Observations on Army Cybersecurity Investments in the FY 2019 Budget

When the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon release the federal budget each spring, Deltek’s Federal Market Analysis team thoroughly reviews the Department of Defense’s Procurement and Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E) budget requests for the upcoming fiscal year to identify what information technology investments are planned. Using a set of targeted keywords, FMA identifies programs that invest in certain technologies of interest to industry contractors. These technology “verticals” include cloud computing, big data analytics, cybersecurity/weaponry, and others.

FMA’s analysis of the DOD’s fiscal 2019 budget request reveals that the United States Army intends to spend about $678 million in FY 2019 on programs which use cyber technology in one way or another.

Identifying the specific cyber- spend in each individual program is a bit imprecise due to the ambiguous way that the Army and the DOD report budget request data. Therefore, as you consider the following information please keep in mind that the numbers presented here are the requested budget amounts for programs that plan to use cyber technology for a specific purpose (e.g., security, information assurance, battlespace capabilities, modeling, training, etc. etc.).

The numbers presented here should not be considered the Army’s entire cyber capabilities budget (defensive and offensive) for FY 2019. In fact, since many of these capabilities will fall within the classified side of the DOD budget the numbers here are likely a significant understatement. They are best viewed as indicators of how and where Army program offices intend to use cyber-related technologies and services and the potential amounts they could spend on them.

Largest Programs

The table below lists the Army programs with a cyber component that we could identify arranged largest to smallest in dollar terms for FY 2019, $3M and above. The programs below account for more than 95% of the $677.8M program dollars we were able to identify and the top five programs represent more than 50% of the total. The FY 2019 budget amounts provided are from the Army Procurement and RDT&E budget requests, so the related efforts may include new work that could be available to industry if a contract for related products or services is competed.

Summaries of Top 5 Programs

• Communications Security (COMSEC) - Communications and Electronics Equipment – ($88.3M for Other Procurement) – FY 2019 funding for modern In-Line Network Encryption (INE) and Secure Voice (SV) devices and support fielding, for the procurement, fielding, depot support and New Equipment Training (NET) for KMI MGCs, NGLD fill devices, and ACES laptops and for associated government and contractor engineering support, Post Production Deployment Software Support (PPDSS), system technical and software support of the AKMI SoS components.
• Assessments and Evaluations Cyber Vulnerabilities – ($88.3M for RDT&E) – FY 2019 funding for the training of teams to conduct cyber vulnerability assessments on critical infrastructure in preparation for cooperative vulnerability and penetration assessments (Blue Teaming), adversarial assessments (Red Teaming), and assisting with conducting assessments of cyber dependencies, vulnerabilities and threats in accordance with the DOD Risk Management Framework. Funding also provides for Contractor subject matter expertise to conduct Security Control Assessments and Deep Cyber Resiliency Assessments.
• Communications Security (COMSEC) - Information Systems Security Program-Information Assurance Development – ($68.5M for RDT&E) – FY 2019 funding for enhancements to improve User activity monitoring (UAM) analysis productivity, data visualization, and workflow management. The analysis productivity objective is to develop and implement user behavior models that use UAM and other network data to identify anomalous user behavior over time, and to integrated new data sources into the UAM analytical data store and processing system. Data visualization advances will present UAM analysts behavior model processing results in an intuitive format that reduce the time required to review the results. Workflow management improvements will add new capabilities to the UAM workflow management system with the objective of enhancing analysis reporting productivity and metrics collection.
• Cyberspace Operations Forces and Force Support – ($65.8M for RDT&E) – FY 2019 funding for the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) to advance prototype, integration, and testing efforts to complete the capabilities required to meet Initial Operational Capability (IOC) per the PCTE Executive Board developed IOC definition.
• Defensive CYBER Operations – ($51.3M for Other Procurement) – FY 2019 funding equipment, engineering, integration, configuration management, testing, training, accreditation, and fielding of defensive cyberspace infrastructure and capabilities, including Garrison DCO Platforms providing prepositioned compute and storage capabilities, deployable DCO Systems providing fly-away kit capabilities, Cyber Protection Team Tool suite 2.0 reverse engineering and vulnerability management software tools and training, big data platform and training for cyberspace analytics capabilities, Plan X cyberspace operations mission planning training, forensics and malware analysis software for remote device analysis and repair, and infrastructure to support User Activity Monitoring on the NIPRNet and SIPRNet networks.

Conclusions

The Army’s cybersecurity and related cyberspace efforts focus on what one might consider traditional information assurance and communications security activities along with advancing the service’s modern defensive and offensive capabilities. The budget request points to a broad mix of hardware and software tools along with infrastructure improvements combined with a focus on developing the internal cyber-workforce skillsets that have been dominating DOD messaging to both industry and Pentagon leadership. The diversity of efforts also reflects the ongoing challenge that cyber presents to the Army, a challenge which is echoed across the Defense components.