Defence’s Chief Technology Officer has outlined a 10-year transformation of Defence’s information environment, adopting advanced technology which will support warfighters on the battlefield of the future.
Justin Keefe, Chief Technology Officer in the Defence Chief Information Officer Group said the group was already in the warfighting business rather than the ICT (information, communications and technology) business.
“Whether that is our cyber experts defending the network every day, our architects setting technical and patterns for our C4ISR systems to everyone in between – it all contributes to the department’s ability to undertake warfighting,” he told the Military Communication and Information Systems (MiLCIS) conference in Canberra.
“Make no mistake. We are here to contribute, not just support the defence mission, and ensure the ADF has the means to fight and win in the digital age,” he added.
Keefe said his focus over the near to long term was to position Defence to better harness the advantages proffered by ICT advances and that the plan to get there had already been laid out.
Since the MilCIS conference in February, Defence has released its ICT and cyber security strategies.
Next will be the defence technology plan to be released before end of year, setting out in plain English where Defence ICT will go and what technologies would be critical to the years ahead.
“At its heart is transforming our single information environment into a future warfighting network that will underpin the sensor-decider-effector loop and generate warfighting effectors for the ADF,” Keefe said.
He also said that plan would provide a high-level technology roadmap to transform the current ICT environment into one that was more networked, agile and positioned for the realities of modern technology-driven warfare.
The focus will be on generating effects for the warfighter. Step one would be to get the foundations right by modernising networks, moving towards zero trust architecture and transitioning to hybrid cloud technologies.
Over the near-term, investments in high-speed links and next-generation network technologies will strengthen the connectivity infrastructure to provide fast secure communications and data exchange where and when needed.
“With this foundation in place, over the next 3-5 years Defence will look to accelerate decision-making through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud and edge computing,” he said.
“Next generation wireless networks, sovereign satellite capabilities and a resilient, distributed ICT environment will ensure defence is more threat aware and able to operate at speed against these threats.”
Defence will move to a distributed ICT landscape to allow it to operate securely in degraded, disconnected and contested information environments.
But Keefe said Defence would need to prioritise, noting there was a finite amount of time to deliver the most critical capabilities.
“We most laser focused on what is essential and necessary rather than what is easy and lucrative,” he said.