The Army’s information technology is too old, and modernization is too slow.
So the service needs a “fundamentally different” strategy that relies heavily on the private sector, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford said the Army has to start relying on contractors to own and operate IT on the Army’s behalf — what he calls “enterprise IT as a service” — and start moving on-base IT to Defense Department clouds.
“Around 70 percent overall of that [IT] infrastructure — in the case of voice, it’s probably as high as 90 percent — is at or near end of life,” Crawford told the Association of the US Army. “[It] would take beyond the year 2030 — if we stayed on the current path — to modernize. We ran into one brick wall after another [asking], ‘how do we get speed,’” Crawford continued. So, about six months ago, he and Lt. Gen. Steve Fogarty, head of Army Cyber Command, realized “we needed to do something fundamentally different.”
This effort’s urgent because the aging IT on Army bases can’t protect data from high-end hackers, provide the bandwidth for new augmented-reality training systems or support combat units waging high-intensity warfare against great powers (i.e., Russia and China), Crawford said. “This reform and modernization initiative,” he said, “is less about saving money than it is about increasing operational effectiveness throughout the force.”
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Today more than ever, however, the federal government is making use of cutting-edge procedures and methods to attract commercial companies to government contracting and to encourage modernization and efficiency in procurements.
Rather, “it takes a village to really solve some of these problems,” said Bill Zielinski, deputy assistant commissioner for Office of Information Technology Category in GSA’s acquisition arm. “I don’t look at it as, ‘How am I going to build and maintain a highly technical skilled staff.’ I look it as the idea that we are working as a broader community to be able to bring the right talent to the table to solve the challenges.”
That will change how IT is marketed and sold this year. Agencies already set aside money for these procurement projects. But the governmentwide increase could help speed up progress, according to Bloomberg Government’s Dan Snyder.
In June, VA Secretary David Shulkin 
