The Pentagon has so far committed only a small fraction of the $9 billion it intends to spend on cloud services under its JWCC contract. 

The Washington Post reported the news today, citing officials and government records.

The JWCC, or Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, contract, is designed to help modernize the U.S. Defense Department’s information technology infrastructure. The Pentagon plans to spend up to $9 billion through 2028 on cloud services from Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp. JWCC is the successor to a controversial, $10 billion contract called JEDI that was scrapped in 2021.

The Post examined cloud service purchase data on USAspending.gov, a government website that tracks federal spending. The analysis determined that only about 30 deals have been issued through the JWCC contract to date. Those purchases reportedly represent less than 2% of the contract’s $9 billion budget.

On a dollar basis, orders issued to Microsoft currently account for the lion’s share of the JWCC-related deal activity on USAspending.gov. The website indicates that the Pentagon has so far committed to spending about $22.8 million on cloud services from the company. Oracle is in second place with $9.3 million, while Amazon and Google have secured $7.8 million and $3.9 million worth of contracts, respectively.

The Defense Information Systems Agency, which is overseeing the rollout of the JWCC, told the Post that a total of 39 deals have been issued under the contract so far. Those deals are expected to be worth as much as $269.9 million if “all options” are exercised. An additional 40 or so purchases are currently being processed.

Lily Zeleke, the department’s deputy chief information officer for the information enterprise, and Sharon Woods, the director of hosting and compute at DISA, dismissed the idea that the rollout of JWC has been slow so far.

Zeleke and Woods told the Post that the contract is the first multisupplier cloud contract at the Defense Department to span multiple classification levels. This dynamic, they explained, makes the procurement program complicated. They added that the amount of time required to process a JWCC deal has been reduced from the several months it would’ve once taken to about one month.

The JWCC is not the only multibillion-dollar cloud services contract that the Pentagon has issued in recent years.

In 2019, the Defense Department launched a procurement program called DEOS that will be worth up to $7.6 billion over 10 years. It includes the participation of Microsoft, General Dynamics Corp. subsidiary CSRA LLC, Dell Technologies Inc. and Minburn Technology Group LLC. The goal of the program is to standardize the Defense Department’s email and collaboration workflows on the Microsoft 365 product suite. 

Photo: David B. Gleason/Flickr