Halvorsen echoes Rogers’ call to complete JIE

Pentagon officials have some practical questions to wrestle with before getting on with the business of deploying a department-wide IT platform, Acting Defense Department CIO Terry Halvorsen said June 25.

"I would love to be able to stand up here and say [the Joint Information Environment] will be done tomorrow," Halvorsen told an AFCEA cybersecurity conference in Baltimore. "It's not going to get done tomorrow. First of all, we couldn’t define what JIE is by tomorrow."

There is no timeline for deploying JIE to all geographies and military branches, according to a DOD official, but U.S. Cyber Command and NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers said a day earlier that the ability of DOD to thwart cyberattacks rests in part on JIE being up and running.

Speaking at the same forum, Halvorsen acknowledged JIE's importance in the future of DOD intra-network communications but laid bare his uncertainty over when the project would be implemented.

"The concept is absolutely the right concept," the acting DOD CIO said. "Concepts by themselves, however, are not executable. They have to be put into discrete, executable, definable … affordable, measurable objectives." He added that the department needs to clearly define those benchmarks and how DOD would fund their implementation.

"It is painstaking work. The way some of our systems are set up, it’s not going to be easy work. But that has to be done," he said.