Army CIO pushes for ‘network-centric force’

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army, in the midst of a process to change to a “network-centric, knowledge-based force,” is fighting a war in which most of its technologies are working correctly, the chief information officer of the Army said Wednesday.

Speaking at an Army technology trade show as bombs dropped near Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Peter Cuviello said the Army has been able to track most of its vehicles and troops on the ground in Iraq through technologies such as the Army’s new satellite-based Movement Tracking System and another satellite and mapping system, Blue Force Tracking.

“We are tracking where most stuff is over there,” Cuviello said. “We don’t have them all, and that’s why when people turn right when they’re supposed to turn left … sometimes they get in harm’s way.” Cuviello was apparently talking about an Army supply convoy that was attacked in southern Iraq Sunday after reportedly taking a wrong turn into enemy territory.

Cuviello, speaking to a crowd of military vendors and Army employees at the Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS) conference in Falls Church, Virginia, said the Army’s technologies were holding up well during the war in Iraq. “If this isn’t an operational test, then there isn’t one that can be done in any of the test sites we have around the nation,” he said. “Things are working.”

But even in the friendly crowd, Cuviello admitted that the technology doesn’t always work perfectly. The war in Iraq will neither be short nor easy, he said.

“Are there glitches? There will be, and you will hear more of that,” he continued. “Are we stretched? Yes, very much so. Are the right things there? Yes. Are there enough of them? No. There’s not enough money out there for all the great things we’re trying to do.”

Beyond the war, Cuviello spent much of his 30-plus-minute presentation talking about making the Army more network-centric, or wired. In August 2001, a top-level Army memo directed the military branch toward a more wired backbone, and in July 2002, an Army memo outlined a goal of consolidating the number of servers used by 30 percent by September 2003.

The Army has reached that goal by consolidating many legacy single-function servers into newer multi-use servers, Cuviello said, and is now shooting for a total reduction of 50 percent of its servers by fiscal year 2004, which starts in October. Part of the struggle to consolidate servers, he said, is getting through the “if I don’t own it, and I don’t run it, it ain’t (worth anything) mentality.”

Another way to consolidate servers is to eliminate about 6,300 Microsoft Exchange servers the Army runs, Cuviello said. The Army is moving toward a Web-based Outlook system that has the same calendaring and task functionality that the Outlook e-mail program has, he added. By this summer, more than 30,000 Army workers will be using the Web e-mail system.

There are many goals for the move to a network-centric system, he said, including reducing the total cost of ownership for technology, delivering secure Web-based interoperable and open systems, and providing better Army oversight of its technology resources.

Cuviello admitted the Army is having trouble keeping up with patches on many computers still running Windows 95 or 98. Some in the Army have suggested those computers be only used in non-Internet functions, but Cuviello questioned how useful those “dumb” computers would be.

“Having a dumb computer is like having a typewriter — you don’t see a lot of those around anymore,” he said. “There’s a really good answer — get rid of all those damn things.”

Earlier during Wednesday’s conference, George Knizewski, lead engineer and contractor at the Army PEO EIS Chief Information Office at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, led a discussion with vendors over the Army’s plan to mass deploy 802.11b wireless devices in the field by 2008 to 2010.

Knizewski said Army soldiers are using wireless devices in the field in Iraq, and by using antennas in desert areas, have been sending and receiving data from a range of several miles, much more than the range of 300 to 500 feet that 802.11b devices typically have in urban areas.

The Army is also experimenting with third-generation, the so-called 3G, wireless technologies, Knizewski said, but is focusing more on getting current wireless technologies more secure. “We have to worry about encryption, we have to worry about firewalls, we have to worry about non-working communication lines,” he said. “We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of technology. We want to be one step behind the bleeding edge.”

About 50 vendors from the private sector, as well as several Army groups, had booths at the PEO EIS conference.