General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) formed a new group with a handful of cloud, telecom, and networking giants targeted at growing the adoption of 5G, wireless, and edge technologies across government agencies.

The GDIT 5G and Edge Accelerate Coalition includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, and T-Mobile US, Dell Technologies, and Splunk. It’s focused on using GDIT’s Advanced Wireless Emerge Lab to develop use cases, prototypes, and services to make it easier to deploy 5G and edge capabilities. These will be developed in support of federal, state, and local agencies for use cases including military, logistics, supply chain, health care, education, and smart infrastructure.

GDIT will provide the design, deployment, and maintenance of the end-to-end 5G platform; AWS will provide its cloud infrastructure to connect edge devices to cloud services; Cisco is chipping in core and mobile edge computing systems to support data processing; Dell is providing open infrastructure and edge operations software and hardware; Splunk is supplying cybersecurity automation and edge computing services; and T-Mobile US is providing network bandwidth and use case support.

“We share a common vision of how 5G, edge, and advanced wireless technologies can transform government operations,” GDTI SVP and CTO Ben Gianni noted in a statement. “Forming this coalition will help us bring our collective strengths together to provide technical differentiation and the most beneficial solutions for our government customers.”

GDIT has been awarded billions of dollars in government funding to work on modernizing agency operations. It also has a history of working with coalition vendors like AWS and Cisco.

Government agencies and the military have increasingly been looking toward the cloud and telecom ecosystem in developing 5G and edge systems to bolster their capabilities.

The most public had been the ongoing Department of Defense Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. This is part of the Pentagon’s $10 billion effort to modernize its infrastructure and technology with the aid of public clouds.

It has also tapped into the cloud-native ecosystem to power specific military goals.

Nicolas Chaillan, who was the chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, said during the Cloud Native Virtual Summit featuring Kubernetes event in 2020 that the military branch had embraced the container architecture as part of its DevSecOps migration plans. He explained that the microservices architecture allowed for much finer-grained control and management of the Department of Defense’s development stack.