 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
|||||
|
|
|
Home > News & Events > MITRE Publications > The MITRE Digest > | |||||||||||||||||||
Ensuring Communications Survivability at the Pentagon November 2003
They know the Pentagon as few others do—all 6.5 million square feet of it, including five wedges, each big enough to hold about 12 superstores. And they know how the 1,700 miles of cabling should fit so Pentagon staff can communicate with each other and with the outside world. MITRE team members working on the Pentagon Renovation program (or PenRen, as it's known informally) find their expertise much in demand during the project's latest phase: implementing the Command Communications Survivability Program (CCSP). MITRE staff are serving as the system integrator for CCSP, an initiative designed to ensure the Pentagon's communications capacity can withstand another attack like that of September 11, 2001. The program, expected to cost $258 million, is on a fast track: work began last spring, with a schedule calling for completion in 2005—a reflection of the urgency with which the Pentagon views the task. "CCSP is critical to the Pentagon's post-9/11 building performance and systems performance assessments," says Michael R. Sullivan, PenRen's program manager. "If the plane had hit somewhere else, the Pentagon could have lost all voice and data connection with the outside world. That's unacceptable." A Fresh Look The foundation for CCSP was laid in the first days after 9/11. The urgent business of reconstituting the building led to something virtually unheard of: calls from a number of contractors, offering their assistance free of charge. It led to a meeting with a number of contractors at the Pentagon the Saturday after the attack, in which Fred R. Budd, director of the Pentagon's IT agency, told them what he was looking for: a fresh look at the building's network infrastructure, with an eye toward making the network survivable in the event of another attack. Budd wanted to go beyond the immediate reconstitution and address the basic vulnerabilities 9/11 brought to the fore. "We gave the contractors some very specific instructions," Budd says. "We told them, 'We want you to take a fresh look at our network infrastructure, and we want to make this a survivable network. You need to help us identify the vulnerabilities and make it better.' I also told them that we did not necessarily want the latest and greatest (technology). We want something that works." From the outset, Budd also wanted a MITRE presence on the project. For example, he asked for a MITRE chair or co-chair for each of the working groups focusing on major IT areas—ADP, mainframe, telephony, network and messaging. "Fred also asked me to take the lead on the overall integration team, which would take the solutions from these four teams and pull them together into a project," says Charlie Richardson, leader of the MITRE PenRen team. "And that became the genesis of CCSP."
The MITRE representatives are working with an integrated products team led by Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which is developing ways to ensure the survivability of networks, data storage, and voice and messaging systems at the Pentagon and other U.S. military facilities. MITRE's job will be to make sure whatever solutions the team devises fit with the rest of the IT infrastructure, much of which has been upgraded since 9/11. "The real crux of not just CCSP but the whole PenRen IT program is in the integration areas, and that's where I think MITRE can provide the impetus for making sure all the integration occurs," says Clarence Hamilton, lead government representative for the CCSP project. "We've got all these different contractors looking at open network infrastructure. And so there has to be some commonality of standards and architecture." The integration mission is one MITRE is well equipped to carry out. We have supported the PenRen program since 1992 and have been deeply involved in the short-term effort to reconstitute the building after 9/11 and the long-term effort to upgrade and protect an IT infrastructure with vulnerabilities made apparent by the terrorist attack. "MITRE has been part of the Pentagon Renovation program as an engineering function right from the very start," says Richardson. "And the PenRen program has taken on a lot of importance besides just being a brick-and-mortar construction site. The community inside the Pentagon now looks to PenRen to solve any problem given that community. Nowhere else in the Department of Defense do you have the opportunity to be in the Pentagon environment, to be looking at redoing the whole command and control infrastructure—not only the physical infrastructure, but also the IT infrastructure inside the building, and the continuity of operations sites that support the Secretary of Defense." Turning a Dream into Reality Overhauling the Pentagon's IT infrastructure is an ambitious proposition—and for many years, it was a prohibitively expensive one. "We talked about it and dreamed of it," says Keith Reck, a project leader with MITRE's PenRen team, noting that the need for an IT overhaul had been apparent for some time. "But when the working group did some initial estimates of the costs, people thought it was impossible." But the idea quickly became plausible, as MITRE helped the DOD work through the source selection and bid process. The PenRen team identified critical vulnerabilities to the IT infrastructure, which the DOD used to determine the most pressing needs to be addressed with the money available. Meanwhile, a MITRE team under Mike Kilgore used this information to review the proposals of prospective bidders and bring cost estimates into line. The team helped pave the way for EDS's $258 million bid for a project that was originally estimated to cost twice that much. MITRE's involvement in CCSP will cut across many areas. In addition to integration, cost analysis, and program control support, MITRE will also have a major impact on the security of the system by helping to ensure the appropriate elements for keeping the CCSP secure are in place. We will also coordinate the activities of engineers and representatives of the government and the vendors to ensure an IT system—parts of which will be relocated to areas outside the Pentagon—functions seamlessly. —by W. Russell Woolard Related Information Websites |
||||||||||||||||||||
| Page last updated: February 18, 2004 | Top of page |
Solutions That Make a Difference.® |
|
|
