Army Cyber Innovation Challenge V for Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) Industry Day

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)), specifically the Program Executive Office (PEO) Simulation, Training, & Instrumentation (STRI), Army Cyber Command and Second Army (ARCYBER & 2A), and the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) are initiating a Cyber Innovation Challenge to investigate training platform prototype solutions. The intent of the challenge is to evaluate the technical feasibility of solutions for specific focused gap areas relevant to the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE).

PCTE is a training platform that allows cyber mission forces to train in emulated network environments utilizing current cyber tool suites.  The PCTE supports both individual and team training, in addition to large scale exercise and experimentation via a distributed close network across multiple classifications.  The evolution of the platform will largely focus on integration of available applications, enabling increased automation to ultimately support multiple simultaneous training events. At maturity, the Department of Defense (DoD) joint Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) will be a constellation of federated, interoperable common training capabilities enabling full spectrum training from individual competencies to the team, unit, group and force training, exercises, TTP development and mission rehearsal.

Currently, the DoD uses a combination of loosely affiliated or independent virtual environments that lacks the automation necessary to establish and maintain persistent and scalable training environments.    Previous analysis efforts have detailed gaps associated with PCTE event planning, event management, training assessment, restoration of the training environments, and automated opposition force.  The future of PCTE includes the development and evolution of new capability solutions focused on improving the timeliness and effectiveness to meet the requirements of fully functional cyber mission forces.

The Cyber Innovation Challenge will focus on an unclassified training platform that will provide individual training to the Cyber Mission Forces.  It must be a cloud-based, virtualized training environment that is web-based.  More detailed specifications will be released with the request for white papers through the Consortium for Command, Control, and Communications in Cyberspace (C5).  Selected industry partners from the consortium will be invited to demonstrate their system with training content provided by the Government.

This Industry Day is open to all interested parties across Government, industry, and academia.  U.S. Citizenship is required. The agenda includes briefings on the entire PCTE requirement and the Cyber Innovation Challenge specific requirement.