3 2 MIKE LEFF is helping the DoD chart its course through a rapidly changing security environment. Leff, a licensed pilot, serves as Vice President of the AT&T Public Sector for Defense. He sees the Department of Defense grappling with global instability and a rise in nontraditional adversaries and asymmetric warfare. The nature of conflict is becoming more unpredictable. The DoD needs to become more nimble and modernize its capabilities for force projection. “The DoD must constantly balance the requirements of force structure, readiness and modernization. It needs to become as potent in the virtual and cyber realms as it is currently with kinetic force projection,” Leff said at a recent event sponsored by Government Executive. “That means net- centric warfare, which requires a next-generation network to support our forces today. The DoD must innovate faster than the enemy in a challenging budgetary climate. That’s where we stand ready to help our military, by leveraging a company that is a 142-year-old institution.” Leff shared with the audience that as far back as World War I and into World War II, Bell Labs began working on radar and military communication systems, as well as other key inventions around semiconductor devices, two-way radios and sonar devices. The DoD network of today was built by defense contractors, not network providers. In large part, it was conceived and implemented over the past two decades. During that time, changes in large enterprises and commercial investments have resulted in significant new technologies that alter the nature of the modern network. The DoD network actually comprises roughly 15,000 separate networks, built by hundreds of different companies. The networks that serve our warfighters are some of the most complicated in the world. As a result, the network transformation challenge faced by the DoD dwarfs that of any other organization in the world. With the government spending between 70 to 90 percent of IT budgets on maintaining legacy systems, there simply is no way for private, purpose-built networks to catch up to global network providers. “From 2012 to 2016, AT&T invested more than $140 billion in our networks— more than any other public company. We’ve built a modern network that scales to how the world operates today—real time, orchestrated, cloud and mobile enabled,” Leff said. DoD is very well positioned to leverage these investments that provide the DoD network of the future powered by commercial networks and innovation, which delivers advanced cyber capabilities and most importantly, mobilizes the warfighter. Newer technologies such as Software- Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have transformed commercial networks. Increasingly, software is replacing hardware in network infrastructure, adding unprecedented levels of capacity and flexibility. Many of the Fortune 1000 make use of these technologies for their networking requirements—many are AT&T customers. SDN fuses together multiple networking technologies and accelerates innovative capabilities. Software makes it so much easier to add new capacity that much of today’s purpose-built hardware, such as routers and firewalls, will soon go the way of phone booths and movie stores. AT&T aims to have 75% of traffic on their software-defined network by 2020, and pushing hard to beat that goal. In contrast to commercial networks, the DoD continues to rely upon an analog, premises-based circuit-switched infrastructure. It requires $140B in our networks—more than any other public company. From 2012 to 2016, AT&T invested more than LEADING THE FUTURE