to express these concerns about assumptions that we are making about the threats that we are going to face may not be true, as demonstrated by our building to fight wars that are history.

    Our guys are getting killed today in Iraq because we collectively, and I am not blaming you, we collectively made some bad assumptions. Maybe we made the best assumptions that we could, but I see a potential for types of warfare in the future where light vehicles that are not armored may not be suitable for.

    So I hope that somehow we can keep that in mind and—in the trade-off of information technology for armor. That is a question in my mind.
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    General BOUTELLE. I think your point is very valid. The only thing I would add to it is, regardless of what you do with the platform, the C–4ISR piece, the network piece could be employed over existing heavy platforms as well as light platforms. So I think the real value that you are going to get out of FCS is the sensors, the networks, the networking information; and whether you applied it to a heavy force like you need in Iraq or a future FCS force, it would have great leverage in either one as an enabler.

    Secretary STENBIT. Sir, I know we are getting close to the end, but I want to be positive about what you just said. Because of the horizontal fusion program constituent parts that we did last year, we had a program demonstration where we put together a lot of those in an exercise last August which was called quantum leap. I believe you were—oh, you didn't come. Some of your folks from the Hill did come over and take a look at it.

    Out of that very process came some ideas about how to do a better job of combining the local intelligence in the Army units in Iraq with the more national intelligence that is coming from some stuff that I don't want to talk about here. Actually, we are about to move some of the quantum leap, or some of the horizontal fusion algorithms, in a net-centric environment into Iraq to allow the people that are having troubles with these Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) going down the road.

    It is a way to put information in to help them, if you would, put little red dots on their maps that say somebody said that is a bad place to go. Today, that is very difficult to get those data around. So there is a case where right now, today, we believe it is worth the time and effort and money to put in information in order to protect the existing infrastructure of vehicles, which is different from the question you asked because the assumption is we are going to be able to do that so much better we are going to be able to change the vehicles.
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    But I wanted you to be optimistic that we have some ideas right now, today, that are about to go over there that have the attribute, which is you take a given set of vehicles and make it a safer place.

    Mr. SAXTON. Okay, I will buy that goal.

    Secretary STENBIT. Well, we hope it is going to be this summer or within months. So I am not talking about long-term future.

    Mr. SAXTON. Good. Okay. I would like to talk to you about that in private some day.

    Secretary STENBIT. Be happy to do that.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you. Thank you.

    We have raised concerns with Internet Protocol Version 6, IPV 6, and whether it will provide the same quality of service that the Department's computing network protocols presently provides. Why did you make the IPV 6 decision without conducting tests at scale to provide this architecture—to prove this architecture at the very least reproduced existing quality of service?

    Secretary STENBIT. The decision is that we are going to do scale level tests in 2004, 2005, 2006. Because we said we weren't going to pull the switch until 2008 when we had, in fact, done scalable tests where we took subsets of the Department's infrastructure and moved to IP version 6 and made sure we understood how far that was.
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    So this is a policy that says we intend to move to IP 6 in 2008. We don't want people buying IP 4 from now on because we think we are going to have to save the money to be able to invest in IP 6. But we are not going to enforce that in a rigorous and tough way without having large-scale experiments.

    Mr. SAXTON. Where will the testing be conducted, and how realistic and rigorous will the testing be?

    Secretary STENBIT. We have asked the services to nominate subsystems that are appropriate and scalable. The NMCI is one which we are considering, which is a 400,000 node network which has excellent configuration management, so we can find out at that kind of scalability.

    The Missile Defense Agency, which is a sort of a closed command and control system, is willing to consider being one of our tests. So we are going to Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) is a place where we might go do this kind of a test. We are looking for pretty large-scale existing systems to take the step earlier so we can understand what it is like.

    Admiral ZELIBOR. I can help with that, if you want.

    In addition, sir, there is three—we are using a test bed within the Navy that is really part of the GIG test bed, and there is three parts to that. You have a thing called the Boston South Network; the Advanced Technology Demonstration Network, which is based at the Naval Research Laboratory here in D.C.; and then SPAWAR that is in San Diego is also part of working—is actually the lead for the Defense Research Enterprise Network. All of those things are being connected, and there is very rigorous testing going on for IPV 6 there; and, also, looking at what I will call dual stacks, where you look at the interoperability between IPV 4 and IPV 6 in that research network.
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    So that is—there is a lot of effort going into that to make sure we have the appropriate testing for this.

    General BOUTELLE. And, Mr. Chairman, we have our facility at Fort Wachuka, which we call our Technology Integration Center, where industry brings in and basically funds their products. We are doing IPV 6 there, and we will be doing a large-scale IPV 6 at Fort Hood for our tactical users at our single tactical support facility.

    Mr. SAXTON. Well, thank you very much. At this point, I would just like to say that we have probably some other questions that we would like to submit for the record. If you would be kind enough to answer those.

    Secretary STENBIT. Be happy to.

    Mr. SAXTON Let me just thank you all for being here today; and let me say that we, Members of Congress, are very much in support of your goals. I have been able to experience IT, which I have seen that has been extremely useful from San Diego to Tampa and from Qatar inside of battle space; and it is impressive.

    Having said that, like most Members of Congress, we don't really understand what you do; and we are trying hard to do that. As you know, there are some of us who feel more strongly about that than others; and, as a result of that, we had quite a debate last year, which I am personally going to try to avoid this year. So the clearer you can make things for Members of Congress on an ongoing basis and get people to see what IT can do that most Members of Congress don't know at this point, I think it would be extremely helpful to us moving forward.
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    So thanks for what you do. I hope we didn't seem contrary today. We didn't mean to be. We just want to get these answers out in the open for everyone to understand, and we look forward to working with you as we move through this cycle.

    Secretary STENBIT. Sir, we appreciate the opportunity. It is a complex subject, and it isn't easy to describe because it is too technical. I want to personally once again thank you very much for your support and your staff's support.

    Last year, we had a lot of very detailed discussions. We are open to do that. We hope we don't bog down your entire system, but unless we talk about it we are not going to be able to understand exactly what your worries are. We are prepared to continue to do that, and I admire the persistence of your staff in continuing to try to learn from us and your Members as well. But we really do appreciate your support because, otherwise, we couldn't be on this path. So now we are trying to figure out the best way to get there.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned.

    [Whereupon, at 5:40 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]