Lisa Costa, chief information officer at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), said SOCOM wants industry to come up with more flexible systems that could enable the command to easily adapt them to meet mission requirements, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.
“I want you to rethink your business models,” she told industry at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations Forces Industry Conference Thursday.
“Think about not necessarily always proposing a full-stack solution, but instead focusing on providing infrastructure as a service, data as a service, algorithms as a service, and keeping those separate so that we can mix and match them for the next unknown mission,” she added.
Costa said special operations forces need next-generation platforms that would provide operators secure data access across classification levels, network logins and resilient communications and capabilities that would allow them to process the collected data on the battlefield.
“What I really want is I want to enable the hardware that we currently have in place and let’s say it’s a phone to be the thing I need it to be at that moment in time,” Costa said during the event. “So it could be an unattended ground sensor. It could be a router or an AI computational processor.”
