Highlights from the U.S. Army’s FY 2025 Unclassified IT Budget Request

The Department of Defense (DOD) always takes its sweet time releasing data concerning its unclassified information technology (IT) budget request for the coming fiscal year. This year has proved no different. The first federal IT budget data came out nearly one month ago, and yet only recently did the DOD add its data to the IT dashboard where this information is complied.

Today’s post digs into the portion of the DOD’s unclassified IT budget request proffered by the U.S. Army and provides a few highlights in the data.

Total Request

Starting with the Army’s total unclassified IT budget request for FY 2025, we see that it continues along a flat trajectory.

After rising to a $7.0B high in FY 2023, the Army’s requests have been coming down for the last two fiscal years. They are still not down to the levels seen in FY 2021 and 2022, but the FY 2025 request is down 11.4% compared to the budget requested in FY 2023. Add rising costs due to inflation, and this drop suggests there may be significant stress in the Army’s IT program management offices as they struggle to do more with less. This may translate into delayed and/or canceled efforts, depending on the importance of a given project to the Army’s plans.

Request by Mission Support Category

Parsing the data by mission support category reveals that the Army requests most of its IT budget for projects which do not fall neatly into established categories. This makes sense as efforts related to things like command post modernization and weapons systems are in a category of their own.

This leaves those systems that have largely to do with back office business operations, such as records, financial, and procurement management.

Top Programs (FY 2025 Only)

Turning to the top ten programs by requested FY 2025 budget, we see that several of these are indeed business systems.

• Common User Infrastructure - $977M
• Non-Core Network Infrastructure Data Centers - $636M
• Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement - $490M
• Warfighting Training Tools - Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation - $337M
• Force Readiness Communications Support - $308M
• Enterprise Resource Program – Sustainment - $266M
• Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization (IMOD) Program - $149M
• Enterprise Business Systems – Convergence (EBS-C) - $139M
• Information Management - Automation Support - $138M
• Global Combat Support System-Army (GCCS-A)          - $114M

I’m not going to go into detail on well-known investments, such as GCCS-A or EBS-C, but here is a bit of information on the lesser known investments:

• The Common User Infrastructure investment “accounts for end-user computing hardware, software, and services,” suggesting that the Army’s biggest program will fund the purchase of basic IT end-user equipment and devices.
• The Warfighting Training Tools investment is comprised of “tools that are designed to capture, record, and present training data.” Some of these tools are cloud-based, such as those used in the Synthetic Training Environment (STE).
• Information Management - Automation Support funds “resources for the analysis, design, programming, operations and maintenance of systems that offer automation support.”

Cloud Services

Finally, a comment on cloud services. As is the case with many of the investments submitted to the IT Dashboard, cloud services are embedded within them. This makes it difficult to parse out what the Army is spending on cloud computing. The nearly $500M Microsoft ELA is all devoted to expanding the use of Army365, the services’ instance of Microsoft365, so there’s that. In addition, the Army requested $94M for the Army Enterprise Cloud Environment. There’s also $50M for ServiceNow licenses and another $28M for the CReATE DevSecOps architecture that the Army uses for continuous integration/continuous delivery. Beyond this, I am currently searching through the rest of the budget for additional cloud investments. More on those as the data becomes available.