The Department of Defense (DoD) is gearing up to have its final planning meeting in April on the agency’s National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) before sharing the results of its work with Congress, a senior Pentagon technology officer said today.
David McKeown, deputy chief information officer (CIO) and senior information security officer at DoD, discussed the progress of some of that work today at the OpenText Government Summit organized by GovExec.
DoD released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy in January, with an aim to catalyze generational change in the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) and create a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem.
The 60-page strategy lays out four long-term strategic priorities to serve as guiding beacons for industrial action and resource prioritization: resilient supply chains; workforce readiness; flexible acquisition; and economic deterrence.
“First of all, we just went out and said, what are we all doing in the department … and so we collected all that information, and we built a placemat that described four bins that we were working on,” McKeown said today.
He said that some of the work on the strategy has involved “getting our governance straight within the Department of Defense … that is making sure that we know all the roles and responsibilities of each organization that wants to contribute to doing cybersecurity in some way, shape or form, [and] that we meet on a regular basis.”
Part of the DIB cybersecurity improvement focus, he continued, involves “things like checking compliance levels for [NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2],” which focuses on recommended security requirements for protecting the confidentiality of controlled unclassified information.
McKeown also talked about the need to help industry partners protect information and said, “this would focus on our most critical technologies and how we can increase the resiliency and the recoverability of those networks.”
“Lastly, we just want to increase collaboration while we’re working on the strategy,” he said.
“I think when we go back to Congress, I think we’ll get a passing grade this time with our strategy,” McKeown said. “The next phase is working on an implementation plan, and that’s where we’re going to partner with industry really tight, especially on the things that affect them,” he said.
