In the world of defense contracting these days, the equation is pretty straightforward: The military needs faster ways to acquire and adopt new tools and capabilities.
“It’s all about bringing new solutions to the warfighter in an expeditious manner. That’s key to their mission,” said Scott Barnett.
As vice president and general manager of the Defense Department practice at Lumen Technologies, Barnett is leveraging Other Transactional Authorities and additional means to make the wheels turn more smoothly.
“In the past, the federal acquisition requirements have slowed down achieving the immediate progress the government requires,” he said. “You cannot skip steps necessarily, but how can we shorten those steps? How can we get smarter about it?”
With Lumen CEO Kate Johnson setting the tone, Barnett is looking for methodologies and best practices government contractors can apply to get capabilities out the door faster. That starts with identifying key needs in the defense sector.
“We’re out interviewing government, listening to what their requirements are, and then we’re actually trying to do our own fast prototyping,” he said. “We have an innovation studio inside of Lumen where the objective is to crank out products as fast as we can, and then bring them to market so that the government can consume them.”
Rapid prototyping is helping the company to surface new products under the government’s Commercial Solutions for Classified program, a National Security Agency initiative that allows agencies to leverage industry innovation to deliver solutions more efficiently and securely.
Under CSfC, Lumen is developing network-as-a-service offerings. In the classified space, “you might take some traditional transport, put the encryption capabilities on either end of that, package it up and sell it as a service,” he said. “Government can consume it as a managed service, and they don’t have to be the experts in running it. We deliver it to them and manage the entire thing.”
The company is also exploring ways to provide the military with on-demand high bandwidth solutions, especially across connectivity-challenged areas in the Indo-Pacific region.
“We’re looking at pre-deployed bandwidth, pre-positioned bandwidth that we can turn on to support the mission at a moment’s notice,” Barnett said. Delivered as a service, “we can build the orchestration tools to support it, and we can put the encryption devices around it to protect it and secure it.” Think of this as Network-as-a-Service.
Lumen’s long track record of success helps differentiate it in this space.
“We’ve been in the network and connectivity business a long time,” Barnett said. “We’re one of the largest carriers of IP traffic on the planet. And the marriage of Level 3 and CenturyLink, which now make up Lumen, brought some very special digital assets and crown jewels to the conversation. It gives us great differentiation in the marketplace.”
As Barnett looks for growth opportunities, he sees the as-a-service offerings as key.
“Enterprise and government customers alike do not want a static network configuration anymore. They want to be able to scale up or down and consume bandwidth on demand,” he said.
“The Department of Defense is no different,” and in fact, may have a special interest in this approach, Barnett said.
“By building virtual networks that can flex and scale with the demands of the mission, it helps secure the network,” he added. “It isn’t a static network that sits in the ground, in the same configuration all of the time, where adversaries might be able to really hone in on that topology.”
In a virtual environment, “the network can change, it can morph, and therefore it’s not as apparent,” he said. Less apparent might be an advantage that benefits our national security interests.”
Barnett is looking, too, at the military’s goal of interoperability as defined by JADC2 and other initiatives. Defense leaders want common standards and common platforms, but they still tend to buy solutions piecemeal.
Lumen is leading by example as it looks to close that gap.
“We exchange traffic with other carriers every day,” he said. “We peer with other autonomous systems every day, and we do that over a defined and agreed-upon set of standards. There is no reason why we can’t take all of the military’s networks and knit them together with a defined set of standards, to accomplish the sensor-to-shooter vision that DOD has for its network capabilities worldwide. It absolutely can be done.”
A company like Lumen “can be the aggregator or broker, the one helping to knit the IT fabric together,” he said. “We are happy to do that and happy to work with any other carrier or any other network to accomplish that.”
On a personal note, Barnett said after 36 years in telecom and 15 in the government space, he’s motivated by serving the mission.
“I’ve never been in uniform, but I’m honored to be working hard every day to make sure the warfighters have a competitive edge,” he said. “For me personally, that’s what it is about.”