The collaboration between the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) and Platform One (P1) has proven crucial in modernizing the F-35 Lightning II aircraft and advancing IT infrastructure for mission success. Platform One provides reusable technology that reduces development costs and accelerates the creation of capabilities for the F-35. In turn, the F-35 contributes feedback and new features into the Platform One ecosystem, benefiting all Department of Defense (DoD) programs.

The F-35 is a fifth-generation, stealth multirole fighter aircraft serving multiple U.S. service branches, foreign partners, and foreign military sales customers. To maintain its leadership in defense systems, the JPO has invested in the F-35 JPO Cloud, a modern, centralized, government-owned ecosystem. This cloud-based platform supports the F-35 weapons system baseline across multiple classification levels and enables the delivery of capabilities quickly to meet mission requirements. The JPO Cloud leverages Platform One’s technology as a baseline to drive reuse, accelerate innovation, and lower development costs.

The JPO Cloud currently supports over 800 users and 60 projects, ranging from mission planning to software development, testing, and data analytics, many of which involve collaboration with industry partners. To foster collaboration and streamline processes, JPO Cloud has deployed six capability suites in a Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Impact Level 5 (IL-5) environment. This deployment follows an “automate everything” mentality, ensuring rapid scalability across various classification levels.

A key benefit of the collaboration is JPO Cloud’s use of Platform One’s customizable DevSecOps platform, which enables rapid deployment, updates, and expansion of capabilities. This ensures that F-35 teams have the necessary tools for secure access, software development, data analysis, and visualization. Platform One’s Iron Bank, a hardened container image repository, plays a central role in securing the software supply chain, enhancing transparency, and providing secure environments for software developers across DoD programs.

Additionally, JPO Cloud employs Platform One’s Big Bang, which streamlines the deployment of Iron Bank containers. This aligns with the DoD’s DevSecOps Reference Architecture and provides the flexibility needed to support the diverse requirements of the F-35 program. As a result, the F-35 JPO achieved an Authority to Operate (ATO) in just six months, half the usual time.

Platform One also supports JPO Cloud’s Zero Trust implementation through its Cloud Native Access Point (CNAP). CNAP provides a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture with a Zero Trust core, offering secure access to AWS GovCloud resources. By adopting CNAP architecture, JPO Cloud accelerated the design and deployment of its Virtual Datacenter Security Stack (VDSS) further enhancing the security posture of software development environments while enabling scalable solutions across other DoD programs.

In summary, the collaboration between the F-35 JPO Cloud and Platform One accelerates innovation, improves security, and drives down costs, ensuring the continued success of the F-35 program and benefiting the broader DoD community.

About the Joint Program Office (JPO)

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office (JPO) leads the life-cycle program management of the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C; the fifth-generation joint strike fighter (JSF) air system of choice for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, international partners, and foreign military sales customers.

The mandate of the JPO is to deliver a capable, available, and affordable air system to the warfighter – outpacing key competitors to win tomorrow’s high-end fight as we develop, deliver, and sustain war-winning fifth-generation capabilities at high-end fourth-generation costs.

About Platform One (P1)

Platform One provides enterprise DevSecOps capabilities across the Department of Defense, transforming how warfighter capabilities are delivered through innovative frameworks, collaborative culture, and secure software at the speed of need.

Platform One’s reusable capabilities provide a jump start to software development through secure zero-trust architecture, supply chain security with hardened containers, tailorable DevSecOps platform, collaboration tools, and CI/CD pipelines enabling modern software development for a wide range of mission use cases.