Why Impact Levels Are Critical to the Department of War’s AI Acceleration Strategy
Impact Levels will determine how quickly the Department of War can turn its AI Acceleration Strategy into operational reality.
On January 12, 2026, the Department of War (DoW) issued its AI Acceleration Strategy, outlining a shift to what it calls “wartime speed” for the development, deployment, and update of digital capabilities. Faster cycles, fewer bureaucratic blockers, and higher expectations for the systems that support everyday missions are now the standard.
What sits just beneath that announcement is a practical reality: many of the systems that must keep pace—especially DoW communications and contact centers—operate in Impact Level (IL) environments. These systems handle controlled unclassified information, support daily mission coordination, and cannot be disrupted in the name of modernization. As AI acceleration raises expectations, Impact Levels become the governing framework that determines what can change, how fast, and under what conditions.
Impact Levels define how sensitive data is handled, how systems are secured, and how much operational risk the Department is willing to accept as it accelerates AI adoption. They span multiple classifications—from lower-impact environments to those supporting mission-critical operations—each tied to data sensitivity and mission risk. IL4, for example,covers systems that handle controlled unclassified information (CUI), including operational details, logistics coordination, personnel interactions, and much of the traffic moving through DoW service desks today. (Older documentation may still refer to this as “DoD IL4.”) Teams may also apply stricter sub-classifications—such as “IL4 High”—to reflect tighter requirements for specific workloads.
That’s the part of the strategy that stood out to me. I’ve spent my career helping public sector, defense, and emergency organizations modernize the communications systems they rely on in their most demanding moments. The same tension appears every time:
you can’t break what people rely on today in order to build what they need tomorrow.
As the DoW’s AI Acceleration Strategy raises expectations for speed, communications platforms now have to evolve faster while still remaining stable, secure, and IL4-and-beyond ready.
Understanding FedRAMP High vs IL4 in Modernization Efforts
A common question in these conversations is how IL4 relates to FedRAMP High. The two are closely connected, but they are not interchangeable.
FedRAMP High establishes a government-wide security baseline for cloud services (FedRAMP High baseline). Impact Levels build on that baseline for DoW’s operational use. Using FedRAMP requirements as the foundation, the Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) defines additional cloud security and compliance expectations.
In practical terms, IL4 covers CUIs such as export-controlled data, personally identifiable information, protected health information, and other mission data. What counts as CUI is defined in the government-wide CUI Registry. Unauthorized access may not expose classified systems, but it can disrupt operations, create personnel risk, or compromise mission integrity. That’s why IL4 environments carry stricter expectations around access control, monitoring, identity validation, and operational resilience than FedRAMP alone.
For communications systems, especially contact centers and collaboration platforms, this distinction matters. These environments handle IL4 data every day, and modernization efforts must meet those requirements without slowing operations.
Where Impact Levels Show Up First: Everyday Communications Systems
The first systems under pressure won’t be the new AI pilots, but the everyday communications environments people already depend on.
Think about the routine moments inside the DoW that involve controlled information but rarely appear in strategy documents:
- A service member calls a support line about benefits.
- A civilian reaches out for information about a move.
- A logistics team needs to confirm the status of a critical asset.
- A commander’s staff needs to coordinate across time zones.
None of these scenarios sounds like “AI acceleration,” but they are the fabric of daily operations. They involve sensitive information, they’re high volume, and they rely on communications systems that can’t simply be taken offline for upgrades.
These are exactly the environments that must be ready for IL4—and ready in a way that allows for continued change. As the Department refines how Impact Levels are applied and introduces more automation into mission workflows, the architecture underneath these interactions will feel increasing pressure to be both flexible and reliable at the same time.
How Avaya Can Help the Department of War Move Faster
In my experience, successful modernization efforts rarely start from scratch. They start by strengthening the environments that already carry the mission, then extending them to meet IL4 requirements while still adapting over time.
In practical terms, that means communications and contact center platforms need to evolve in place:
- They have to integrate with existing voice and data systems rather than demand rip-and-replace projects.
- They need architectures that can support secure cloud, on-prem, and hybrid models aligned to the requirements of all IL4 levels, so different organizations can modernize at the pace that fits their mission.
- They should be able to incorporate new automation, analytics, and decision-support tools from different providers over time, without requiring every call flow or workflow to be rewritten.
- They stay resilient. People should experience modernization as better service, not as a series of outages or new failure points.
When I say Avaya is agnostic, I mean we don’t dictate which tools or models the Department of War uses. We make sure the communications layer can safely support those choices without locking agencies into a single vendor roadmap.
That’s how we help accelerate progress. We ensure the systems that carry conversations, requests, and coordination are built to change without breaking.
Modernizing Impact-Level Communications With Continuity
Acceleration, on its own, isn’t a strategy; it’s a posture. The real work happens in the systems that have to live up to it day after day.
For the War Department, that means communications environments that are IL4-ready, flexible enough to evolve, and resilient enough to support both today’s missions and what comes next. From my perspective, and from Avaya’s, that’s where we add the most value.