Brief: Google received cloud contract supporting U.S. Special Operations Forces
The newly public $132,219 award is part of the $9 billion ceiling Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) effort and follows similar awards of the same amount to Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.
2024-03-26: Added comment from a SOCOM spokesperson.
Due to a 90 day U.S. Department of Defense publication delay, a newly public contracting notice demonstrates that Google signed a cloud computing contract to support U.S. Special Operations Forces on December 18. Part of the tech giant’s role on the $9 billion ceiling Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program run by the Pentagon, the child award is through the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology & Logistics (SOF AT&L) Center, and the contract description explicitly reads “Special Operations Forces (SOF) Commercial Cloud Services.”
Three months before Google’s award, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle each signed analogous JWCC child awards through the same funding office, with the same obligation ($132,219) and the same ceiling (twice the initial obligation), albeit with shortened contract descriptions of “SOF Commercial Cloud Services”. The mission of SOF AT&L, according to its website, is “to provide rapid and focused acquisition, technology, and acquisition logistics support to SOF Warfighters.”
Formed in response to President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue hostages from U.S. Embassy Tehran in April 1980, known as Operation Eagle Claw, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) advertises a total force size of roughly 60,000, including active duty, National Guard, and reserve personnel. By contrast, the U.S. Department of Defense as a whole claims 1.3 million men and women on active duty status alone.
SOCOM is best known for its history of ‘direct action’ night raids in Afghanistan and Iraq through its amalgamation of elite service branch units known as Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), but its other core activities include either strengthening or opposing insurgencies, depending upon U.S. strategic interests. (The former is known as ‘Unconventional Warfare’ while the latter is known as ‘Foreign Internal Defense’.)
Given that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon all joined the Central Intelligence Agency’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract in November 2020, and then the Pentagon’s $9 billion ceiling JWCC contract in December 2022, the new child awards with SOCOM could serve as a natural bridge between the two environments. SOCOM’s JSOC is perhaps the Pentagon’s closest partner to the CIA, particularly through the Special Operations Group of the Special Activities Center within the agency’s Directorate of Operations.
(Google Public Sector’s board of directors has included both former SOCOM commander Tony “T2” Thomas and a former head of the CIA’s Science & Technology Directorate, Dawn Meyerriecks.)
The publication of Google’s support for U.S. Special Operations Forces also closely follows the announcement of former Google Trust & Safety executive Radha Iyengar Plumb as the Pentagon’s upcoming Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. Before her Trump-era policy roles at Google and Facebook, Iyengar Plumb was chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, known as the ASD SO/LIC.
Google Public Sector did not respond to a request for comment.
The listed funding office for the four SOF JWCC child awards, “F2VUR0 USSOCOM SOF ATL C4”, implies a connection to SOF AT&L’s previous Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) line of effort. According to an address given to SOF Week in May 2023 by SOCOM acquisition executive Jim Smith, SOF AT&L’s C4 line of effort merged into two other SOF AT&L programs, with Enterprise Networks and Transport Systems being given to the Director for Enterprise Information Systems, and the remainder of C4 merging into Tactical Information Systems.
After publication of this article, a SOCOM spokesperson confirmed that the contracts are through its Enterprise Information Systems component and stated:
“Per the JWCC ordering guide, the US Government (USSOCOM) issued a request for quote with the intent to purchase an equal set lump sum dollar amount of offerings to each contractor. This acquisition strategy is used to evaluate the JWCC contract vehicle’s availability of commercial cloud services across the four commercial cloud providers and to evaluate the commercial cloud service provider’s parity and maturity across the various DoD, FEDRAMP impact levels, and cloud services authorized to support multiple classification levels.
These evaluations ensure USSOCOM investment in cloud services are aligned with SOF unique capabilities and maintain functionality requirements. Post evaluation, these cloud service investments will be leveraged to support additional SOF Cloud service requirements supporting SOF’s hybrid cloud environment.”
(As previously reported by the author, SOF AT&L has also purchased Clearview AI’s facial recognition software.)
Despite its $9 billion ceiling, more than one year into JWCC, the total obligations are only in the tens of millions. And the Defense Department is considering a successor contract, dubbed, ‘JWCC 2.0’, according to a December announcement from Chief Information Officer John Sherman.