Army to release white paper request for Persistent Cyber Training Environment

The Army later this year is planning to release a white paper request for the Persistent Cyber Training Environment and award a contract in the first quarter of fiscal year 2021.

The service is seeking vendors through the fourth iteration of a "cyber innovation challenge" to "rapidly integrate innovative and novel capabilities" into the PCTE platform, according to a May 19 Army notice.

The PCTE will provide the Defense Department cyber workforce a joint training environment that will enable cyberspace training, exercises, mission rehearsals, experimentations and more capabilities. The PCTE will be integrated into the Cyber Training, Readiness, Integration, Delivery and Enterprise Technology effort, for which the Army plans to award a contract next year.

Specifically, the service is looking for solutions to address emerging U.S. Cyber Command operational priorities, including Cyber Mission Force assessment planning and analytics. The Army is looking for an assessment planning tool, visualizations and dashboards, a scoring engine and more capabilities tied to mission tasks.

To address traffic generation priorities, the PCTE platform should "define, shape, control and record realistic traffic emulation capabilities" that mirror real-world activities and terrain. Specific areas of interest for the Army include network traffic layers, cyber traffic terrain and traffic command-and-control dashboards.

The service will award a vendor for the PCTE through an other transaction agreement, according to the notice, and a request for white papers will be released in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year.