Chaillan announced his decision to quit working with the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force in a LinkedIn post on September 2.
“It is time! It is time for me to say goodbye to the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force,” Chaillan began his LinkedIn post.
“One of the main reasons for my decision was the failure of OSD and the Joint Staff to deliver on their own alleged top ‘priority,’ JADC2 – they couldn’t ‘walk the walk,'” Chaillan wrote. “I put my reputation on the line when I shared that I was asked by the Joint Staff to join the JADC2 team as their CSO. They wanted me to help deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within 4 months so that we would finally have a tangible deliverable to show for JADC2, not just redundant and siloed work performed by each of the DoD services or vaporware/stale documents
Chaillan said that while OSD and the Joint Staff said JADC2 is a top priority, the DoD “could not even find $20M” for the project. “A rounding error for the Department.”
In his letter, Chaillan also called on the Air Force to stop appointing mid-level officers with generalized skillsets to run specialized technology projects.
“Please stop putting a Major or Lt Col. (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field,” Chaillan wrote. “We are setting up critical infrastructure to fail. We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to...