In July, Lt. Gen. Charles E. Croom Jr., a 32-year Air Force veteran, took over the reins of the Defense Information Systems Agency. As director, Croom is chief to more than 6,600 military and civilian personnel scattered across the globe.

He is also the commander of the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations. JTF-GNO runs and defends the Global Information Grid, the Defense Department’s backbone network for classified and unclassified traffic.

Previously, Croom was director of information, services and integration for the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration and CIO.

Croom replaced Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., who retired and stepped down after five years at DISA’s helm.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are your immediate plans for DISA this year?
CROOM: My first job is to try to lay out a vision for where I want to take DISA and the DOD in terms of improving the ability to share information across our forces. We’re busily working on a strategic plan—that’s not easy to do by the way, and I dare you to go find one that is truly visionary. What we tend to do is list programs that we’re doing. That’s not a vision; that’s just things we’re doing.

Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., DISA’s former director, had a 500-day plan. It was a very good plan, but it wasn’t a vision. It was a customer agreement that he had between the combatant commanders and DISA and detailed what it would try to deliver to them. We still have that 500-day plan, and we’re still going continue it, but that doesn’t answer what we’re going try to do for the future.

We’re trying to write the future. I think we might have an easier job than we initially thought because the commercial world is ahead of DOD, so I’m looking heavily at the commercial world to say what is out there that I really like that they’re doing that I would want to incorporate into Defense systems.

I think the philosophy when I arrived at DISA was to create. Things had to be created at DISA and what I’m bringing to DISA is the “let’s adopt” approach. I think the services and agencies are out there doing things that are just as good as DISA is doing. And I’m scouring those services and agencies to find out what they’re doing well that I could adopt and make joint.

So we have the saying, “We’re going adopt before we buy, and buy before we create.”

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What is the status of DISA’s move to IP Version 6?
CROOM: Well, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a policy out there. We’re complying with that policy. We have an office stood up that works the details of those issues with the services and agencies. It’s very important that we hold hands with our partners in DOD as we move forward and we’re designing specifications: What has to be done? What timelines have to be done? I think we’re complying with the OSD policy, and we’re doing it in partnership with fellow services and other agencies.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: How close is the military in reaching true joint interoperability?
CROOM: We’re better today than we were yesterday, and we’ll be better tomorrow than we are today. We’re working very hard at it. I can assure you that my counterparts in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are not only personal friends of mine but wear purple socks. They are purple at heart. We all note that tomorrow’s fight and today’s fight is a joint fight, and we’re all embarrassed that we are not as jointly interoperable as we know we should be.

So there’s a lot of work, and lots of good people are doing things. It’s a big DOD. It’s a huge task, but the hearts and minds are aimed at it. I believe these new architectures, particularly the service-oriented architecture approach, will improve the way we do interoperability. That’s why Net-Centric Enterprise Services and programs like Joint Command and Control are so critical. This is a total seat change from building stovepipe legacy systems that you have to worry about bridging to your neighbor.

In this biz, it’s not about DISA doing it themselves. It’s about the ability to work with the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and other agencies and modernizing and improving ourselves. So everything we’re doing at DISA is looking at how we can hold hands and capitalize on what these services are already doing and what the commercial world is already doing. I mean they’re ahead of us in some ways. They’re leaders and knowledgeable in certain areas. So we’re going change, slightly, our philosophy to better utilize and capitalize in where their leadership excels and we’re going just try to pay a little more attention to try and orchestrate this to a joint effect.

We’ve got great purple leadership out there in the Army, Navy, Air Force and we’re going deliver purple programs for the joint warfighter.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: When will the Global Command and Control System be phased out for the Joint C2 system?
CROOM: Well, I don’t think a date’s been selected yet. As we bring on capability, we’ll phase out old capability so I think I couldn’t give you a timeline.

JC2 was just handed to DISA [in November]. This program is still under development. But we have a high vision and high goals for it.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Can you give me a status of DISA’s move to converged IP for voice, video and data?
CROOM: This isn’t something that happens instantaneously across DOD, but the commercial world is moving that way because of the great power it gives you. By converging, you have all of these capabilities in your little handheld personal digital assistant. We want to bring those same types of services to the soldier who’s walking the battlefield, so he’s got voice, data and picture capability at his fingertips. You do that by merging.

Now, there are some issues that we’ll have to work in terms of what are the risks of putting all of your eggs in one basket? Today, we have stovepipe systems—separate voice, separate data—and when one goes down, the other still exists. When you start merging this all onto the same network and it goes down, well you’ve lost it.

So we’re going do this small, and it will be mission-based. We may want to keep separate stovepipe systems just based upon their survivability, but each one will be weighed based on the merits of its operability. In an overall, sense, we are moving to that conversion.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: You’ve spent a lot of time with the military services. What is their perception of DISA?
CROOM: Well, it hasn’t always been positive. We hopefully have turned that around. We want to be their provider of IT by choice, not by dictate. We want to be good enough that they’re going choose us first.

Part of that, one of the areas that has caused heartburn at DISA, is that we haven’t been able to share our costs adequately with the user and so we’ve got a pedal-to-the-medal effort in terms of adjusting our books and providing full-and-open disclosure on how we do our billing and how we spend our dollars. That’s no easy task because as you know our money comes in all different colors, comes in all different years, used for all different things, etc.

We want to be able to better account for the dollars we’re spending and share that accounting with the users, so they have no doubt that we’re putting their money to good use. I think it’s only fair.

We have a goal in 2007 to be independently audited and have A++ grades coming out of that audit. We are intending to keep our goal. It’s that important to us.

I’m going be here three years. I’ve given you long-term stuff. I’ve told you things I want to do. It will be interesting to see how the story changes and how I modify to it.

One of the areas that we’re going to be working on with this service-oriented architecture business is we want to do a lot of prototypes—put it out there and let users touch it, use it, feel it. Then you get lots of feedback. You learn very quickly. So we’re going to be doing lots of prototypes and, when those prototypes are working, we’re just going to scale them up to be the final solutions. When they’re not working, we’ll either modify or discontinue them. We’re going allow experimentation, and we’re going allow failures.

We’re going get out there, test it in small communities, learn what we’ve got or change it or modify it, or close the thing down.

As you bring out the new, you’re going have to get rid of the old. So when we bring out the new collaboration tools, we’re going discontinue our Defense Collaboration Tool Suite. As we bring out JC2, you’re going see a closing down of GCCS.

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