Largest military buildup in the Pacific since World War II means network transport must keep up

A myriad of challenges facing the Department of Defense network transport include legacy systems, security, bandwidth, and latency. To address these issues and to “future-proof” network transport so it stays secure and scales to handle the growth in data traffic from artificial intelligence and cloud computing, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded Lumen the 10-year Indo-Pacific Transport Services (IPTS) contract in 2022. Under the contract, Lumen provides transport and communications services across the 36-nation Asia-Pacific region, including the network infrastructure backbone for US Indo-Pacific Command.

Breaking Defense discussed future proofing the network with Scott Barnett, vice president of the Department of Defense practice for Lumen.

Breaking Defense: What are the challenges the DoD currently faces when it comes to network transport and secure data transport?

Scott Barnett: At a high level, there’s a handful of challenges that they face. One is legacy systems. We’re spending a lot of time helping DoD move away from legacy systems and networks, as well as copper-based time-division multiplexing, TDM, and moving toward fiber.

Then there is security and compliance across the board. As networks get bigger and add more end users, you have to manage security and make sure everyone is compliant through Zero Trust and identity and credential management.

Third is bandwidth and latency. As applications become more robust – and AI is driving that, but applications are, as well – you’ve got to have the bandwidth and must minimize the latency. AI applications are already demanding extremely low latency, and it’s the latency piece that is driving the edge explosion – getting the processing, storage, and the computing as close to the end user as possible.

It’s all about the end user and their ability to consume the data. If you listen to Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton at DISA, it’s about getting the data to them securely, efficiently, and as quickly as possible. Can you cache the data at the edge so that the end user can get it faster, consume it, and take action on it? The terminology for this is sensor-to-shooter and JADC2, and it’s about how all these elements work together in what we call a fabric.

Remember that DISA is a network provider; they have many constituents such as the departments of the military, the fourth estate, and many customers that they ultimately need to serve. That means you have to have high up-time flexibility. All of this works together to provide them with a good end-user experience.

Lumen talks about future proofing the network? What does that entail?

There are several key ingredients to future proofing. One is flexibility, where you’re ensuring the network can integrate with new technologies and systems.

The second is scalability. You have to build the network to handle increased demand, higher bandwidths, and more connectivity. Fiber networks are highly scalable and can accommodate future expansion without significant changes to the infrastructure. Scale is a value proposition for our end users, and fiber already has future proofing built into it.

Then there’s modularity; can the components that we’re using in the network, whether that’s the optronics or the fiber, be easily upgraded or replaced? Reliability and stability are also becoming more important to reduce the risk of data loss and service interruption in the world of cloud and AI. Finally, it’s security, which is interesting.

You can use the network as a sensor – not just securing what’s going through the network or fiber, but also securing the network, securing the physical layer. Securing the outside plant is also important for some customers. We may even encase the fiber in concrete.

Increasingly, it’s the situational awareness of the network as a sensor that our customers are asking Lumen for. If they’re buying connectivity from me and I’m the underlying network provider, they want to know what the health and status of my network is.

Think about this: with the modems that drive the lasers inside the optronics that drive the light down the fiber, we’re now finding that all along the sensitivity of those lasers could actually detect the slightest movements. This has a lot of applications for public safety and detecting earthquakes or tsunamis. You could detect if someone’s tampering with the fiber or has accidentally used a backhoe to dig up your fiber.

All of that information, the auto sensing, the network as a sensor, we can take that information, drive that into AI and ML pools, and feed that insight to our customers for action. That might be to re-route traffic automatically using an AI tool or interface without any human intervention to orchestrate the traffic on your network around that vulnerability or failure.

Those are the things that feed into situational awareness for DISA and for the Department of Defense. I think we’re the leaders in it, and we’ve been doing it for years to make sure that we’re on this continuously upgradable approach and always future proofing.

Earlier you mentioned the word “fabric,” which refers to Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF). Explain.

When we talk about the Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF), it can be a wavelength or it can be dark fiber. Lumen is an underlying provider for, I believe, many of the hyperscalers and certainly for the DoD Information Network (DODIN), and PCF is the underlying infrastructure and approach to enable this ubiquitous connectivity that enables the mass amounts of traffic to flow easily from a sensor to shooter in one example.

Think about all of the sensor data that’s being generated from so many platforms across the satellite and terrestrial domains, including subsurface. All of the data coming off those platforms has to be stored somewhere.

As we discussed, it’s entirely more beneficial to the end user if it’s close to them, with retrieval or access time of that data in milliseconds. When you operate at the edge, you want less than five millisecond time for interaction.

Here’s an example of why. If you’re operating in the Pacific and sensor data is coming down off a variety of platforms, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to fetch that data from data centers or network operators that are in the continental United States. It makes more sense to have that data available in the Pacific closer to the folks that need it.

Lumen is enabling that by making sure that DISA has the open highways. We work hard in partnering with the Department of Defense to make sure that the network is proliferated, and we use the Private Connectivity Fabric to enable the DODIN to access that data and deliver it to the end users as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

We are what we call ‘Tier Zero’ when it comes to operating as a global carrier of IP traffic. We talk a lot about PCF, but what goes hand in hand is our ability to carry most of the planet’s Internet traffic, and to protect and defend the DoD Information Network globally. PCF enables us to be Tier Zero provider at the very top of the IP food chain for IP traffic on the planet, not just for the Department of Defense.

All of what you described plays a role in your Indo-Pacific IPTS contract with DISA. What’s the latest?

Three years ago we were awarded DISA’s Indo-Pacific Transport Services (IPTS) contract. That is a single award to Lumen, and we are the preferred transport-mission partner now in the Pacific.

You hear on the news every day that China is the pacing threat. We are working in an environment where we’re seeing the largest military buildup in the Pacific since World War II. We must and we are preparing DISA and the DoD to be ready across all domains.

We must provide them with private connectivity working with my carrier partners in the region, which I’ll come back to, to provide DoD with situational awareness, high availability, flexibility, all the things we mentioned previously so that if a conflict happens, they’re prepared. I have to enable them in the space domain, enable them terrestrially, surface, and subsurface. That’s all the submarine systems, all the telecommunication providers working in concert to make sure that we can deliver a seamless experience to DoD.

We discussed future proofing earlier, and IPTS included that even years before the Great Powers competition and China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific became top DoD priorities.

We came to the table with a compelling story and a lot of past performance on how we operate networks and future proof, and how we were the right network provider to support their mission going forward. The situation has continued to evolve since then.

For example, we are spending a lot of time working with partners in Australia, Japan, and Korea to strengthen the United States partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to make sure that we’re all knitted together and that we can operate seamlessly and can operate our networks into countries and across countries without service interruption in time of conflict. We are supporting joint forces in the Pacific, and those are the end users of DISA.