By March, Army Futures Command plans to award an offeror with an agreement to establish a program that would start with coding workshops and beginner training and, after five years, end with a scalable government-only software development facility.
The Army’s first soldier-led software factory “shall be staffed, built, and run from zero existing infrastructure or policy precedent, to ultimately transition to Army self-sustaining operation as a fully-uniformed agile software development unit without a heavy reliance on contracted presence,” reads a solicitation posted to beta.sam Monday. “The future operating environment will include contested communications and the Army can no longer singularly rely on industry to provide software solutions given the infeasibility of contractors on the battlefield in a high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.”
The government in general is also interested in saving money it spends on proprietary software. A pilot at the Office of Management and Budget wants to address this while increasing innovation by using more open source code. But there is a recognition of associated risks, as malign actors can introduce vulnerabilities to popular libraries, and legislators have called for Defense officials to develop a process for code security reviews. Whatever officials come up with could prove challenging to execute, especially given a persistent talent shortage.
While the Army Futures Command describes the desired soldier-led software factory as being without a policy precedent, the Air Force is doing something similar with its dependent contractors software
