Fulcrum IT Strategy: What It Means for Warfighters and Agencies

The Fulcrum Strategy’s Objectives and Goals

The Fulcrum vision has four objectives that sum up DOD IT aspirations from the past several years for a unified, simplified infrastructure. It includes projected investments in hardware and software, sustainability and interoperability, and breaking down information silos to ensure warfighters have a seamless experience while using DOD systems.

“The goal is to provide the interoperable experience we have using computer systems in our personal lives within the DOD,” Beavers said.

Additionally, Fulcrum will give warfighters a highly secure IT landscape. It would increase the information available for their missions using modernized and upgraded networks and implementing zero-trust security policies across data, applications and infrastructure. Fulcrum-enhanced IT would be more agile and scalable and able to sustain high-performance needs regardless of the workload.

“We will need help from military IT leaders to turn this vision into reality by changing the decisions they make every day when solving problems in the digital workspace,” Beavers said.

The plan also requires private sector expertise to shift from legacy hardware and software to take full advantage of cloud computing and storage and artificial intelligence. A detailed implementation guide showing how the Fulcrum plans will be implemented is currently being developed, but it’s likely to follow these four lines of effort designed to strengthen the department’s warfighting ability through IT improvements.

Enhancing Warfighting Capabilities with Modern IT Solutions

This focuses on providing warfighters with a modern and proven IT infrastructure that succeeds in any environment. For example, it would benefit a mission with a small group of soldiers halfway across the world to be promptly connected to a command center, where they could share critically important data.

Fulcrum would also enable easier collaboration with allied defense forces, allowing warfighters to share information covering multiple domains, across and under oceans, and in space as well as in cyberspace. For example, a warship could receive targeting data from an allied partner hundreds of miles away.

Getting to full collaboration with other allies will likely take time to coordinate.

“This requires examining how some concepts would work in real time,” Beavers said. “How do you do a cloud with foreign partners, using federated identity and access management? We're conducting a series of experiments to see what we think will work and will then make adjustments.”

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Key Initiatives and Technologies for Modernizing Information Networks

With today’s warfighters in need of IT infrastructure that processes and circulates vast amounts of data from edge locations, IT hardware and software must be agile, scalable and extremely resilient.

With Fulcrum, DOD’s plan is to leverage commercial tech to increase infrastructure security and take a more data-centric approach. This would power a greater reliance on generative AI solutions and analytics, as well as modernizing storage into full and hybrid cloud environments.

The goal of modernization should be tightly focused on the end users.

“A modernized network needs to coalesce into that user’s perspective,” Beavers said. “It should feel like the internet, not a bunch of separate networks.”

The plan also includes integrating and simplifying siloed DOD networks and implementing a core zero-trust security framework across all environments.

Optimizing IT Governance for Greater Efficiency and Security

Streamlining policies and processes — as well as efficiently allocating resources throughout the modernized and more connected IT landscape — is considered an essential part of Fulcrum. Ideally, the plethora of data created by modernized networks will be processed and analyzed, quickly providing decision-makers with the information they need on the battlefield.

Systems and networks will continuously monitor their operations and evaluate IT performance. This will help identify legacy systems that fail to meet department objectives or incur high maintenance costs, and AI could even recommend replacement equipment or repairs. This kind of assistance from the technology itself would be a welcome change.

“The system would be giving us the information we need to make purchasing decisions,” Beavers said. “This is important because we’re good at turning things on, but maybe not so efficient at turning them off.”

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Building a Premier Digital Workforce with Training and Development Strategies

As with any large enterprise these days, an emphasis on identifying, recruiting, developing and retaining talent is considered essential to the success of Fulcrum. Besides the need for IT and cybersecurity professionals, there will also be more openings for data, AI and software engineering experts.

In addition, Fulcrum proposes investments in continuing education for DOD’s technical talent in order to keep current on emerging trends and mission needs and seek partnerships in industry, government and academia to increase workforce knowledge.

Overall, the Fulcrum project seeks to leverage available technology to modernize and streamline DOD’s IT infrastructure and bring together previous initiatives for unified IT.

“We’re at a tipping point right now, where you have all of these department strategies, and Fulcrum is the nexus bridging the gap between those strategies and enabling them,” said Robert Franzen, deputy customer experience officer in the DOD’s Office of the CIO, at the same conference. “Fulcrum doesn’t tell us how we do the work; it tells us why it matters to empower the workforce to go make it happen.”