Defense Department CIO Terry Halvorsen recently let slip the Pentagon's plans to develop a top-secret mobile device to allow classified communications any time, anywhere. He's declined to offer any further details beyond a pilot expected this fall, but it appears that test run could be the start of something bigger.
"I don't want people to know when we're actually going live with those," Halvorsen said when asked about the top-secret smartphone capability on a call with reporters on Sept. 15. But he did say there has been preliminary testing, and the Pentagon is "continuing to see great results on that."
Now it looks like that preliminary testing is gaining momentum.
The initial top-secret mobile offering with be voice only and the target is a sensitive compartmented information (SCI) capability, according to officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency. DISA's Defense Mobile Classified Capability-Secret (DMCC-S) already is fully operational — Halvorsen himself is a user. That device is on track to be in the hands of more than 3,000 users by the second quarter of fiscal 2016.
"The initial pilot offering will be to a very limited set of users to pilot use cases where the user will be in an SCI" environment, said Kim Rice, DoD mobility portfolio manager at DISA. The test run will help determine "whether or not the requirement is there for larger infrastructure, a larger pilot or an operational offering. The answer to that will most likely determine some of the way ahead in terms of the operational deployment we may eventually get to."
Rice emphasized that the top-secret mobile capability is still a work in progress, but her office aims to have some users up and running this year.
"It's a new area and a new domain for us, so we're learning in that space," she said. "We're finding as we go along some lessons learned and unexpected areas we did not necessarily plan for. So we're moving forward, but it's on a day-to-day schedule."
Some of the issues cropping up involve things like figuring out where to host the capability, or what kind of clearances will be needed by the team handling deployment and integration, she noted.
"Because it's the first time we're doing this, there have been a lot of great discussions with [the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency] to determine requirements from a security perspective — and that takes time," Rice said. "There are a lot of learning curves going on."
