 Thanks for being here this afternoon. What I'd like to talk about is a little bit different from some of the other presentations. It's not all that technical, but I want to set the context for some very important and far-ranging changes in the way the Department of Defense is using computer networks, social networks, and also our communications systems. And I also want to lay out some areas where we really need your help in terms of not only improving our capabilities, but also the security. My name is Lynn Wells. I work for a part of the Office of Secretary of Defense that looks at information technologies. And this office is also the Chief Information Officer for the Department. So that's sort of the background. The context here, the title was Net-Centric Operations and also Unclassified Information Sharing with Non-Traditional Partners. And people talk a lot about how the Defense Department shares classified information. This is unclassified and the Non-Traditional Partners refers to people like humanitarian assistance organizations, state and local first responders, local security services. And a mix of scenarios like disaster relief, building capacity of foreign nations, and stabilization operations after conflicts. So it's really quite a new mission for the Department to get involved in. All this and the Net-Centric Operations are based really on considerations of both national and international security. And we did a national defense strategy last year where the point is laid out here. The defining characteristic of the security environment is actually uncertainty. So how do we move from the predictable past of the Cold War and having a monolithic sort of enemy to fight into this era of surprise and uncertainty? As many of you know, the Defense Department has a very structured planning process. It's a long process. In fact, if you look at the acquisition of major systems, it can be 17-plus years that we're actually working on the budgeting and the planning for these things. It's worth keeping in mind that this is longer than from before the Wright Brothers' first flight to the end of World War I. So what we're effectively asking people to do is estimate the need for military aviation before the first airplane is flown at the end of a war that nobody expects is coming. And you superimpose that the timelines of the industry that you're all involved in, of not only information technology, but sort of the five great revolutions of our time of information, of biotechnology, of nanotechnology, of robotics and energy, and info by our RoboNanohydro, and you're just looking at an enormously dynamic security environment that's going to outpace almost all of our planning. So hence the point, uncertainty is the critical feature. The key then is to make the U.S. forces agile and robust to respond to this variety of situations even if you get surprised. And that's where this whole business, the network and net-centric, becomes so critically important. We've got to move our focus from being in stovepipes of Army, Navy, Air Force, don't talk to each other, to having enterprise-wide. We're not just talking about the warfighting applications, also business, how do we acquire things, defense operations, intelligence, how do we share the intelligence that's gathered, and then the various business processes. We're trying to move from a system-based, and you want to buy a fighter plane, you want to buy a tank, you want to buy a ship, to capabilities-based. We want to be able to access, share, and collaborate the information. I'll come back to that repeatedly. I have to emphasize just how fundamental these changes are to the culture and the policies and the processes of the department. We have all grown up who have been independent for a long time and information where knowledge is power, and information belongs to its owner, and you treat information as something that you protect and don't share rather than something that you're a steward of that needs to be shared with those who have to know about it. Finally, the Schimpfen emphasis is moving away from a producer-based system. I produce the information, I own it, to a consumer-based focus where if we need to have it, we'll find a way to get it. Again, these are huge cultural changes. The place we're trying to get to is not just a technology change. It's people and processes and technology working together to make sure that you've got access to the information. The information is shared, and those who need it most can work together, can collaborate on it. The bottom line is connecting people to information. It's not just building fighter planes. It's not just building tanks. It's not just building ships. The information has become the core of what the Defense Department is all about. Next slide. So in conducting the net-centric operations, you start at the top with a security context. This is what the international security environment is all about. You can see, maybe you can't see, they're hard to read, but it's uncertain, it's asymmetrical. You don't have a common peer competitor, global, diverse, distributed. So the strategy is transform our own national security strategy to conduct these net-centric operations and to create a collaborative information environment where you get the agility out of the system. Why is the agility important? If you think back in the early days of the war in Afghanistan, there was a special forces soldier on horseback, horseback of all things, and that was getting close-air support from 40-year-old bombers that were dropping precision-guided weapons guided by the global positioning system all linked together by a data network. None of those were being used for the purpose they were designed. Every one of them was an innovation to provide the agility to meet the scenario that was in... That's what we're trying to get to, is net-centric operations gives the agility to meet these uncertain futures. There's something down at the bottom called the gig, the lower box that's called the global information grid. And this, again, is not just a network. It is the people, it is the processes, it is the technology that does anything that collects processes, stores, manages information in the department. This is a very heterogeneous network. We're talking about 10 gigabit per second stable fiber out to hand-held soldier radios at the tactical edge. We have to find a way to find end-to-end connection of all the people who need to know this. Next. So where we're trying to move from a series of information stovepipes, somebody described them as cylinders of excellence, to shared information, trying to move from interfaces that are hardwired into the systems. My God, I've built the terminal for this satellite and that sucker is going to be on orbit for 22 years and you're stuck with my terminal. To commodity-based unconstrained sharing. Accommodate uncertainty. The goal is to make all information in the network so it's accessible, it's discoverable, accessible, understandable by unanticipated users. If you look at some of the coalitions we've been operating in lately, we have really long-term loyal partners like Tonga and Lithuania. There is no way that anybody would have planned to share information with folks like that when the systems are being designed. We have to be able to accommodate them in the future. Fixed display formats, people talk about a common operational picture. We want to get away from that. We want to move to user-defined operational pictures where you draw on the data to display the information that you need. I may need to know 10 kilometers around my foxhole. Somebody else may need to know the total air picture over the entire thousand mile space. The user defines what they're doing. And finally and perhaps most importantly, need to know it's been the mantra of all dealing with classified information. Do you have a need to know if you do, then we'll share it. The model now is need to share. We cannot get the job done unless we share the information. You saw that in the 9-11 Commission. We've seen that in the operations that are going on today. It is a fundamental change in the culture of the organization. Next. So the result is that the network is really becoming the center of gravity, the core, the most important single integrator across the entire Department of Defense. The organizing principle is I, whether I'm a businessman, whether I'm a warfighter, whether I'm a general, whether I'm a private, can get the information that I need when, where and how I need it. That's the essence of the net-centered information environment. And the goal of this is not to share information. The goal is to turn data to information, to knowledge, to decision, to action as quickly as possible. I mean, one of the points that you all have come out in the sessions here today, we've got to be able to respond to threats and machine time on the networks. If you sit there in your network operation center and watch the links turn from green to yellow to red, you've missed the boat. And so how do we do this? So the result again is the network is the center of gravity. What we have to keep it from becoming is our Achilles heel. And we absolutely do not have all the answers. I mean, I've learned an awful lot just here in the presentations I've heard yesterday and today. We've had a number of people here listening. We need to go back and fold this in to the way we're doing business. When I talk to industry, the single most repetitive theme I have is we need more secure products from industry. We understand the pressures to market. We understand the needs. Just get stuff out there. We cannot take the 2.9 million computers running in the Department of Defense and have them all be beta testers for some new commercial product. Go ahead. So some of the things particularly have been important. IPv6, Mane, I mean all of this battlefield networking is going to eventually be Mane networks. And yet we hear discussions that say they don't scale beyond a few tens of users. How are we going to put that together? The complexities of IPv6 are something we're very much wrestling with. The device driver's piece we just heard was absolutely fascinating, as have been the discussions of the complexity of 802.11, which I'll get into more later. What I want to talk about now is this unclassified sharing. Because traditionally when you talk about sharing information in the Department of Defense, people think about sharing secrets. This is something very different. There have been a whole different series of missions that have come to be important to the Department really over the past two years. One is, let me start from the bottom, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, beginning with tsunami in Southeast Asia, following up Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, the Pakistani earthquakes, the mudslides in Central America, most recently the potential eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia. The U.S. military is deployed in humanitarian disaster relief work almost all the time. Post-war stabilization, security, transition, reconstruction. The Defense Science Board a couple of years ago criticized the Department very severely for doing too much planning for the conduct of the war itself and not enough preparations for the post-war stabilization reconstruction. This is being adjusted dramatically right now in the emphasis within the Department. And as you can see, the military support to SSTR. Building partner capacity. The real goal of the Department right now is to avoid the conflict in the first place. How can you work with partner nations to make sure that the conditions of instability, the conditions of social crisis can be perhaps mediated, even avoided, to get away from having to fight in the first place. So these missions require that we share unclassed information outside the boundaries of traditional networks. Go ahead. This again is not theoretical. This is real-world situations are going on today. And so the non-traditional partners we're talking about, non-governmental organizations, doctors outboarders, United Nations, Red Cross, Indigenous security services, the Afghan, the Iraqi, the Nigerian, the Peruvian. These are people who will probably not get U.S. security clearances, probably not get inside our firewalls, but are absolutely crucial to the effective completion of the mission. At home, state, local, tribal governments, first responders, whether they're, again, in overseas or domestic situations, and very, very importantly, commercial partners. People have come to realize that the partner in these operations is not just government. The private sector has an enormous role to play. The policy issues, education of our people and others are really much more important, more challenging than the technical solutions. We sent some people from my office a couple of years ago down to Southeast Asia for the tsunami relief. And there was a Navy doctor, and a retired Navy pilot. So in that operation, there was an aircraft carrier operating off the coast, and obviously, there were lots of non-governmental people in Indonesia. And the two doctors could walk into the Ulan liaison office in Jakarta and get a brosso. You know, hey, man, we worked together in Kosovo. We were together in the Congo. They had the social relationships. The pilot could get back on board the aircraft carrier and get high-five. Let's go to the ready room and talk pilot. When they got together a few days later, they found that the carrier was prohibited by doctrine and policy from sharing information outside the military domain with people who didn't ask. The NGOs didn't know they had to ask. They didn't know how to ask. Within about three days, within a couple hours, the time those folks got together, there was all kinds of information flowing. But we had to bridge the policy and the cultural gaps in order to cause it to happen. A very, very important statement was made about two months ago by one of our four-star generals who made the observation that the priority of sharing unclassified information needs to be comparable to the priority of sharing classified. Again, this is a huge change. And finally, we've got to address not just people who are always up on the network. We have to address the disconnected user because lots of times folks in these austere environments of information sharing and disaster relief just aren't going to have the 24-7 connectivity. So what are some of the requirements for this sharing? First of all, the policy makers and the planners have to treat the requirements to share as a strategic requirement. This can't be treated as a techie adjunct to major muscle movements of delivering food, water, and shelter. It's got to be a core function of what we're doing. Second of all, we've got to engage with these non-traditional partners outside the boundaries of the military networks to things like communicate, collaborate, in some cases translate, and find ways to engage effectively in these environments. And often these are very austere environments. There's no power grid. There may be no social services. There may be governance that has been disrupted. We need to have common interoperable tools to share. And geospatial information tools are very, very important in doing this. Information assurance and credentialing is absolutely crucial. I'll come back to this again and again. Distributed trust is what we need to be able to establish in these environments. How do we know when you're trying to bring back up Hancock County in Mississippi that you're really talking to the mayor or the police or the fireman and not somebody who's trying to run a scam? In the case of Indonesia there was an insurgency going on in Bandache province so the Indonesian folks said, well, we want to be a little careful about who you share the information with so we don't inadvertently wind up stoking or bringing back the insurgents. This local knowledge is absolutely crucial, but we've got to find ways to build the trust. We're looking a lot of commercial based products. People talk about, well Defense Department Department of Homeland Security, you should have warehouses full of radios. Where you go down to some place and provide them with radios to communicate. First of all, it's not necessarily a good idea because now we've got warehouses full of radios that are degrading at the rate of Moore's Law. Second of all, the thing we've learned in these operations is you do best to fall in on the capabilities that the local folks have already. The last thing you want to do in the midst of a crisis where everything is just combined later is come in and say throw away the way you were doing things before pick some new thing that we're going to impose on you and now you've got all the additional social issues. So we want to find ways to bridge to the communications, networks, whatever of the indigenous users as much as possible. So one of the things that's been looked at for communications are lease packages. We sign deals with a series of providers say we need three spot beams two megs up, four megs down anywhere in the United States within 12 hours. And 12 beams within 72 hours, something like that. So that kind of approach is one of the things that I mentioned. Unclassed geospatial products. When you talk to the non-governmental organizations the thing you hear more than anything else that they need is road information. Where are the bridges out? How can I get the goods to the villages? And we often have that. We've got terrific pictures from all sorts of things from airplanes to stuff parking around on orbit. And how do you declassify that and produce it in the form that you can just give to somebody potentially hostile or at least unfriendly country but who's trying to help the people in the immediate need. I mentioned the social networks and the subject matter experts. You go to Tsunami. How do I find quickly a neuroscientist who speaks Bahasa Indonesia and scuba dives? We're starting to build the networks to be able to do that. At the same time, that person's not going to be too useful to the world of New Orleans. So in that situation, how do you put together a different kind of social network? We have to have those sorts of folks identified beforehand and available to reach out. So the operational concept here is basically what's unusual for DoD is this is essentially an intranet, extra net problem for us. And we haven't been used to dealing in that very much. Within DoD, we have a series of intranets. And some handle classified, some handle unclassified, some handle intelligence information. But we're working out here mainly in the DMZ with some sort of a portal that provides a common shared workspace. And the way this is being deployed and it's no big deal as far as a lot of people work, but it's a big deal for setting this up for the government. It's in the .org domain rather than .mil. There are a number of non-governmental organizations whose charters preclude them from dealing with the Jueling Fang militarists. Okay. But as we said, they need some of our geospatial information. We certainly need their local knowledge. We need their understanding of how to distribute food. So how do we work together? So by working this in the .org domain and setting up, again, the sort of tools that the rest of the world has been dealing with it for a long time and we're just beginning to employ blogs, wikis, photo notes, annotated photography, find a way to share. So we're also trying not to establish this a monopoly. Some of those little people down there in the middle between the two vertical lines are additional combatant commanders. We have five regional combatant commanders around the world. The Pacific Command, the Central Command, the European Command, and so on and so forth. Each one of them is doing something for their own local area. And rather than scrapping it and forcing something down their throat, we're trying to set up here so that all good ideas can be mashed together. Next. So phase one of this is up and running. We rolled this out about a month ago. And as you can see, it contains just pretty straightforward capabilities. By single domain chat, I mean it can only stay in unclassed space. It doesn't yet go to the classified networks. Phase two, the VMOC is the virtual military operations center and that's a set of tools being developed just to bring in better visualization capabilities. Ryjan is something that was developed. It's a regional information joint awareness network being developed for homeland security being used to in some of the ports around the U.S. We think we'll have a secure chat that'll let us go from unclassified up to our classified networks and really, really, really importantly and this is where I invite your inputs as much as possible. We need to find a way to inject entrepreneurial concepts into this. Defense ultimately needs to have a stable program of record that gets transitioned from year to year to year and funded and so on and so forth and that's great. But given the pace of change in the environment given the great ideas and the vulnerabilities that are being discovered we have to find a way to inject those ideas into the system in days to weeks rather than 17-year cycles. Next. One of the interesting concepts that's come up is something called hastily formed networks because thus far I've been dealing mainly with the collaboration tools information sharing but very often in these situations you don't have the communications link. There is no network. You can't be interoperable if you can't operate in the first place and so how do you set up the hastily formed network in a crisis that can then be dismantled when the job is done? The definition that's working now in the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey has actually done some really pioneering work on this is essentially a combination of physical, social, and information networks, not just comms. But a lot of it's built around 802.11, 802.16 nets, of which we've heard so much interesting stuff today. We've just had the USNS Mercy, it's a hospital ship that's around in the Philippines to pull into a port in the southern Philippines and the doctors will go ashore and work with the hospitals and they're doing terrific work. But because there may be power only three hours a day in the port there's no way for the doctors to communicate back to the ship with a local communication system saying I need this or do telemedicine with some university that wants to work together. So we've developed these deployable packages of rapidly deployable comms that can be brought in, set up in a few hours and handle the underlying network on which the information is going to be shared. What we need to learn a lot of skills about the interagency and coalition operations what happens at the civil military boundary. Over the past couple of years we've run a series of demonstrations and the first was in 2000 and it was on many of you remember the Rwanda Burundi crisis of 495 and this was a replication of that it was a major refugee flows in the face of disasters and the idea was to how do you get military medicine to talk to the civil medicine community and so the language of this was English but it turned out not really because one person would say food and somebody would think 50 pound bags of rice and somebody else would think something else and so just getting the sharing of information and the common what was going on led to some very very interesting new displays and collaboration tools for example one of the most interesting displays was the situation refugee camp came to be displayed in Toroids and you say why a Toroid Toroid is a mathematical donut and so you say here's the size of the camp on the map and the size of the Toroid is the size of the refugee camp and the thickness is the number of people in the camp and the status is red yellow green but the trend can be shown in surface roughness of the donut if it's shiny things are getting better if it's really rough then things are getting worse the quality of the data can be shown by the transparency if it's good data it can be quite transparent and then you can have the power of Toroid and the sanitation sub Toroid and the food sub Toroid just walk in the room you see right away that we're red or yellow going to red because they're not enough sanitation to handle a number of people going to be there in the next 48 hours so some innovative displays like this have come out of this kind of thing capacity to improvise one of the things about the USM force is probably the greatest single strength is the innovation and skill sets of our junior officers enlisted and one of the things we have to be very careful about with the network is that we don't do anything to destroy that a couple of years ago I was out looking at a new Marine Corps command and control vehicle and this thing had taken an old vehicle had four radios in it and they chucked them out and they'd put in three computer displays 12 radios and satellite dishes and all sorts of displays you could see the tactical picture on maps and I went back to a Marine General friend of mine and said wow you should see what I've seen and this comment was Lynn this terrifies me because it now gives the senior leadership the ability to destroy the greatest asset of our armed forces which is the innovation and independence if you're an officer enlisted I thought about that and there certainly is that possibility but the Navy's actually been through this a lot over several years we've put in data links and it's an issue of training you've just got to train people to say you can't go in and micromanage everything general you gotta back off and let people operate at their own level but it's not something that comes naturally it's again part of this cultural thing and what leadership in the network really means is to say okay I'm going to centralize everything of the command headquarters and get it out to the edge next so what are we doing way ahead we've got solutions roadblocks exist both in policy and authorities I've spent a good part of the last month with the Senate Armed Services Committee is writing the authorization bill and it turns out that there is a law that talks about humanitarian assistance and it's from the U.S. military and it says that you can do rudimentary construction and repair well it turns out that half the lawyers look at rudimentary and say that cannot include any information and communications technology so as a result right now in the Dominican Republic we're building some hospitals and the troops feel they are forbidden by policy, by law from putting phone lines in the hospital because somehow it's prohibited in law you can build a wall you can build windows you can build a well, you can build a road somehow you can't connect to anything so we're working with the Congress to get the law at least clarified that says basic and rudimentary in these days includes the ability to connect to the services that the people are really going to need there are all these combatant commanders I mentioned these folks are out there working already and we need to find a way to leverage what they're doing these operations are not major combat operations but they are humanitarian assistance disaster relief stability security transition reconstruction and building partner capacity another huge change in this area came last November when the secretary signed out a document that basically said that these SSTR, stabilization operations will be accorded the same priority in the department as major combat operations that is just enormous and it must change and again it opens the door for all the things we're talking about here we've got to find a way to get the right tools migrate into the global information grid and then evolve this version 1.0 the vision of this this version right now in 1.0 every year, June 1st defines the hurricane season in the United States so we're looking at version 2 roll out next May version 3, May after that we're spiraling this based on lessons learned around the US hurricane season at the same time we want to take this entrepreneurial injection we talked about earlier and a series of experiments so that in roughly four month cycles we can upgrade so that's sort of what we're shooting for version 1.1 in October version 1.2 in February version 2.0 next May and again we really welcome ideas from the floor tactic, techniques, and procedures this is really important for the military there's a certain amount of structure that has to go into this and even as I talk about the entrepreneurial spirit of the junior officers enlisted it really helps if you have the checklist that says okay it's alright to provide communication technologies to the hospital before you go in to have decided ahead of time that says that the operations officer of the joint task force are empowered to release photographs of the roads to doctors without borders it just helps to have that and that's what the tactic techniques and procedures is and finally work the overall network architectures next so that's kind of what I want to talk to you about today but the real point is that this represents a social, cultural and technological change for the department that just reinforces the importance to us and to the folks here in this audience we're going to have a demonstration later this month of these and the situation is going to be a combination of a pandemic plus a terrorist incident has completely destroyed the social networks of a community so the power grid doesn't work the transportation doesn't work the communications don't work in that environment how do you reestablish the connectivity and particularly how do you reestablish citizens trust and the ability of government deliver government services without having the whole thing degrade into chaos and vigilanteism and whatever so this is the stakes that this is all playing for I'd also just like to reiterate in this context the point I made last night those of you who heard the meat the fed in the next five years roughly 40% of the acquisition workforce in the department of defense and that 40% is 60,000 people are going to be eligible for retirement that's going to create enormous opportunities for the folks with your skill sets with your interests with your motivations to come and work with us on some things that maybe you haven't thought about like these types of operations they're not a lot of what you think and so if you're interested if you're qualified if you have the capabilities I'd very much be interested in talking with you afterwards so let me stop there and open it to questions please why don't we go to the mic if you would please my question concerns the IOS and the folks that do OPSEC are they maybe a bit concerned that say methods or intentions or capabilities are going to be inadvertently released the pieces of the puzzle could be fitted together and doing these humanitarian actions the answer is absolutely there are people who are terrified about this and frankly we don't know how to do this very well I mentioned the insurgency in Ache province in Indonesia there have been other cases where two of our own states maybe don't want to totally share information on each side of the state boundary so we have concerns about revealing information about military tactics, techniques and procedures about our capabilities for example one of the problems with releasing imagery from overhead satellites is everybody agrees that it's needed but can you release it other than say for official use only well for official use only for a non-governmental organization might as well be secret code word so in the last month we've gotten the release of 162 gigabytes of imagery of Afghanistan totally free and clear to share with anybody again there's just been enormous progress over the last 12 months since the definition of stabilization reconstruction was deemed to be this important we're trying to figure out some algorithm that says okay any unmanned air vehicle smaller than a predator say the video from that would be assumed to be declassified and the joint forces command down at Norfolk has a cell that's devoted to lessons learned they try to take anything we do and figure out what we could have done better so hopefully out of these by monitoring what's going on we'll make some mistakes we won't wind up with fundamental long-term compromises and security please the way ahead is to share information with NGOs and other nations information possibly classified as well what is DOD doing right now to satisfy information sharing with currently especially in the areas of computer network defense areas of what computer network defense so the question is if the future is sharing all this with NGOs and people like that what are we doing now to share information especially in areas like computer network defense and you're talking about with the private sector primarily but internally as well services both internally and externally the let me answer in several different ways in the wake of the publication of the 9-11 commission report there was a presidential directive went out to mandate a dramatically improved information sharing environment across the U.S. government for counter terrorist purposes and there actually is set up an information sharing executive who's in charge of making sure that the stole price is broken down the information gets shared there's actually an awful lot happening in that area and in fact some folks are saying what's happening is we're getting too much information shared right now because anybody is afraid to have something sitting on their laptop if something else happens they just throw it over the transom but what's happened is a realization that this same information sharing needs to be expanded so for example we have in addition to counter terrorism we've got avian flu there's a whole batch of different class of information needs to be shared there there's a whole the air traffic control system in the United States is about to migrate from a radar base to a database GPS to a database based system that information needs to be shared and so the underlying principle in everything we're doing is a data strategy that says all data have to have metadata tags on to make them discoverable, accessible, understandable and we in the intelligence community share the same metadata tag and scheme as we do with NATO and we're working to extend this now to the Department of Homeland Security which is usually used to find pictures we're talking about in addition to the network defense about 18 months ago an organization was stood up called the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations and the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha was given responsibility for the operations and defense of all DOD networks that had never existed before and so as we try to work through the concept of operations for all this there at least now if you have one belly button you can go to to put all the information sharing information information together the problem has been that a lot of this there are cultural barriers and so it's still not operating as well as you should the second piece is back in the Clinton administration there was something called Presidential Decision Directive 63 which dealt with critical infrastructure and set up in this were a series of things information sharing and analysis centers where the private sector was supposed to meet the government and so the financial sector could say well we're seeing attacks on here and what intelligence do you have about this it turns out of the I think there are nine sectors a couple are working really well a lot of them are not working well and we've never have gotten trust built up in some of the private sectors to allow us to share as well I think actually in the information technology arena among the large companies among the Microsofts and the Bell Souths and the Lucents and that there's a pretty good sharing of both intelligence and information and threat information the concern I have is that the entrepreneurial venues out there the people really doing a lot of cutting edge work are not part of that to extend it extended further so I think we've made a lot of progress but there's still way to go could you go to the mic please recognizing the challenges that exist technologically you mentioned both from a net centric perspective as well as from the enterprise perspective what is going to be happening to take care of the non-technical issues particularly the cultural differences between the services as well as the historical lack of good coordination with NGOs and others because you mentioned the general being afraid of those net centric technologies for reasons which have been brought up in the past what are we doing to fix that moving forward one of the first places started is an emphasis from the top that this change is really important and if you look through the quadrennial defense review which is this four-year review that has been finished and the strategic planning guidance that came out of it the critical importance of net centricity of the need to share is just riddled throughout the document so no one can be in the least bit in any doubt that the senior leadership of the department is committed to this approach second there's a constant human time lag somewhere of just getting internalizing the new procedures so this has been out for about eight months now we're starting to see some progress we actually see it a lot down at the lower level say the junior officers in the enlisted we see it quite a lot of the senior generals the problem is actually in the mid-level bureaucracy where the word hasn't gotten through yet so that's kind of what we're focused on but I was astonished really about a year ago to have been in a meeting with a four-star general and an undersecretary defense and hear the two of them discussing the merits of different approaches to metadata tagging you know a year and a half ago they probably wouldn't even understand what the term was so it's working and it just isn't going to take time thanks let me take this from here please thank you my question is about the about the players you describe about the players you describe in this architecture our large organizations whether public, private government, foreign, or domestic what about the individual citizenry and other groups formed out of the citizenry like for domestic issues amateur radio operators, ham operators do you take into account both their ability to consume information and act on it but also perhaps their capability in the case of the ham operators to provide critical infrastructure I mean they've been there for years I'm really glad you asked this the question if you didn't hear was what about individual citizens, ham radios operators, private groups not organized entities there's a group called the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue which is doing a lot of work on preparations for all hazards disasters and earthquakes, fire flood and one of the points that they make is that the citizen, the individual is the best first responder if you have a fire in your kitchen and you can put out with your little kitty fire extinguisher you're way ahead of the game you have to wait for the fire department to come and put down the half of your house that hasn't already burned yet and so a lot of emphasis is going into what can we do to get individual citizens ready for 72 hours worth of disaster say all of us had in our state disaster preparedness organization website and we're really ready for what's on the stages there we'd be vastly better off and this has been a recurrent message that's part of this during the DARPA grand challenge which was the robot race out one of the people who's been working on these issues for us was responsible for route surveillance and so in case there had been an accident the rescue helicopters come land and not hit a power line or crush a desert towards us or whatever so it turned out they went into a community college and in a bare wall classroom within three hours had a command center up and running to cover the entire length of the of the route done almost entirely by ham radio operators and V-SAT terminals and the ham is becoming back into military use the Mars program kind of faded out for a while so in this it's really being used a lot more and at least in the demonstration we're talking about here at the end of August we plan to make use of ham radio as well including I mean networking over HF and packets over HF and things like that so good question well as your workforce does require, I'm sorry retires and you're bringing in lots of new younger people how are you adjusting the internal culture and just the workplace environment to adjust for the expectations of a younger workforce and especially if you want creative people it's very hard like creative people don't like to work behind walls or behind guards and just the whole federal environment is it kind of ruins your creativity after a while a little bit jaded this is such a great question because in fact we've had this discussion a lot and the point about Gen X and Gen Y and the extent to which being connected is not just a nice to have an inherent part of the lifestyle and then you say welcome to the federal government and you're going to work in a secure classified facility, check your blackberry your phone, your every portable device of the door and getting senior managers to understand that this is not just an irritant this may in fact be a total demotivator at the same time as we've heard the wireless explosion introduces security vulnerabilities that are non-trivial and I don't think any of us I certainly don't except to be aware of the problem understand what the balance is going to work out there's a related issue here and it has to do with the management of outsourced services we're doing really well we know how to acquire ships, tanks and planes and tangible thingies but right now more than there's more money spent on contractor salaries and contracted services than on the salary of government employees today in the federal government and this is only going to and so while we know how to buy things almost none of us knows how to manage outsourced services and that's going to be another set of skills going to have to be either brought into or taught to this revised workforce so I would love to hear more about ideas on how to do this short of saying screw the security it's not a problem but there's got to be some sort of balance and this need to share information sharing mobile wireless environment coming into it so thank you for raising it I wish I had an easy answer but it is really being discussed at senior levels yes Dr. Wells when you're discussing the information here and saying what the DOD is doing preparing for problems both domestically and internationally doesn't a domestic problem fall under the realm of FEMA or is the DOD also performing hand in hand with FEMA at this point taking over the operations from FEMA we're absolutely not going to be taking over I mean FEMA it is in the realm actually Department of Homeland Security not FEMA and the question is there is something called a federal response plan and the federal response plan basically says it's up to local authorities they can't do it they turn to the state the state can't do it they turn to the federal government if the federal government can't handle it within FEMA or DHS then they call on DOD to provide those services that aren't elsewhere available and we certainly saw in Katrina and Rita where some of those were called on but the lead for that remained with the Department of Homeland Security so there are some questions if you had a truly catastrophic and nuclear terrorist incident would some kind of changes be made that's actually being discussed at very high political levels and I can't comment on it but the federal response plan assumes that the DHS will be in charge DOD in support but when you say FEMA it's actually FEMA within the context of Homeland Security you're absolutely right I think I have time for one more Yes Dr. Willis thank you I'm hearing packets over HF products I'm hearing that the industry do we have a significant cost of paying contractor salaries COTS and GOSS software is now more expensive than ever we have a project where they manage it federally but open it up somewhat of an open source project for developing some of these solutions So three years, three weeks ago I kicked in several hundred thousand several hundred thousand dollars and do a quad sponsored effort called the Open Technology Development Initiative that's expressly trying to get to open source or actually open standards and open source raises all sorts of flags in the government community open standards and perhaps open source to get to exactly some of the issues you're trying to raise So we have a I think it's a nine month spiral to see what can be turned in and we're really going to try to make use of that to find a new way of doing business Thank you all very much I appreciate the chance to talk with you today