ARLINGTON, VA, Oct. 13, 2004-Lieutenant General Harry D. Raduege, Jr., Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Commander, Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO), announced today that David M. Mihelcic has been selected as the new DISA Chief Technology Officer. Previously, Mr. Mihelcic served as the chief engineer for the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIG-BE) program.

During his tenure with the GIG-BE Program Office, Mr. Mihelcic challenged industry to think outside of the box to come up with dynamic, flexible, and secure solutions to address the challenge of providing bandwidth on demand to the nation's warfighters. He was instrumental in defining the GIG-BE architecture and networking technologies that would form the foundation of the infrastructure. The GIG-BE program successfully reached initial operating capability (IOC) in September, after which Lt. Gen. Raduege selected Mr. Mihelcic to take on a new role at DISA as its CTO.

Mr. Mihelcic brings a wealth of engineering and architectural experience to the CTO position. "He has proven himself to be an innovative, technically savvy thinker who has sought evolutionary solutions to information technology challenges," said Lt. Gen. Raduege. "He understands and is a strong advocate of the DoD transformational goals that challenge us to leverage information technology to connect troops with critical operations information and improve and protect information networks."

He has also served as the chief executive engineer for Network Services, chief of the Center for Defense Information System Network (DISN) Evolution, and primary technical advisor to the principal director for Network Services. As the technical advisor he was responsible for defining the architecture and introducing innovative technologies into the DISN architecture. He chaired the DISN configuration control board, was commander of the center for Horizontal Integration and deputy chief executive engineer for information processing. Prior to coming to DISA, he served as the head of the Network Security Section, Naval Research Laboratory, and worked in private industry.

As CTO, he will serve as the agency's senior authority on scientific, technical and engineering matters. Mr. Mihelcic will be responsible for defining DISA's overarching technical strategy for synchronizing DISA's programs and services with the Department of Defense's net-centric transformation. "DISA's contributions to the warfighters through the GIG-BE and NCES programs will allow the DoD to make the transformational changes and innovations necessary to meet the threat environment of tomorrow," said David Michelcic. "I'm gratified that Lt. Gen. Raduege has given me the opportunity to impact what role DISA will have in developing and fielding the capabilities that will make a difference."

"The fundamentals of warfare in the information age are being transformed to leverage critical, real-time information, which in turn, provides an enormous advantage to today's warfighter," said Lt. Gen Raduege. "Dave Mihelcic's challenge, as the Chief Technology Officer of DISA, will be to guide the development and fielding of capabilities that will change the way warfighters receive and process information today, the way they quickly leverage community of interest data producers and pull the mission-tailored information they require from anywhere in the network environment."