The Pentagon is developing a follow-on to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract vehicle it awarded in 2022 to cloud-service providers Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle.
The Pentagon’s sequel to JWCC — dubbed JWCC Next — will similarly be a multi-award contract “but at a bigger scale” than its predecessor, according to John Hale, product management and development chief at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Defense officials are finalizing the acquisition strategy for JWCC Next, engaging with industry and mission partners across DOD. They aim to publish a draft request for proposal later this year and begin taking bids in in 2026.
“I would expect [JWCC Next] to hit the streets probably in 18 months,” Hale said on March 6 at the OpenText Government Summit.
To date, JWCC has awarded a total of $2.3 billion in task orders to the four cloud service providers, according to DISA, which manages the contract. Those task orders cover a wide range of mission-critical cloud requirements — some of which are classified — across the Defense Department and its many components.
Hale said that while JWCC enabled Defense customers to harness the power and functionality of the four leading hyperscale cloud providers, JWCC Next aims to bring them entire cloud ecosystems and third-party marketplaces—including from smaller vendors.
“What mission partners really want is the ecosystems built around the hyper-scaler provider. There’s a whole ecosystem of third-party providers that are built around hyper-scaler providers, and that’s what mission partners want,” Hale said. “They want the entire enchilada.”
Hale said about 180 cloud providers meet baseline cloud-security requirements for Defense Department consumption, and “we don’t have any way to easily gain access to those cloud providers.”
“What we’re seeing is a lot of our mission partners are wanting multi-cloud solutions,” Hale said. “And so what we’re trying to do is get a feel of the landscape and then hopefully come out with another way to allow access to those other providers that mission partners are asking for.”
One of those mission partners is the Army, which has been seeking the kind of commercial cloud services and ecosystems accessible in industry, the service’s chief technology officer said.
“So it’s been trying to figure out how we just quickly make it for integrators to leverage those things with the same experience that they’re trying to use to fit in the commercial realm,” Army CTO Gabe Chiulli said in a panel conversation with Hale March 6.
The Defense Department declined to comment on the size, scope or timeline of JWCC Next, but told Nextgov/FCW “we are actively assessing the lessons learned that can be applied to JWCC Next.”
According to data from Deltek, the federal government spent a record $16.5 billion on cloud computing last year, driven largely by the Defense Department’s growing comfort with and appetite for offsite computing. Deltek projects federal cloud-computing spending to exceed $30 billion by fiscal 2028.
JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts across the Defense Department and intelligence community. In 2020, the CIA awarded its multibillion-dollar C2E cloud contract to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, enabling them to compete for specific IC task orders. Amazon Web Services also won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud contract internally dubbed WildandStormy.
JWCC was itself a sequel of sorts to the canceled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, an attempted single-award contract the Pentagon scrapped after years of litigation and controversy.
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