Pentagon to Launch Next Iteration of JWCC Contract in 2026

The Pentagon is planning to put out a request for proposals for the next iteration of its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program as soon as Q1 of 2026. The contract dubbed JWCC Next will replace the previous iteration, which was awarded in 2022, though there will be a transition period.

The plans were revealed by John Hale, chief of product management and development at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), during an event. Hale said: “When we launched the JWCC contract several years ago, it was mainly focused on how do we get the Department of Defense access to the hyperscale providers.

“It’s been very successful, and it’s worked out very well. When we started working with the other cloud brokers within the department, we started to realize that they were leveraging capabilities that we didn’t necessarily make available on the JWCC contract. And the big one was access to third party — the third-party marketplace, the third-party vendors. And so we actually modded the JWCC contract to enable that capability."