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“So when they come to government, we have to give them the right skills, we have to give them the right experience so that when they’re done Silicon Valley or industry in general is willing to grab them, right?" CDAO Craig Martell said.

The CDAO has established a governance working group looking through "40 different foundational documents" that reference pre-existing organizations before the CDAO or other roles and responsibilities the new office will take over, the deputy in charge said Wednesday.

“I think that we have struggled for a very long time on the Mission Partner Environment,” Danielle Metz, chief IT strategist for the office of the secretary of defense, said. “The combatant commanders have been screaming for the need to be able to seamlessly… collaborate not only internally with themselves, but across the mission partners.

"As far as reaching out to kind of the multinational world and the federal space, we haven't yet, but that's something that's kind of on the roadmap for us to get to," Drew Malloy, technical director for DISA’s cyber development directorate, said.

“There’s a cost to your IP, there’s a cost to the US government and there’s a benefit to our adversaries if we don’t do something like this,” DoD Chief Information Officer John Sherman said of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program.

An Air Force officer's semi-viral screed implored the military to fix basic computer functions before doing anything else. He told Breaking Defense the CIOs' response was "genuine progress."

“Cybersecurity must be built into system design, and the human defender should be included early on in cyber defense engineering and programmatic priorities for both system usability and training,” according to the Pentagon's chief tester.

Google's addition is somewhat surprising since, in recent years, the company has pulled away from DoD work due to internal pressure on executives from its workforce. The apparent omission of IBM is also notable.

Elsewhere in the hearing John Sherman called attention to a growing concern at the Pentagon over the radio spectrum, saying "spectrum sharing" should be a DoD watchword.

"I have a mantra of 'I want to kill to the [Common Access Card] as the primary authentication mechanism for the department'," Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said. "Industry has better authentication, and it's not just two-factor, it's truly multi-factor authentication."