The Department of Defense has a new Chief Information Officer (CIO), Katie Arrington – a remarkable comeback for the former Pentagon CISO (Acquisition and Sustainment), who had her security clearance suspended and was placed on leave in May 2021 after the NSA apparently alleged that she had leaked classified information. She claimed that the incident was politically motivated, subsequently sued, and later settled the case.
(“The decision was designed to interfere with the cyber security activities that Arrington was running through DoD, which NSA did not support. Nor did certain high-ranking DoD officials want Arrington serving in a senior position within the Biden Administration due to her close previous ties with President Trump and they used NSA’s decision as a pretext to remove her” Arrington alleged in a punchy complaint filed in April 2022.)
The DoD revealed Arrington’s appointment as new Pentagon CIO on March 3, saying she was “Performing the Duties of the DoD CIO” (i.e. what appears to be an acting CIO role) in an announcement that, somewhat confusingly, comes two weeks after Arrington posted on LinkedIn that she had been appointed as DoD Chief Information Security Officer (CISO.)
Arrington “has begun performing the duties of DOD CIO and does not concurrently have the role of DOD CISO,” DoD told Nextgov/FCW.
Arrington in her former DoD role had steered cybersecurity contracting. In her current one she will have a much wider set of responsibilities across DoD's agencies and sprawling set of digital estates.
"In this capacity, she serves as the primary advisor to the Secretary of Defense for information management/Information Technology (IT); information assurance, as well as non-intelligence space systems; critical satellite communications, navigation, and timing programs; spectrum; and telecommunications" – The DoD.
See also: Spy agency NRO ramps up commercial partnerships, warns over satellite weapons
(The US Army alone, as of 2022, was running 2,370 systems and apps on-premises for its 1.4 million users; had 150 system interfaces for the Army’s 72,000-strong digital workforce; and was spending $1.5 billion annually on IT hardware and nearly double that for software…)
Among the many issues on her in-tray – or certainly among those focused on by her predecessors (Leslie Beavers, who has served as acting CIO since John Sherman stepped down in June 2024) – is modernising DoD’s extensive satellite communications (SATCOM) capabilities.
As a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on DoD’s “Enterprise SATCOM Management and Control and hybrid SATCOM architectures” notes, DoD is working on “integrated, hybrid architectures” for its satellite communications. The aim, it noted, is to ensure that SATCOM capabilities are “available in the right places, for the right users, at the right time.
“ DOD CIO plans to [modernise] business and operations support processes and systems that enable SATCOM resource allocation and operations across DOD. Specifically, DOD CIO plans for ESC-MC [the program] to establish connections across diverse systems for situational awareness, identify authoritative data sources, set rules, and automate processes to accelerate the management and resource allocation of SATCOM users, systems, and their access to space and ground systems.”
