Army establishes digital service

Continuing to build on successful initiatives established within the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the Army is standing up an Army Digital Service.

In a Dec. 16 announcement, Army Secretary Eric Fanning said the Army will be building upon the Defense Digital Service initiative. Fanning, who served as Carter’s chief of staff when DDS was originally established, explained he has observed the office’s success in bringing in people from the private sector for a “tour of duty” to help DoD solve difficult problems in the technological and digital world. DDS’s chief, Chris Lynch, described his staff as a “SWAT team of nerds” that come to the Pentagon to work on projects of impact.

The Army has a nearly unlimited set of issues they need help with, Fanning said during an event in New York City on Dec. 16 announcing the Army Digital Service Outpost, one of the first such projects among the services.

Two initiatives the Army’s new Digital Service will be working on involve recruitment and mitigating cyber vulnerabilities on Army websites. The Army’s current recruiting process is outdated and cumbersome, Fanning said, noting the need to attract the best and brightest into the Army.

The new Hack the Army initiative is another project the Army Digital Service will undertake. Hack the Army expands upon a DDS-pioneered bug bounty project in which vetted hackers — and now members of the Army — will be allowed to search for and disclose vulnerabilities discovered on networks.
Fanning conceded that the target set the Army is tackling is so vast, they can’t merely rely on their organic talent of uniformed military and career civil service personnel. The problems the Army is facing are increasingly complex, and the speed at which the service must identify and address them is increasing, Fanning said.

Bringing in outside talent from the technology world will help change the way the Army thinks about complex problems, Fanning said. He explained that while it’s fine that DoD is not the bastion of innovation it was 40 years ago, the force writ large has not caught up on their system processes to absorb the rapidly changing technology.

But this is not merely about technology, Fanning continued; the Army must think across the entire department as the service modernizes. As adversaries become more adept and faster, the Army must adapt. Top brass are buying in, Fanning said, especially after seeing what some of the adversarial capabilities in cyber and electronic warfare can do during war games.

Fanning also noted all the projects the Army Digital Service undertakes are at the unclassified level, which could expand in the future. These unclassified problem sets are commonly known problems, but they are bureaucratic headaches that can have a significant impact on people’s lives, he said.

Fanning said the current changeover of administrations should not affect the work being undertaken by the Army Digital Service.