“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Josh Luckenbaugh, Staff Writer
“Instead of building a one-way bridge from each DARPA program to each program in Cyber Command, we’re building a bidirectional, multi-lane highway that’s going to allow us to continue to bring a flow of technologies”
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“Cyber Command and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently signed a new binding agreement formalizing how the two organizations will collaborate to deliver key cyber capabilities.
The new agreement is the next step for the Constellation pilot program DARPA and the command launched in 2022.
Katie Sutton, chief technology advisor to the commander and director of Pentagon operations at Cyber Command, said the agreement lays out the “process that’s going to allow us to continually bring capabilities from DARPA to the command.
“Instead of building a one-way bridge from each DARPA program to each program in Cyber Command, we’re building a bidirectional, multi-lane highway that’s going to allow us to continue to bring a flow of technologies — not necessarily a one-to-one mapping — but to be able to look across the entire DARPA portfolio and identify which of those elements are going to be the most important,” Sutton said at the recent Offset Symposium.
Once a DARPA project is chosen by Cyber Command, the Orion Consortium — consisting of DARPA performers and Cyber Command developers — works collaboratively to deliver capabilities, a command release stated.
Multiple projects have undergone further development through the Constellation program, with two more pending award, the release said. The first pilot project delivered an operational prototype after six months and featured “initial capabilities greatly exceeding its predecessor and starting a groundbreaking pathway for evolutions and integrations planned for the remaining two and a half years of the project.”
Cyber Command is hoping Constellation can be the “model for how we would harness innovation across all of the government labs and industry as well going forward once we prove out this process,” Sutton said.
“It’s … definitely a model that could be scaled across the” Defense Department, she said. “We’re putting a lot of deliberate thought into how do we make this repeatable? How do we look at this from a technology perspective, a budgeting perspective, an acquisition perspective, so that we don’t have to recreate the wheel each time, and we can create that nurtured pipeline to bring the capability through?”
Having operational users from the command experiment with the technology and provide input will result in a “product that is more likely to transition and actually be used by the warfighter, rather than just a tool … within their toolbox that never gets used,” she said.”
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