Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division ( Nswc Pcd )

My current duty station, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe & Africa, continues to afford me the ability to lead albeit with a minimal staff; a component command overseas as opposed to a communications company in the continental United States (CONUS) has fewer cyber technical specialists. This may seem like a deterrent to an in-depth training capability, it has in fact fueled my desire to ensure my young Marines are the next cyber technical experts this side of Apple or

On Nov 2013, the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) awarded the contract to “modernize” its existing custom developed application Cadet Administrative Management Information System (CAMIS) II to the Solers Corporation (Solers Corporation, 2016). CAMIS was developed over several years and began to encompass support for many disparate business processes at the Academy, but primarily served as a Student Information/Management System. This modernization effort or CAMIS III was the third iteration of moving CAMIS from a legacy system to a new platform. Almost 2 years later: Mar 2016, this project ended with the government decision to discontinue the modernization effort. This was done by primarily not exercising option years and stopping funding on the modernization development line item of the contract. (Paulson, 2015) Despite modernization effort ending, the government continued to support the CAMIS III operations and support portion of the contract, as well as the legacy CAMIS II contract. This paper attempts to analyze why this software project failed, based on the personal experiences and perspectives from the overall combined team and attempts to understand why. The major reasons for failure included: gross underestimates (scope, cost, and schedule). However, there were opportunities to achieve a better outcome. These opportunities were failures by the program manager, vendor team, and management stakeholder expectations.

The Department of Defense is one of the oldest executive departments of the executive branches in the United States of America and is in control of national security and the Armed Forces of the United States. More than 3 million employees embody the Department of Defense and control it’s day-to-day operations and is well funded with a budget of $680 billion thanks to a bill that passed 68-29 in 2010 . Under the Secretary of Defense there is a very powerful Chief Information Officer of the Department of Defense, Teri Takai. Teri is responsible for developing strategic plans and to align with the department’s mission and the mission of the United States. The CIO of the Department of Defense interested me because of the decisions having to be made affect so many users. Every decision Teri makes has to be spot on and has to take in consideration, how it will hurt or benefit other departments or national security. The goal of the CIO is to unify the information management and to advance the technology vision of the department.

This is the greater context facing the U.S. Army’s 516th Signal Brigade based in Hawaii. The 516th Signal Brigade consists of 2,500 soldiers and federal employees responsible for the installation, operation, and defense of tactical and strategic information technology (IT) networks for the U.S. Army in the Pacific Theater (from Japan to Alaska). Every day the 516th Signal Brigade must defend against cyber-attacks, provide IT service support to many thousands of users, and remain prepared to deploy quickly its mobile communications teams in the event of conflict or a natural disaster. However, during my tenure within the brigade from 2013-2015, I discovered

While a commander’s staff conducts planning at any level, whether it is strategic, operational, or tactical, the importance of identifying both theirs and the adversary’s center of gravity (COG) is a critical part of the planning process. Three factors should be carefully analyzed in order to gain a full understanding of the COG; they are critical capabilities, critical requirements and critical vulnerabilities (U.S. Office of the CJCS 11 August 2011, III-24). Although a COG can be attacked directly, the indirect approach which seeks to destroy or neutralize the COG by attacking an adversary’s critical vulnerabilities can be a more efficient use of available resources. The United States Marine Corps’ Warfighting publication MCDP 1 draws a direct correlation between a COG and its critical vulnerability by stating, “we should focus our efforts against a critical vulnerability, a vulnerability that, if exploited, will do the most significant damage to the enemy 's ability to resist us” (United States Marine Corps 1997, 47). The Marine Corps favors the indirect approach to defeating an adversary’s COG because the functions assigned to them by the Department of Defense (DoD) require expeditionary operations and expeditionary forces typically are limited in size, assets, and resources driving them to target an adversary’s critical vulnerabilities.

The primary performance measures are related to student achievement based on standardized tests. Still, as with any organization today, cyberspace support plays an important part in reaching the strategic goals which include organization excellence and outreach. The IT division supports the DoDEA goals by “delivering reliable, secure, high-performing and cost-effective networks and services to our students, teachers and staff.” (CSP, 2013) The IT division is comprised of five branches: CIO-Enterprise Architecture, System Development, HQ Operations & Customer Support, Information Resources, and Information Assurance.

I have a comprehensive understanding of the Department of Defense’s vision and direction and long-range plans and emerging technologies that can lead to proper programming and resource allocation. The Strategy of the DoD, DoN, and the USMC relies on the use of innovation and emerging technologies to maintain both a strategic and tactical advantage in the warfighting domain, and as a means of achieving efficiencies in the business domains. The DoD in general and the DoN specifically have in their vision statements and leadership direction that the services will use innovation both as a force multiplier and a means to achieve efficiencies and costs savings. While the various Services and Agencies within the DoD differ in some aspects, there are numerous similarities. They all have the vision and objectives to delivery information to the user to meet the Command and Control and IT needs, even in a contested environment. Generally, the goals within the Department are to consolidate and stabilize the infrastructure, unify communications, manage innovation, build and maintain a strategic workforce, consolidate datacenters leading to improve application portfolio access and management and lastly enhance network operations. I will point out here that I have been materially involved in all aspects of these

The relationship in strategic guidance flows from the NSS through the QDR as described above and to the National Military Strategy (NMS). With the provided strategic guidance it becomes the responsibility of Combatant Commanders to operationalize strategic guidance through the lens of their respective operational

The United States Marine Corps has an illustrious history forged in the trials of combat. Throughout its history, irregular warfare has and will continue to pose challenges for Marines facing new and radical enemy forces. The rapid, opportunistic, and flexible capabilities of maneuver warfare enables Marines to combat ambiguous enemies whose warfighting capability and doctrine is based on irregular warfare principles. Marine Corps units are organized and equipped to facilitate rapid deployment and to maximize the potential of each asset available to the Marine Air Ground Task Force Commanders. As we wage war against our nation’s foes, the elements of the Marine Air Ground Task Force are prepared to provide mutually supporting roles for the

As an institution tasked with the protection of the United States and its interest around the world including on, above, and below the sea, it is increasingly more important that the United States Navy (US Navy) continually works to generate and adapt to change in order be prepared for any threat from enemies near and afar.

1. Today when looking at members of the Coast Guard there is very little difference in uniform to distinguish the senior enlisted and Officer Corps from that of the Junior Enlisted Corps. The Coast Guard believes that there is a distinct difference between a First Class Petty Officer and a Chief but has gone away from making that difference easy to see from a distance. The Navy goes so far as to change the entire color and style of their uniform as well as the change of the combination cover when a member is advanced to the pay grade of E-7. This is due to the belief that the amount of responsibility one takes on with this advancement warrants the clear delineation, one that can be seen right away. Furthermore, even today when going through the Chiefs Call to Indoctrination process, all Navy and Coast Guard Chiefs build a hat box solely for the purpose of housing their new combination cover, a cover that in today’s Coast Guard members have been wearing since boot camp. The Coast Guard used to make the same uniform change as the Navy, and we have strayed from this tradition, strayed at the cost of a loss of respect in this advancement. The Coast Guard should visibly distinguish E-7 and above by making a change in the uniform regulations and making E-7 and above only authorized to wear the combination cover.

Operation Just Cause was not the capture of a man; it was the genocide of a country

Earlier in my career, while working for the Coast Guard assigned as an intelligence officer and program manager, I was assigned to develop an information sharing system to support the Coast Guard Intelligence activities. In evaluating the situation, it was easy to see that the Coast Guard was technically disadvantaged. At this time, the Coast Guard IT infrastructure consisted of a custom designed workstation, sever and network. It was a head of its time and offered the capability of unclassified agency wide e-mail and file sharing, and in the early 90s this was far beyond other services. The Coast Guard did not

On 22 January 2013, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a white paper describing his vision for the Joint Information Environment (JIE) and how it would support operations in the years to come.1 This mandated transition is driving a reassessment of the most appropriate command and control (C2) structure to conduct operations within the domain. Attempts to achieve a standardized fully interoperable environment will only achieve limited success due to the innate variability and changing nature of technology, exacerbated by service unique capabilities and requirements as well as inconsistent funding. Existing C2 models either fail to address the uniqueness of operations in the cyber domain or otherwise fail to

The purpose for an IT security policy is to provide “strategy, policy, and standards regarding the security of and operations in cyberspace, and encompasses the full range of threat reduction, vulnerability reduction, deterrence, international engagement, incident response, resiliency, and recovery policies and activities, including computer network operations, information assurance, law enforcement, diplomacy, military, and intelligence missions as they relate to the security and stability of the global information and communications infrastructure” ("Cyberspace policy RevIew", 2016).