The US XVIII Airborne Corps are exploring different Edge and cloud computing solutions during the 2025 Project Convergence.
As reported by DefenseScoop, this year's Project Convergence - an event aiming to "transform and ensure future war-fighting readiness" held through March and April - is seeing the corps trialing Edge and cloud computing solutions.
Col. Nicole Vinson, chief communications officer for the corps, noted: “Everything that we do now is cloud-based at the corps level. When we lost communications for the network - and that was basically because we had so much data going out that the network was not in a position to handle it - we didn’t have any connectivity to the systems that we needed to have connection to, which drove our focus to really get after the Edge capability.”
Vinson went on to note that the Corps is discussing what information and data needs to be hosted at the Edge, as well as the applications that might need to operate.
The Airborne Corps will be trialing two different Edge node versions, with one being a cloud-to-Edge capability that is being tested for the first time. This will use a tactical cloud, enabling corps to take capabilities from the cloud and deploy them at the Edge as needed, a more flexible environment than current solutions.
The technology and hardware being used for these trials have not been shared.
Col. Edwin Mathias, the corps’ chief of staff, noted: “Our ability to disaggregate the staffs into multiple nodes and reduce our signature is important. Those Edge nodes, those independent transport capabilities would allow us to operate our current operations for one location, our fusion cell with our intel and fires team in another location, our administrative logistics component in another location, and then our network and G-6 team in yet another.”
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has long been a user of cloud and Edge computing technology.
Through its Defense Information Systems Agency, the department has Joint Operation Edge (JOE) clouds deployed at US military hubs in Asia Pacific and Germany which are an "interconnected and integrated mesh of large form factor Edge computing platforms, installed on-premises at DoD locations, that delivers commercial Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service, as well as the necessary DoD enterprise common service offerings."
In 2021, Microsoft won a 2021 contract for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, which includes cloud and Edge computing services. That contract was re-awarded to defense technology company Anduril in February 2025, with Microsoft still set to work as the preferred cloud provider. Anduril's Lattice software platform was deployed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OCI Roving Edge Infrastructure globally in September 2024.
The DoD awarded a contract for a "zero trust pilot" virtual private cloud project to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in October 2024.
The DoD also operates its Olympus cloud offering, which focuses on 'common services' that surround cloud workloads, including network connectivity and boundary protection, as well as a basic suite of core services, and in August 2024 was looking at re-tooling its Stratus private cloud solution to help mission partners work together in the cloud.
The US Defense Information Systems Agency is further a customer of HPE GreenLake, HPE's cloud-to-Edge offering.
