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In 2020, the U.S. Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps initiated a transformative journey to become a data-centric unit. Based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the XVIII Airborne Corps, often referred to as “America’s Contingency Corps,” serves as the Army’s strategic response force, ready to deploy globally to protect the U.S. and its allies. To achieve their data-driven objectives, the Corps aimed to create the first sustainable tactical cloud environment for the conventional Army, leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to facilitate this endeavor.
Collaborating with various defense agencies, organizations, and commercial partners, including AWS, the Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, and the Army Analytics Group, the Corps launched the “Dragon Cloud” initiative. This effort began with the development of a proof of concept (POC) to validate the cloud’s effectiveness and demonstrate its potential operational advantages. The POC was designed to integrate contributions from other divisions, ultimately providing a comprehensive solution that could be refined for the broader Army. Utilizing AWS GovCloud (US), the team established the POC cloud environment at Impact Level 5 (IL 5), which served as an unclassified dedicated space. Within this environment, the team created applications designed by Soldiers and successfully showcased their functionality in a cloud setting. As these applications were not originally cloud-native, overcoming the challenges of their migration and proving their interoperability served as further validation of the cloud’s potential.
Following the successful POC, the XVIII Airborne Corps shifted focus toward building an operational classified cloud environment, set to process data at Impact Level 6 (IL 6) with AWS’s assistance and the support of the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency. This Dragon Cloud IL 6 environment will harness commercial innovations and integrated managed features to enhance network reliability, flexibility, and agility. The capabilities of the AWS Cloud will also significantly reduce the administrative workload for Army network administrators, enabling them to deploy server infrastructure in mere minutes rather than days. Moreover, the established reliability of cloud resources will enhance availability and performance for end users. Automatic resource scaling will introduce a new level of flexibility in Army information systems, allowing mission command systems to adapt based on workload and achieve unprecedented application agility.
The Dragon Cloud IL 6 environment is designed for global accessibility. By minimizing the need for heavy physical server stacks at the tactical edge, commanders can leverage cloud computing to access mission command applications from virtually anywhere. This approach is projected to lead to a 60% reduction in hardware requirements when deploying forces away from home, thereby improving agility and flexibility in operational settings. The environment’s capability to host real-time strategic data in the cloud will enable users to function effectively in distributed environments at the tactical edge, facilitated by a persistent data fabric. These advancements promise to deliver a more consistent, reliable, and available network at a fraction of the traditional costs.
The future network that commanders will rely on for upcoming operations must be agile, flexible, reliable, and sustainable. Dragon Cloud is poised to meet these demands while integrating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Such innovations will address the mission command needs of tomorrow’s Army.
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