Army to ‘kill NIPR’ at multiple locations in commercial internet experiment
The Army’s top civilian leader said that the service will “kill NIPR” at multiple locations — likely starting next month — in an experiment to see if commercial internet solutions would be more effective.
Speaking to soldiers at a town hall at Fort Drum, New York, on Monday, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said “we’re going to bring you down to the commercial internet and we think it will solve all sorts of problems.” If the evaluation is successful, the Army will scale it across the service, he added.
NIPR, which stands for Non-classified Internet Protocol Router, is the military’s communication network for unclassified information. Defense Department personnel can access commercial browsers or email through NIPR, for example, but the network is owned and secured by the military.
An Army spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the service is evaluating “a shift” from NIPR to a commercial solution that can handle data at Impact Level 5. IL5 includes Controlled Unclassified Information, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is considered sensitive and necessary to protect, but does not meet criteria for classification.
The spokesperson said that the evaluation is intended to “cut costs, boost performance and enhance cybersecurity.” They added that the effort was in coordination with the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, DISA and other military services.
Driscoll said “all of these different networks we have are insanity,” referring to NIPR, SIPR and JWICS — the latter two being classified systems. “Like, I’m the secretary of the Army. I have two full-time tech people 30 feet from my desk and we can rarely use Microsoft Teams without it going down. I can rarely get into my unclassified email without it breaking, and I can’t print — it’s utter madness and we know it, and you deserve better.”
“If it works, we’re going to scale it throughout the Army,” he said of the network evaluation. “If it doesn’t work, we’re going to try another experiment until we figure out how to fix this problem.”
Details about the experiment are scant so far. Neither Driscoll nor the Army spokesperson identified the locations where this experiment would occur or which commercial solutions the service was considering. Driscoll indicated that this evaluation will happen at “a couple of places.”
“The Army Office of the Chief Information Officer is in the evaluation and early planning phase for a potential commercial IL5 solution,” the spokesperson said. “There are no more specifics at this time.”
The experiment appears to be part of a broader shift from older military systems to commercial-based models for the DOD under Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Last month, DefenseScoop first reported that the Air Force was retiring NIPRGPT, a military large language model. The Army also said it had stopped using NIPRGPT as the Pentagon builds its artificial intelligence platform, GenAI.mil, which includes models from commercial providers.
