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.

As reported by Defense Scoop, 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."

The next phase, Hale said, aims to provide a "broader access" to various commercial cloud providers. He declined to provide an estimate for how many vendors could win JWCC Next.

In addition, DISA and the Pentagon aim to make JWCC Next a longer-term contract so there isn't the need to "transition" every five years.

Reports emerged last month that DISA was exploring working with smaller businesses that can offer “a wide range of information technology” services through the JWCC program.

The previous JWCC contract, valued at $9 billion, was awarded in December 2022 to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle.

At the time, the Department of Defense said of JWCC: "The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge. The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will allow mission owners to acquire authorized commercial cloud offerings directly from the Cloud Service Providers contract awardees."

It replaced the previous Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which was announced in 2018, and is set to be worth $10bn over ten years, and was planned to go to one vendor - Microsoft. As a result, JEDI was heavily criticized, including AWS suing the government, claiming the award was demonstrative of Presidential interference.