The Army will hold an industry day on Aug. 12 for a new effort to find capabilities to improve operational cyberspace situational awareness, with plans to award a prototype contract next March.
The industry day will take place at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia with officials set to detail project requirements ahead of an initial “prototype challenge” in October.
“Army commanders lack the ability to develop cyberspace situational understanding by detecting, monitoring, and visualizing friendly, neutral, and threat elements within cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum,” officials wrote. “The fundamental and urgent need is to develop a capability that will provide tactical commanders situational understanding of the cyberspace domain as it relates to multi-domain operations.”
The Cyber Situational Understanding (SU) project will look to integrate commercial off-the-shelf capabilities into the Army’s Command Post Computing Environment.
“Cyber SU must present coherent, relevant, and accurate visualizations that allow commanders and staff to quickly comprehend how events in cyberspace and the EMS are impacting mission tasks and so they respond accordingly,” officials wrote. “We seek to realize these capabilities through rapid prototyping of integrated COTS and GOTS solutions.”
The October “prototype challenge” will be the first of three opportunities for industry to demonstrate their capability offerings, with similar events set for December and January.
A prototype downselect for a two-year contract will be awarded to a single vendor or multiple companies depending on the results of the prototype challenges, according to the Army.
This Cyber SU effort is the first of three phases with the goal of getting after a “minimum viable product” capable of analyzing and displaying relevant cyberspace data into “actionable warfighter information.”
Phase two will take place through FY ’23 and include the first capability drop for a tool to integrate cyber threat intelligence, followed by a second capability drop in phase three through FY ’24.