Q & A with Rear Adm. Kendall L. Card Director, Command Control Systems NORAD-USNORTHCOM J6

CHIPS, Jan-March, 2008

Rear Adm. Card: If you look at what the panel said as a whole, you would conclude that there are a lot of pieces. You have to remember that the half-life of IT is one year. Everything changes rapidly in the cyber domain in particular and in IT systems, so we need to remain flexible.

It is very difficult not to want what is available today, and at the same time, you have to have a program of record and some sort of a road ahead. I am talking about a five, 10 and 15-year plans. I have a five-year plan and a 10-year plan for headquarters.

It makes sense to me that while we never have perfect alignment with everyone that we continually seek things that converge and become congruent as we move along. It may be tempting to take different roads and different paths because people may see a large breakthrough in one area that helps their particular niche happen more efficiently and more quickly.

That leads to proprietary systems. We have to remember that we are all a part of a bigger whole, and we have to look for congruency in the final answer so that we don't have to build so many bridges.

It is hard for me to describe what I think we have out there. If you have 1,000 stovepipes and your mission partner, Homeland Security, has 25 of those, you have to build 25 bridges to those systems. Then, for defense support of civil authorities, maybe you have another 100 bridges that you have to build to all the individual systems, instead of building two bridges to some generic or agreed upon base of systems.

We are working toward that congruency; it is just very slow to happen. A 10-year plan, from a 40,000-foot view, is to keep people moving toward this center Global Information Grid/ Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System (GIG/CENTRIXS) solution.

We are making progress, and I think all the combatant commanders said that. But what they said was that it is not happening fast enough. We are dissatisfied with the timeline because we see this fast-moving technology and all the things that are available. It's hard to be patient though and wait for those things to happen.

If we don't show some patience then we are all just reaching out for all the different systems, and we are not building toward a convergent road. It is like building 100 different phone systems in the United States. It took us years to tie all those pieces together.

We are trying to tie all the pieces together, and we don't need it to take years and years. We need to do it much more quickly than we are doing.

CHIPS: Can you talk about your 10-year plan and give some examples of what your goals are?

Rear Adm. Card: As I mentioned, we have a building that doesn't support the architecture doubling every five years. That's a lot of servers. Blade technology [server solutions] has helped us out a lot there and virtualization is going to help.

ACC (Air Combat Command) is moving toward a centrally managed and funded facility which is important because the Air Force is our sponsor service here at NORAD and NORTHCOM.