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It’s All About the Mission
By Jerome W. Mapp, DISA Corporate Communications

As DISA’s vice director, Navy RADM Elizabeth Hight helps lead a global, Department of Defense agency of more than 6,000 employees who are responsible for planning, engineering, acquiring, fielding, and supporting global net-centric solutions to serve the needs of the president, vice president, the secretary of defense, and other DoD components under all conditions of peace and war. During her message to the military, government, and industry leaders, Hight said that DISA’s focus is mission first.

“What will tomorrow look like?” Hight asked rhetorically. “It’s not just about the hardware, the software, the applications, the services, the data, etc. It’s about the mission. What I need for you to do today is to think about how we integrate those capabilities that we’re all working on.”

Hight compared the integration of capabilities at DISA to an ecosystem, where climate, landscape, animals, and plants are constantly interacting.

“Now, we know what an ecosystem is,” Hight said. “It really is a system that is spawned by the interaction of all the piece parts with their external environment. Think about what that means to us. Think about a collaboration tool that can be used by someone you never thought you would be communicating with, an unknown partner who is responding to a situation that is unanticipated.”

Referring to the previous day’s speaker — Army LTG Francis Kearney III, deputy commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) — Hight urged the audience to think about the different phases of war, such as the irregular warfare that USSOCOM is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Think about what it means, as he said yesterday, to work with the population in order to help them [the United States] understand how to support their [Iraqi and Afghani] government,” Hight said. “That’s interacting with an external environment in ways that are totally unanticipated, but it’s the way we will always fight in the future.”

Hight told the audience that delivering capabilities to the customers — the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines serving in harm’s way in far-flung places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world — means delivering them with speed. Referring to Kearney’s comments about the need for instant and mobile communications on the battlefield, Hight said, “I don’t remember hearing him say that he was willing to wait several years for it.”

Hight summed up the need to deliver capabilities and services rapidly to the warfighter with a quote by Klaus Schwab of the Davos World Economic Forum. She quoted, “We’re moving from a world where the big eat the small to a world where the fast eat the slow.”

While advances in technology have made information and the world more accessible, Hight believes those same advances have also given the United States’ adversaries the opportunity to expose and exploit the nation’s weaknesses. “They [adversaries] love the fact that we are slow because they don’t have to be,” Hight said.

“So what do we need for tomorrow?” Hight asked rhetorically. She said that the agency’s needs include increased velocity, increased access, and increased automation in order for DISA to continue its mission of equipping the warfighters.

“We need increased velocity in the way we field systems,” Hight said. “We need increased velocity in the way that we meet gaps in our ability to make decisions and [we need increased velocity in] our ability to meet missions. We need velocity in understanding how technology can be integrated.”

Hight told the industry partners that the option should not be to replace one system with another.

“I need you to define how the capability that you are building and delivering can be integrated into my larger picture,” she said. “So when you come into DoD, those of you who are our industry partners, the thing that will help us the most is to understand how the capability that you have developed and can provide fits into this larger picture.”

Hight said DISA needs to understand the trends in technology that have led up to today.

“We don’t just want to be able to get to a database with a current imagery. We want to be able to understand the trends that have occurred over a period of time,” she said.

On the need for increased automation, Hight said, “I’m a huge believer in letting machines do what machines do best and letting people do what people do best.”

“We have hundreds of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, civilians, and contractors out there every day, doing what they do best.” She urged the industry partners to give the nation’s military services the tools they need to complete their missions.

Hight spoke of the need for partnerships as the military services increasingly operate jointly in foreign environments.

“Each of us has to believe in our partnership. Each of us has to believe in the next big thing. The next big thing might be some sort of weird idea, but don’t dismiss it,” Hight said.

“It’s time to do things differently” — to implement GIG 2.0, to adopt a real-time service strategy, to believe in partnerships, and to optimize for the warfighters’ enterprise, Hight said. She added that the nation’s military services, DoD agencies, and industry partners have to be joint by birth, offering services that are “on command” and “on demand.”

“Everyone in this room has to be a teacher. If you’re not a teacher, then you are only promoting technology that feels good to you. Your number one job is to know this technology so well that you can teach it to your grandmother,” Hight said.

Returning to her initial theme of mission first, Hight said, “I’m here to tell you that it’s all about mission and it’s all about our personal commitment, our understanding, and our ability to communicate what this technology will do. It’s all about taking risks for a very good reason, and that very good reason is that brother, or sister, or son, or daughter, niece, nephew, or neighbor who have committed their lives to ensuring not only our way of life, but introducing the goodness of our way of life to others."

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