ARCYBER chief’s advice to industry: Make interoperable tech and start at the edge

TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — As the Army embarks on its modernization journey inline with the service’s recent transformation initiative, its cyber leader made clear that the service is seeking interoperable, off-the-shelf capabilities from industry to replace more bespoke, rigid offerings. 

“The biggest opportunities that I see are from a modularity and platform independence standpoint. I think our approach is to use shared frameworks and APIs [application programming interfaces] in order to have cyber and EW [electronic warfare] effects be able to talk to each other,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, the commanding general of Army Cyber Command, said Tuesday during a fireside chat here in Augusta. 

Army leaders have said that such interoperable capabilities will be vital in working with its sprawling Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative —  the service’s plan to combine intelligence, C2 and fires all in one system so commanders can have information more readily available. 

“If you’re a commander on the battlefield, I think that just means, you know, bottom line, it’s tactical flexibility. It’s the ability to take an effect and put it against any platform,” Barrett said. “If you’re able to do that, you’re able to really buy down some of the training that you might have to do because you’re able to reuse these effects and just plug them onto the platform according to the target that you want to prosecute.” 

Another benefit to buying interoperable capabilities, she said, is that it will over time help decrease the Pentagon’s mounting technical debt, something the department has grappled with for some time. 

“If you nail this modularity piece really well, as you continue with that experimentation, and you learn things and you modify what you’re doing, you’re going to be able to future-proof whatever it is that you’re doing because of this aspect,” Barrett said.  “You’re not going to be stuck with some sort of engineering tech debt that you have that has to be completely redone.” 

Barrett added that while the Army is looking for interoperable platforms and capabilities, industry needs to ensure that such tools are engineered in a way that they are first and foremost operable at the tactical edge, particularly in denied, degraded, intermittent and limited (DDIL) environments. 

“You need to make sure that this can work at the edge and then come back. Don’t try to take an enterprise solution and then really try to do cheetah flips to make it work at the edge. It just, it just really isn’t a good approach,” Barrett said. “I would say start with designing for that contestation when you’re building it. That really is key.” 

“DDIL has to be planned for,” she added. “You train like you fight. So every experimentation, every CTC [combat training center] rotation, every warfighter, we need to be inserting real world scenarios.”