Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner
Golden Defense
At the tip of the spear when it comes to new initiatives in defense IT, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner as DISA director has had a busy year. It awarded the OTA for Thunderdome, a zero-trust solution, and is the main organization running the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, the Pentagon’s firs commercial enterprise cloud. DISA has been awarding multiple task orders to the four companies under the agreement since its December award date. On the network defense side, Skinner also leads Joint Force Headquarters-DOD Information Networks, for which he outlined a three-pronged approach for success against ever-sophisticated adversaries trying to burrow into the network: improvements to cyber readiness inspections, improvements to training cyber personnel and a shift in mindset for how to defend the network by maneuvering the cyber domain itself.
