New military center seeks interoperable technology
- By Dawn S. Onley
- Feb 20, 2003
The Joint Chiefs of Staff plans to open a hub for technology companies to show off their latest wares to the Defense Department as a means to speed up development.
But Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg Jr., director of command, control, communications and computer systems for the Joint Staff, warned vendors not to submit technologies that rely on a specific platform or operating system. The IT Development Center will only consider technologies that are interoperable, he said.
Kellogg spoke last month in Washington at the Network Centric Warfare 2003 conference sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.
'If the stuff is not interoperable, it ain't gonna be bought,' he said. 'If you got proprietary stuff out there, I am on a campaign plan to not buy that stuff.'
Problems in fieldKellogg said Defense already has many applications that are not interoperable. For example, he said, soldiers in Kuwait and Afghanistan using different collaboration tools couldn't speak to one another.
'Now that is not the way you fight battles,' Kellogg said. 'The advantage we see on network-centric warfare is everything ties together on a network. You get tremendous capabilities by tying everything together.'
The technology center will be located at the Joint Forces Command in Suffolk, Va.