Dubbed Tatooine, the new workspace located at the state-owned Georgia Cyber Center is the expansion of the Jyn Erso pilot project launched last year to join DDS staff and Cyber Command soldiers to solve hard problems. The new space officially opened Thursday with a day-long hackathon “for cyber soldiers and the local tech community,” according to a press release.

“Tatooine will be a beacon for technical talent across the military — a place to write code and solve problems of impact,” DDS Director Chris Lynch said in an announcement. “Through this partnership, we are setting our best technical warfighters against our toughest problems with support and training from our DDS software engineers and experts. Together, men and women in uniform and tech nerds are finding new ways to rapidly solve high-impact challenges.”

The Army is gradually relocating its Cyber Command headquarters to nearby Fort Gordon. The state’s CIO Calvin Rhodes said this week that the center will play host to the unclassified training sessions for personnel who are waiting for their security clearances to be completed, a process that can often take at least six months, sister publication StateScoop reported. The National Security Agency, which has an outpost at Fort Gordon, will also have a presence at the Georgia Cyber Center. Officials said the $100 million development is the single-largest investment by a state in a cybersecurity facility.

Tatooine will join Army officers and soldiers with DDS technologists to tackle hard problems in unclassified “startup-like spaces” using private sector tools and methodologies, according to the Pentagon.

“For instance, project teams are using concepts of continuous software iteration and user-centered design, which are common in the tech sector, but not in the military,” the department said.

Tatooine is a way for DDS and Army Cyber Command to create more pilot teams without having to relocate Cyber Command personnel to Washington D.C. Other planned uses for Tatooine include supporting initiatives like the Hack the Army bug bounty program.

Army’s Cyber Command and Cyber Center of Excellence are providing the technical soldiers to staff teams and Professional Military Education credit for time spent in the program, according to the announcement. Senior Army officers from the center and the Army Cyber Institute will oversee day-to-day operations in the workspace and report to DDS.

“To help the Army resolve its toughest talent management and technical challenges, DDS and U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) have partnered to bring technically-gifted soldiers together with private sector civilian talent to rapidly develop immediate-need cyber capabilities,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, head of the command, said in a statement. “This innovative partnership will solve tough problems and serve as a powerful retention and recruitment tool.”

Through the Jyn Erso program, project teams have already tackled a few projects, such as a program to develop, produce and deploy a capability to combat commercial drones.

“The team developed a low-cost software system that is flexible enough to adapt to newly identified targets and easy for operators to use and transport in austere conditions,” the announcement said.

DDS and the Cyber Center of Excellence also launched a training pilot earlier this year as part of Jyn Erso to streamline cyber training courses. In its first iteration, DDS cut down the training time for a subset of Army soldiers from six months to just 12 weeks.

We know what you’re wondering, and yes, the names of the workspace and the pilot are Star Wars references. DDS, since its inception, has referred to itself as the Rebel Alliance ( a shoutout to the good guys in Star Wars), even naming the Pentagon’s landmark $10 billion commercial cloud contract the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. 

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President Trump launched in March the President’s Management Agenda, which listed “leveraging data as a strategic asset” as one of its goals. A request for comments open now until Nov. 16 is the second of three planned to get input on different aspects of the strategy being developed to do that, according to a new Federal Register notice. 

“The Federal Government needs a robust, integrated approach to creating, acquiring, using, and disseminating data to deliver on mission, serve customers, and steward resources while respecting privacy and confidentiality,” says the notice published in the Federal Register.

The Federal Data Strategy would give agencies a set of principles, practices and a year-one action plan “to deliver a more consistent approach to federal data stewardship, access, and use.”

“The principles are a framework for agencies, while the practices are actionable, yet aspirational, goals for a 5- to 10-year time horizon, and the action steps will be strategically chosen activities for agencies to implement the practices in any given year,” according to the notice.

This notice is seeking comment on a set of draft practices that have been developed by four working groups. Each of the working groups on the strategy is made of about 10 federal data fellows, and is focused on one of four strategic areas: “enterprise data governance; decision making and accountability; access, use and augmentation; and commercialization, innovation and public use,” according to the notice.

In the request for comments, the team is looking for ideas on how to organize the practices. It is also asking commenters to edit the list of practices, list any additional practices that might be relevant to add that aren’t included in the draft and identify any practices that should be omitted. Commenters can also provide examples of how government agencies at any level have implemented a practice successfully. The notice also asks commenters to provide specific action steps that should be associated with a particular practice.

The first request for comments, released earlier this year, tackled a draft set of 10 principles, asking people to “review and provide feedback on their clarity, appropriateness, completeness, and potential duplications,” according to the notice. Those principles were finalized and published earlier this week. More than 200 comments were received (237 to be exact), and the data strategy team edited the principles based on the comments.

The request for comments also asked for “practices related to key aspects of the Federal Data Strategy, on mechanisms for stakeholder engagement, and on use cases, or real-world examples, that leverage Federal Government data for the benefit of the public.”

The undersecretary for economic affairs and acting deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce, federal CIO, the chief statistician of the United States, and executives from the U.S. Small Business Administration and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, are co-leading the data strategy team.

The third request for comments is planned for January 2019 and “will seek input on a year-one action plan for implementing the Federal Data Strategy,” the notice says.

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The agency is proposing a single-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to support the Department of Defense Mobility Classified Capability (DMCC) programs for secret and top secret capabilities. It released a draft solicitation on Monday to get feedback from industry.

The contract would have a one-year base period and four one-year options, according to the draft. The total ceiling on task orders coming from the contract would be $100 million.

The agency said it’s planning to issue a request for proposals before the second quarter of fiscal year 2019. “Anticipated award execution is in the 3rd quarter of FY 2019.”

The contractor would be responsible for providing “the necessary personnel, equipment, services, and other items needed to support operations, maintenance, and sustainment requirements of DoD Mobility Program Office,” according to the draft solicitation.

DISA established a Mobility Portfolio Management Office to align various mobile device pilots across the DOD.

“A phased series of operational pilots have been conducted and allow DoD to incorporate lessons learned, ensure interoperability, and refine the requirements for a secure architecture to support Mobile Device Management (MDM), influence commercial standards, and create cost and operations’ efficiencies for DoD enterprise mobile users,” the draft says.

DISA said it’s hoping that it can over time lower the cost of that suite while addressing security and increasing productivity.

DMCC is an enterprise service offering for DOD customers to get access to the classified information network and commercial information services through approved mobile devices. The contract would provide “classified mobility capabilities, professional and engineering services, and enterprise-wide support,” according to the draft solicitation.

Some task orders may include “innovation tasks,” relevant to a rapidly changing mobile environment.

Eight performance areas were proposed in the draft solicitation: contract and program management performance; information assurance; gateway solution; system engineering support; test and evaluation (T&E); logistic and asset management; network and operational support; and mobility capability integration and innovation.

Industry can submit feedback through Oct. 26.

DISA has also been making changes to its unclassified capability. The DISA-managed DOD Mobility Unclassified Capability (DMUC) service was previously available to only mission partners who purchased DOD’s Enterprise Email service, but the agency expanded the service in August to all mission partners. Doing so sparked DISA’s mobility management business, drawing in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as customers, as well as some smaller agencies in the Defense Department, FedScoop reported.

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The FBI’s Information Technology Acquisitions Unit has been pursuing an IT contract to replace the $30 billion Information Technology Supplies and Support Services (ITSSS) blanket purchase agreement set to expire this month.

After conducting market research, the agency is nixing its original plan to hold a full and open competition, it said Friday in a notice. Instead, the FBI is planning to make awards to companies on the General Services Administration’s (GSA) IT Schedule 70.

The recompete has an estimated $5 billion ceiling. The previous contract had a $30 billion ceiling, but it appears that only about $2 billion was spent, according to the bureau. The original contract was awarded in October 2010 to 46 vendors on GSA Schedule 70.

In Friday’s notice, the FBI said it anticipates making 15 to 22 awards per track on the contract. Ten to 15 of those would go to large businesses, and five to seven would be for small businesses in each track. Those numbers may change depending on what the agency needs, according to the notice.

The tracks have also been reconfigured to match a framework used by chief information officers and other tech leaders called Technology Business Management. The proposed tracks now are end-user services, business application services, delivery services, platform services, infrastructure services and emerging services.

The notice didn’t say when a final solicitation might be issued.

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AI is a huge focus area for the DOD, which announced Tuesday the selection of a bilateral team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom for the Bilateral Academic Research Initiative. The U.S. research team will get up to $3 million in DOD funding over three years, while the U.K. research team will receive up to £1.5 million from the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MOD) over the same time period.

The Bilateral Academic Research Initiative — BARI for short — supports “high-risk basic research as a bilateral academic collaboration,” according to the release. The initiative is jointly sponsored by the Basic Research Office in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.K. MOD, according to the release. This is the pilot program’s inaugural year, which is focused on “artificial intelligence and collaborative decision-making.”

“This research should attempt to understand new phenomena or produce discoveries that would have significant impact on enabling new and improved operational technologies of interest to the US and UK militaries,” the funding opportunity announcement says. “The goal is to produce significant scientific breakthroughs with far reaching consequences in the field of artificial intelligence.”

Academic teams were asked to submit proposals “that build frameworks for new AI agents that allow the exploration of the ‘virtual human,’” which behaves “as an equal team member that can reason as well as its human teammates,” according to the funding opportunity announcement.

Dr. Maryam Shanechi at the University of Southern California will lead the U.S. team. Dr. Riccardo Poli at the University of Essex will lead the U.K. researchers.

But the aim isn’t to replace the human in the mix, and the initiative isn’t interested in proposals that try to replace humans or give them roles that don’t take advantage of “human strategic level thinking.”

Humans, DOD says, are better at understanding context, applying lessons, inventing the new and versatility. For example, humans are better at applying conscious critical thought or making something up “on the fly” and adapting it, the announcement says.

“The awarded team has proposed an innovative approach to create novel frameworks for humans and machines to be effective, collaborative teammates,” Bindu Nair, deputy director for Basic Research, said.

Dr. Kate Griffin, deputy head portfolio commissioning for defense science and technology in the U.K. Ministry of Defence, called the winning proposal “scientifically ambitious.”

Earlier this year the DOD also set up a center to explore artificial intelligence. Four areas of focus are planned for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, one of which will be increasing the department’s collaboration with the private sector, academia and military allies on the development of AI capabilities.

The department has also submitted an “extremely comprehensive” DOD AI Strategy to Congress.

“As artificial intelligence matures, we must redefine the role of computers in warfighting,” DOD CIO Dana Deasy said in August. “So how exactly will computers be seen as our partner?”

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The service sponsored HACKtheMACHINE this past weekend in Seattle to gather the best and brightest in tech to take a look at some of the Navy’s biggest digital challenges.

Rear Adm. Lorin Selby — the chief engineer and deputy commander for ship design, integration and naval engineering for Naval Sea Systems Command — caught up with FedScoop before the start of the multi-day event designed to breathe fresh air into the Navy’s evolution as a digital entity.

“If you look at how that software is so integral to the success of the Navy, we’ve recognized we need to think differently about the way we architect that software, develop that software, test and then field that software,” Selby said. “We recognize we need to be faster. We need to be more agile than we are today.”

The event — hosted by the U.S. Navy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Fathom5 — was broken up into three tracks: Maritime Capture the Flag, Data Science and the Seven Seas and Hack for the Ocean.

The third track, for example, was focused on getting developers to show the Navy how to use “modern development practices” to deploy applications, the event’s co-creator Zachary Staples said Friday.

“The lessons from that are going to go directly into the developer guide that the program office who owns that network is going to use to go contract for applications,” Staples said.

In that track, teams were asked to put themselves in the position of first responders to Hurricane Katrina and deploy applications that emulate what a first responder DevOps team would do.

DevOps is a big area of focus for the Navy, Selby said.

“We’re trying to really crack that nut because if we can do that faster and better than others then we will continue to rule the seven seas,” he said.

Selby said the Navy has “pretty cool” problems to solve, and events like this are all about giving different people access to them and building relationships.

“We’re coming into a place like Seattle. We’re meeting people we may not normally interact with, different parts of industry we normally don’t touch,” Selby said. “And we’re actually meeting folks, building relationships. And so when we leave here we’re not going to just drop that.”

Events like HACKtheMACHINE can even be a recruiting tool, leading someone to work for the Navy one day, he added. This was the fourth iteration of the event, which has been hosted in several different cities. Naval Sea Systems Command’s sponsorship the event is a sign the event is maturing, said Staples, who is also the founder and CEO of Fathom5.

“A lot of the Navy leadership is going to be here, and the program offices, to just get a feel for the culture, about how modern software developers operate, and how they’re led and projects are built,” Staples said. “And you can’t get that sitting in the Pentagon.”

The event isn’t full of the usual suspects at DOD events either, Staples stressed. The first iteration of the event, which was held in San Francisco, was attended by “young developers from Facebook, Snapchat, and other tech companies.”

“They told me, ‘We’ve been playing military video games our whole life. We just never actually met someone in the military,’” he said. “And so when we came to them with something that was in their wheelhouse, which was working on a hard problem in a competitive format, they gravitated towards that.”

Events like this get the Navy’s problems in front of a different but “critical slice of America,” Staples said.

On Friday, Staples also stressed that people involved with the event are not interested in “innovation theater.” In throwing an event like HACKtheMACHINE, the team involved has gone to a lot of effort to bring interesting, difficult challenges to contestants to get real outcomes, he said.

Data Science and the Seven Seas, one challenge, for example, was designed to help the Navy build algorithms to assist manned and autonomous vessels with navigation.
“This challenge will use data from ships underway on the high seas to develop algorithms to assist the Navy with preventing collisions for human-operated and autonomous vessels,”  according to the event website.

The Navy collects reams of data, Selby said, but just uses “a fraction” of it to make decisions.

“We need to do a lot more, and so events like this, HACKtheMACHINE, expose us to kind of what others are already doing or thinking, and allow us to take those ideas onboard,” he said.

The Navy is running pilots to look at ways to use its data better — such as looking at developing algorithms that use machinery data to operate machinery more efficiently, Selby said.

Past iterations of the event have reaped rewards for the Navy. The data science challenge at a past event in Boston helped the Navy learn valuable lessons in how frequently it should gather certain data, and in what data it actually needs to collect, Selby said.

“All that has gone back into how we are now building our systems to do what we call condition-based maintenance,” he said. “We’re trying to actually, more optimally, run our machinery. And so those algorithms that we looked at, as well as the data quality, we’re taking those lessons back on board.”

Events like HACKtheMACHINE are important because the Navy can’t rely exclusively on “beltway bandits” to get its tech, said Brian MacCarthy, principal of the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen Hamilton.

“To bring emerging capabilities, the ones that we talked about, and the ones that we’re focused on in the three tracks, it is increasingly becoming more important for us to understand how to work with a larger community of interest, again the academics, the incubators, the accelerators, the startups,” MacCarthy said. “I don’t think that the Navy can simply rely on, kind of the beltway bandits, alone.”

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Air Force innovation group AFWERX is running a challenge to get ideas that will shape the second iteration of Pilot Training Next, an initiative designed to help the service train new aviators faster with the same quality. To get these new ideas, the group is using an “ideation platform,” a virtual space where anyone can post ideas and comment or like the ideas of others, Lt. Col. Eric Frahm, chief product officer for Air Education and Training Command, told FedScoop.

Pilot Training Next, at its core, is about learning methods, Frahm said.

“How do we learn more effectively, how do we enable our students to become self-actualized learners within the program?” he said.

In this challenge, the service is looking for tech that will enable it to do just that — solutions in areas such as data science, artificial intelligence, biometrics, simulator development, virtual reality platforms or graphics engines and adult education platforms.

In participating, companies and academia get the chance to have their technology incorporated into “a total redesign of the program which has the potential to reach $100M or more in contracts over time,” according to the challenge website. And though Pilot Training Next is looking at these new solutions in the pilot context for now, Frahm said some of the ideas could be incorporated into other aspects of Air Force training.

“Your product gets embedded in the trunk of this tree that turns into this next generation learning system and learning ecosystem that again, spreads out not just through pilot training but to all learning activities than the Air Force conducts,” he said.

Version 1

The key technology-related contribution to the first iteration of Pilot Training Next was making an effective simulator widely available “so that the students could use a simulator basically whenever and wherever they wanted to,” Frahm said.

The simulator normally used in pilot training costs around $4 million, Frahm said, and students don’t get as much access to them because there are not very many. Virtual reality enabled the Air Force to get that cost down to about $10,000 to $15,000.

“The two simulators are not the same,” he said. “The $4 million simulator is very, very high fidelity to the aircraft. You do get something for that additional money. The question that we were exploring was what is the end result of having a simulator available on-demand versus having this kind of exquisite piece of hardware.”

The simulators used in the first version of Pilot Training Next, which included virtual reality headsets, Windows PCs and gaming joysticks, enabled students to learn at their own pace.

“Really the thrust of all of that is to hold quality as a constant and time as a variable…. just kind of enable students who are able to go really fast to go really fast,” he said. “And the students who want to have more time, or need to have more time, then give them the time that they need to get to the level that we need them at.”

New ideas

The second iteration of Pilot Training Next will look to integrate more advanced technology that can help the Air Force better train its pilots, Frahm said.

People in industry, academia and the military can submit ideas to the challenge until Oct. 12. Rapid prototyping and collaboration around the new ideas are scheduled to run from November 2018 to January 2019.

“I think that as we move forward it becomes a little bit more about technology,” Frahm said. “We’ve done the human part. Now it turns into something about how do we extend those lessons that we’ve learned and make them more effective?”

The content of the training is “more or less worked out” while the methods to deliver it are “in play and are getting experimented with,” he said.

One potential area of interest is improving the artificial intelligence used to create individualized training. The AI tutor used in the first iteration of the challenge “could not keep pace with student progress,” according to the challenge website.

Another big area of interest is getting an automated scheduler, Frahm said. “Every flying squadron in AETC but also in the Air Force, you have people who are doing the scheduling. And a lot of that can be reduced down to a math problem.”

Biometrics is another area to improve, particularly “the ability to ingest multiple biometric data streams, assess it, then change the learning environment to optimize student performance,” the website says.

The challenge platform

The platform AFWERX is using to host the challenge is a way for industry, academia and the military to meet in a virtual space to “submit ideas, discuss them, provide quick feedback to each other,” Frahm said.

“If we just as a military go out and try to scout for these ideas, we’re kind of limited to our own personal network,” he said. “And this is a way of expanding on that network, reaching into different sectors of industry than we don’t normally get to reach, get to talk to.”

In launching the challenge, there have already been a few lessons learned, Frahm said, like prioritizing search engine optimization to reach a wider audience. He also emphasized the importance of crafting the request in language that’s simple for people to follow.

“I think it’s really easy to end up crafting a message that speaks to yourself,” he said. “For people who are even trying to follow what you’re doing, they just don’t have the same level of familiarity with your program.”

Government often doesn’t think about how to market its ideas, Frahm said. The key, he said, is “making sure that people can quickly and easily understand what it is you need without having to devolve into the language of requirements where you’re spelling out every last little detail for people.”

The team plans to go through the submitted ideas, and the comments and questions on them.

“If the community just really thinks that’s a great idea, that’s something that’s really important to us,” Frahm said. “And we’ll try to deconstruct — well what is it about this idea that everybody’s responding to?”

Thirteen ideas had been posted as of Sept. 21.

“We’ve had a great response from the community so far,” Frahm said.

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The leadership from both parties on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness expressed skepticism in a hearing Thursday that the new command would be the solution to the Army’s past acquisition woes.

“While I am hopeful, I am not yet persuaded that a new command is the right answer to the Army’s acquisition challenges,” said Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., the subcommittee’s chairman.

The Army has said that establishing this new fourth command is the “most significant” reorganization effort it’s undertaken since 1973, something the chairman also noted in his opening statement.

“It’s difficult to envision how all these changes will synchronize in a smooth fashion,” Wilson said.

Ranking Member Rep. Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, also expressed concerns in her opening statement, noting that it’s fair to ask if in creating this new command, the Army is “in fact just creating more overhead that will further slow an already cumbersome process.”

“While I know the intention is to keep this new four-star command small, history shows that over time all such commands grow rapidly,” she said. “No matter who is in charge, large administrative commands like this often develop internal processes that consume vast amounts of time and resources.”

She said the command is set to tackle issues that are already being addressed elsewhere within the service and expressed concern that the Army is standing up a four-star organization without a clearly defined command relationship and organizational plan. Some duplication as the command is stood up is to be expected, she conceded, but she wanted to know what the plan would be for reducing inefficiencies.

Futures Commander Gen. John Murray said he saw his appointment as a way to provide centralized oversight and actually streamline several bureaucracies.

Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., asked if the witnesses saw any coming challenges to “harmonizing authorities” in the establishment of Army Futures Command.

“Yes sir, there will be cultural challenges,” said Ryan McCarthy, undersecretary of the Army. “We have decades of ingrained behaviors, so like all things, this will require a great deal of senior leadership focus… and communication internally and externally to stakeholders.”

Murray said among his priorities going forward is synchronizing “efforts across the entire modernization enterprise” and ensuring those efforts are focused on what’s most important to the Army.

Other members, though, were optimistic about the approach.

Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said he understood the “logic and intent” of the initiative, considering that the Army has struggled over the years with several of its acquisition programs.

“I think what you’re trying to do, which is to try to reset the whole approach here in terms of acquisition certainly makes a lot of sense,” he said.

What’s coming?

The Army stood up the new command’s headquarters in Austin at the end of August. But that was just the first step, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said then. The Army is shooting for “full operational capability” around summer 2019, by which point the headquarters will have about 500 personnel.

The Senate also confirmed Maj. Gen. James Richardson to be deputy commander of Army Futures Command earlier this month. 

And a key part of the reorganization effort is the command’s cross-functional teams, which are focused on the Army’s modernization priorities. They are already at work, and are spread out across the U.S., McCarthy said.

Murray said Thursday that the command is “very close” to hiring a chief technology officer. McCarthy added that the command is recruiting a dean of a “very prestigious engineering school,” “someone who is world class in systems engineering,” for the position.

For staffing, the command is looking for very “non-traditional” talent in areas such as artificial intelligence and data analytics, Murray said. The Army is going to look to entrepreneurs in the ecosystem to either hire or work with on a consultant basis, McCarthy added.

Murray is also trying to stand up an organization in Austin called the Army Application Lab that would be similar to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Air Force innovation organization AFWERX to be co-located in Austin’s Capital Factory, a startup accelerator space that already houses outposts from the latter two organizations.

The lab will be focused on “scouting and researching technologies” to find potential technology the Army would want to accelerate or bring into an existing program, Murray said.

So what does this all mean for the future of the Army, one lawmaker asked, in, say, about two years?

“I can’t do miracles, so I’m not going to deliver you a new tank in two years, but what I do think you will see is some of the capabilities the cross-functional teams are working on will be in production and being delivered in the hands of soldiers within the next two years. Not all of them, but the couple key pieces of it,” Murray said.

But he added that Congress can expect “much shorter timelines to deliver capabilities.”

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The DISA-managed DOD Mobility Unclassified Capability (DMUC) service was previously available to only mission partners who purchased DOD’s Enterprise Email service, but the agency expanded the service in August to all mission partners. Doing so has sparked DISA’s mobility management business, drawing in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as customers, as well as some smaller agencies in the Defense Department.

“We are interested in bringing on as many DOD mission partners as we can,” DOD Mobility Portfolio Manager Jake Marcellus to FedScoop, saying DISA is managing about 125,000 devices and adding about 3,000 additional devices per week. “So can we scale? Yes we can.”

The new availability of the service doesn’t change much for DISA as an organization, but it impacts mission partners who now don’t have to stand up or maintain their own mobility programs, Marcellus explained. DISA’s service offers mobile device management, mobile security management and application management.

“On average, many of those programs may service somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 users,” he said. “And we’ve even recently seen customers or mission partners that have come to us, and they’re managing a whole mobility program with only 500 users. So that’s really not cost-effective when you think about it.”

DISA can also host an app if an organization has an application or plans to create one.

“We tell you what the standards are, validate those standards through a vetting process and then place you in a mobile application store that we host here,” Marcellus said. “And I’ll say that’s where…we see a lot of innovation and ideas.”

DISA itself doesn’t provide devices — it issues supported-product lists, which show devices that have been vetted by the National Information Assurance Partnership that also work with its service.

Marcellus said customers should expect a commercial experience through the service.

“We are using commercial services, not anything specifically government,” he said. “So you can expect that the experience will be like the experience you have with your personal phone.”

With August’s update in service came a major reduction in price — now $4.31 per device, per month, down from $7.54. Because of improvements to the service, the agency is bringing on customers “at rates that we did not expect,” Marcellus said. “We can bring on one command that will be 10,000 customers additionally, let’s say in 2 months,” he said speaking hypothetically. “So based on that we’re able to reduce price.”

The team is also focused on efficiency efforts to drive down costs, looking for ways to minimize interaction for easy questions or common problems, such as with a mission partner user page with basic information. “So you don’t have to call us, you can go on there,” Marcellus said.

DISA can also give a partner basic management privileges, through tiered permissions, “so that they can manage what I would say is the majority of the functions,” Marcellus said, like password resets, onboarding and offboarding as common support jobs.

“Whatever are the common support things, we don’t want them calling DISA, we want them to call whoever you call for your services today,” he said. “It sounds like a simple idea but that’s been pretty powerful, right, I think from an emotional standpoint because people don’t like to move the control.” Therefore, they can continue their IT support operations without change.

DISA started its mobility program in late 2012, linked with DOD Enterprise Email, an enterprise service offering for unclassified email. But DISA Director Vice Adm. Nancy Norton wanted to expand the service beyond just those who subscribe to DEE, Marcellus said.

“I think it first came in the form of a question: ‘Why not?’” he said. “Is there some type of technological impediment or tight coupling that we would have to figure out?”

There wasn’t, so they got to work.

“One thing that’s important is we’re starting to see the availability of cloud-based email, and DOD organizations that are interested in that,” Marcellus said. “So we know that we can extend our capabilities, our mobile capabilities, to integrate with cloud-based email systems as well. So that seems to be the way that some agencies are going.”

DISA is also mulling changes to its classified capability. This summer DISA issued a request for information searching for existing automated provisioning tools to support devices used in the Department of Defense Mobility Classified Capability (DMCC) program. DISA plans to issue a request for proposals this quarter, Marcellus said.

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At a ceremony Friday in downtown Austin, Army Futures Command began its mission. Earlier in the day, John Murray, its leader, was promoted to four-star general. The Senate confirmed Murray’s appointment earlier this week.

“For too long we have focused only on cost, schedule and performance,” Murray said Friday in his remarks. “We must now also focus on value. Value to the young men and women that will be operating the equipment we build, and utilizing the concepts we develop.”

The new command, as Army Secretary Mark Esper described it in July remarks from the Pentagon, is “consolidating the Army’s entire modernization process under one roof.” One of the factors driving the decision to create the command, Esper said at the time, is recognizing that in today’s environment the service must be able to design, develop, test and procure more quickly and more affordably than it has in the past.

Army Futures Command will be focused broadly on advancing the service’s six modernization priorities: long-range precision fires; the next generation combat vehicle; a future vertical lift platform; the Army network; air and missile defense; and soldier lethality, according to an Army publication.

Friday marked the “activation” of the command, but it’s just the first step, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Friday in a press conference. The Army has said it’s shooting for “full operational capability” around summer 2019, by which point the headquarters would have about 500 personnel.

“What AFC looks like now may not be what AFC looks like in a year, or two years,” Esper said during Friday’s press conference. “I think what we have to do is be willing to operate in the grey for some number of time as the commander figures out what is the best organizational structure to help him accomplish his mission?”

The command will have about 75,000 square feet of space at three different locations in the city, according to an Army publication.

“Its footprint will include a 20,000-square-foot incubator hub, where 100 personnel from the command will work with small and large companies as well as entrepreneurs to develop technology to help modernize the Army,” according to that Aug. 15 publication.

Army Futures Command joins several other Defense organizations in Austin. AFWERX opened a new hub this summer, joining the Defense Innovation Unit at Capital Factory, a co-working space.

Locating the command in Austin, Esper said Friday, “demonstrates the type of bold change needed to excel in today’s complex environment.”

Austin Mayor Steve Adler said that the city’s culture is one of several reasons it was chosen — the community in general is innovative, creative and entrepreneurial, “and bottom line, it’s weird.”

“‘Keep Austin Weird’ means to me that in this city it’s OK to take risks,” Adler said. “It’s OK to fail in this city so long as you do it quickly, and then you innovate and you iterate and you keep trying until you succeed.”

Murray said Friday he is actually returning to Texas. His family has spent a collective 10 years or so there, he said.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the singlemost key to our success will be our ability to tap into the talent, the entrepreneurial spirit and the access to key partners that are present today in Austin,” the newly-minted commander said.

The Army started with 150 prospective cities to choose from for the new command, before narrowing down to five: Austin, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Raleigh.

The Army announced in July that it had selected Austin for the command’s headquarters, noting in a video that Austin had been chosen for its “quality of life and proximity to commercial technology, research and development, and academic innovation.”

In remarks on Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott said the selection is a “natural partnership” given what he called a “long enduring bond” between the State of Texas and the U.S. military.

“And Austin, Texas, and the University of Texas have become the epicenter of innovation and transformative technology,” Abbott said. “This headquarters takes the next step in the shared mission that we all have been working towards.”

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