DoD Application Store: Enabling C2 Agility

摘要

The Department of Defense and the military Services are currently working to provide widget and app storefronts to disseminate applications that enable agile, composable, C2 capabilities. This paper will examine the technical and non-technical lessons learned through the effort to implement the DoD Application Store on an Ozone Widget Framework. The government-developed open source Ozone Widget Framework will allow developers of web applications to register their app in a single repository where it can be discovered, used, and composed by the warfighter. The DoD Application Store, as an Ozone Marketplace within the Ozone Widget Framework, will include automated delivery of software patches, web applications, widgets and mobile application packages. The envisioned DoD Application Store will deliver software from a central repository, over the land or air, to the warfighter at the tactical edge thereby increasing C2 agility. Over the last several years DISA, PEO C4I, and SSC Pacific have moved to implement this framework, and have discovered a number of additional benefits and encountered previously unknown obstacles. As the DoD has moved to emphasize the importance of efficiency and cost savings, the savings offered by this agile C2 solution have grown even more important as the current methods of distributing software components to the tactical edge are time consuming and costly. While the ability to distribute application packages to the tactical edge is technically feasible, the process of shaping the DoD acquisition system to match the agility of the C2 tools has been challenging.