A Multiphase Approach To Killing the Living Dead

Here is an arti­cle that I orig­i­nal­ly did for AFCEA Sig­nal Mag­a­zine in Octo­ber 2022. Enjoy.

The U.S. Space Force is going through tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion as it con­tin­ues to grow from its U.S. Air Force roots. One of the major chal­lenges it is encoun­ter­ing is that much of the enter­prise relies on lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy, which has the foun­da­tions of the orig­i­nal Air Force space pro­gram. It is not uncom­mon to see For­tran pro­gram­mers, IBM main­frames and Switch net­works as part of the pro­gram. This time-test­ed and true tech­nol­o­gy has main­tained aspects of nation­al secu­ri­ty for decades. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the tech­nol­o­gists who have sup­port­ed the tech­nol­o­gy stack are retir­ing, retired or no longer alive. As a result, sup­port­ing the lega­cy net­work often falls on the shoul­ders of the younger work­force, who have no inter­est in sup­port­ing lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy. This cre­ates dif­fi­cul­ty for the Space Force because it will strug­gle to find a work­force to sup­port its “zom­bie tech­nol­o­gy.” For those who are not famil­iar with the term, zom­bie tech­nol­o­gy is a tech­nol­o­gy that should have been retired a long time ago but keeps return­ing from the dead.

The ques­tion aris­es of how to kill the zom­bie tech­nolo­gies. Besides hit­ting the pow­er but­ton, I sug­gest a mul­ti­phase approach to elim­i­nate the liv­ing dead.

Phase 1 — Identify the Target

A con­scious effort must be made to phase out all lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy over the next five years. Fund­ing must be iden­ti­fied in the Space Force/Air Force Pro­gram Objec­tive Mem­o­ran­dum (POM) cycle now and must include train­ing the “zom­bie killers” to get rid of the lega­cy capa­bil­i­ties effec­tive­ly. There also must be fund­ing for learn­ing how to take care of them in the future after the zom­bies are gone.

Phase 2 — Train the Zombie Killers

The focus of the POM bud­get is on train­ing and incen­tives because con­vinc­ing some­one to learn the lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy, to be hon­est, is a hard sell. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, love of coun­try was good enough to have some­one com­mit to solv­ing this issue. How­ev­er, COVID-19 and the Great Res­ig­na­tion dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed the cleared work­force. More often than not, a good tech­nol­o­gist can and will find a job in the com­mer­cial sec­tor that allows work from home. Plus, the tech­nol­o­gist does not have to deal with the has­sle of work­ing in a clas­si­fied area while hav­ing access to crea­ture com­forts that they have grown accus­tomed to dur­ing COVID. This work­force shift has increased the cost of train­ing zom­bie killers. More impor­tant­ly, there must be a plan to tran­si­tion the indi­vid­u­als from zom­bie killers back to tech­nol­o­gists once the zom­bies are eliminated.

Phase 3 — Killing Zombies

The act of killing zom­bies is not going to be pleas­ant. Most senior lead­ers will want the ‘lift and shift ’ approach (known as brown­field imple­men­ta­tion) because it is eas­i­er to train the exist­ing work­force using zom­bie tech­nolo­gies. After all, they have become accus­tomed to using the tools for the past cou­ple of decades. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, lift and shift migra­tions have a low prob­a­bil­i­ty of suc­cess. 1) The cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy can­not adapt eas­i­ly to decades-old tech­nol­o­gy. 2) It will not have the nec­es­sary secu­ri­ty con­trols to meet accred­i­ta­tion. With this under­stand­ing, the act of killing zom­bies will have to be embraced as a new way to intro­duce tech­nol­o­gy, start­ing with the space sys­tems oper­a­tions and intel­li­gence school­house all the way to advance training.

Phase 4 — The New Normal

While all this talk of killing zom­bies is fun, we must be con­scious that we don’t allow the cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy to become the future zom­bies. Sim­i­lar to how the Office of the Direc­tor, Oper­a­tional Test, and Eval­u­a­tion does its annu­al reports, the Space Force should con­duct board reviews to deter­mine the health of its tech­nol­o­gy stack to ensure that it does not fall into the same fal­la­cy as before. If not, hit­ting the pow­er but­ton is always an option if the tech­nol­o­gy shows signs of the undead.