Jane Edwards
Greg Wenzel, an executive vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said countering technologically advanced adversaries requires the Department of Defense to come up with a unified, open network that could enable warfighters to quickly access, share and analyze disparate data sets and facilitate the decision-making process on the battlefield.
“How that unified platform is built will determine how successful [Joint All-Domain Command and Control] will be in the long run,” Wenzel wrote in a commentary published Wednesday on Defense News.
He discussed how DOD could benefit from a model in which the department prioritizes ownership of data, application program interfaces, architectures and other critical technologies while partnering with commercial firms to build particular platforms.
“Government ownership ensures that a third-party system owner cannot keep the most critical data for themselves without the government’s involvement, giving the DOD maximum control,” Wenzel noted.
He added that under this option, the Pentagon’s specific needs “could be readily addressed by a collective of industry partners at a moment’s notice” and each unit within the department could experiment and customize platforms across a single network in support of missions.
