As vice president of AI-first transformation, Plumb will spearhead IBM’s Next-Generation Transformation Strategy and work across the company’s core business lines to foster adoption of AI, automation and hybrid cloud computing throughout the global organization and with its clients and partners.

Plumb started in the role July 14.

A key part of her job, Plumb told DefenseScoop, will be serving as IBM’s “Client Zero,” meaning she will internally operationalize AI technologies and concepts to test them before deploying to clients.

“The approach is really taking AI solutions and embedding them in the company’s own processes and then using that to prove out how AI solves problems, drives agility, creates efficiencies, which IBM then can use to help demonstrate that value for its customers, right? So, this is an internal transformation role, but with an eye towards building out concrete examples of execution for external consumption,” Plumb told DefenseScoop.

That’s not so dissimilar from her role leading the CDAO, which serves as a central hub for accelerating and spreading the adoption of AI, data and analytics capabilities across the U.S. military. She likened it to the work of CDAO’s Rapid Capabilities Cell, which has been responsible for ushering in major contracts with frontier AI models.

Likewise, IBM is very focused on “scaled adoption at the enterprise level,” Plumb said.

“So how can you get AI tools into the hands of your workforce, and do it in a way that, rather than AI as a substitute for all the humans, you team AI with the humans to drive efficiency and productivity?” she said.

Plumb explained: “IBM’s big bet is … how can we do this as an enterprise transformation and really kind of drive the AI transformation vision in concrete ways through businesses.”

In particular, she sees an opportunity for IBM in working with her former employer, the Pentagon, and the federal government at large on the business side with applications, for example, managing supply chains, logistics, contracting and more.

“That’s where I think there’s a lot of potential for rapid movement of things we find that work in IBM and applications to the federal sector,” Plumb said.

Since Plumb’s departure from the CDAO in January, the office was led by Margie Palmieri, the deputy CDAO, until DOD leadership named Douglas Matty as the new leader in April. Matty previously founded the Army AI Integration Center under Army Futures Command, which he led between 2020 and 2022. Last week, DefenseScoop reported that Palmieri, one of the CDAO’s longest-tenured leaders, is the latest to depart the organization amid a raft of others who’ve left.

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“The good news is it’s just a very natural evolution from what was already there,” Plumb told DefenseScoop Monday during an exclusive interview at the Pentagon.

When it first achieved full operational capability in 2022, the CDAO was structured around four combined predecessor organizations: the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program. Plumb, who before this role served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, assumed leadership after the office’s first chief, longtime commercial tech executive Craig Martell, departed in early 2024. 

After comprehensively reviewing the office’s inner workings, her team spent the last several months shuffling its structure to take a new path forward designed to expedite Defense Department components’ access to and adoption of AI for contemporary day-to-day operations. In the interview, Plumb provided DefenseScoop with a first look into the re-organization and the motivations behind it, as well as why she believes it makes sense ahead of her planned departure and the entrance of the second Trump administration.

“I will transition in mid-January, but the rest of the CDAO is career and technical expertise staff, and they will just stay and so a lot of the priority missions will continue,” Plumb noted.

Pressing needs

Putting it simply, some of the CDAO’s original teams — including those working on Advana, joint command and control pursuits, AI assurance, what was previously referred to as the algorithmic warfare group and others — have been renamed and reassembled into new efforts aimed at delivering in-demand AI and analytics across the enterprise, and via ongoing operational missions. 

“Over the last six months, it was really clear that two things were happening,” Plumb explained.

On the one hand, she spent time with CDAO colleagues focused on what she called “the integration that has to happen between those [DOD] customer needs, and the platform services” delivering products that meet them. 

Secondly, through steadily evolving efforts to propel the department’s realization of the military’s next-generation concept for combined all-domain command and control — including through its Global Information Dominance Experimentation series, better known as GIDE — Plumb said she and her team “really saw the importance of, early on, having that scaled capabilities view as we look at new solutions through these acceleration cells.”

Just as the CDAO is organized with lines of effort under policy and acquisition, for example, Plumb has established a new Scaled Capabilities directorate with a Senior Executive Service-level role and, for now, two existing divisions named “mission analytics” (MA) and “enterprise platform services” (EPS), focused on scaling capabilities to the enterprise.

While MA broadly includes CDAO officials working on customer support activities, the AI and Data Acceleration or ADA initiative and several others, EPS — formerly known as algorithmic warfare — is responsible for the underlying infrastructure, software tools and services for enterprise capabilities like the Advana platform.

Separately, but now reporting directly to the CDAO and operating in conjunction with that, is the existing “Advanced C2 Accelerator Cell” — as well as the new AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, which Plumb unveiled last week. 

Describing the fresh vision, she explained: “When we see capability gaps at specific [combatant commands], how do we solve that pressing need — but then build that in a way that’s future-proof and can be scaled to other settings? So for instance, if we solve, as we have, operational real-time issues outside of the United States, then when we have major issues in the United States — like, say, a hurricane, and we need to optimize our operational response to that — how can we take those same tools and scale them to that new use case?”

The new AI RCC envelops maturing AI assurance and test and evaluation work, and CDAO-led efforts to facilitate the military’s responsible use of emerging and still-uncertain generative AI capabilities. 

Notably, the AI RCC (pronounced “arc”) marks the DOD’s next iteration of Task Force Lima. Plumb said it was in some parts born out of the learnings identified by that group. 

“I think one key finding was that there was a pressing need for the department to accelerate its identification of these AI capabilities, and then create pathways to scale,” she said, adding that the idea is to introduce “a small core team that works on pilots in the priority areas” paired with a team tasked with scaling such capabilities for wider use. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop, she said the leadership team is “in the final stages with a candidate” who was recommended as a Defense Innovation Unit “pick” to steer the AI RCC. 

On Tuesday, a DOD spokesperson said Capt. M. Xavier Lugo — who led Task Force Lima through its duration — “has moved to lead another priority initiative at CDAO,” without clarifying which.

In terms of tangible generative AI progress the office has made this year, Plumb said that officials recently accelerated a large language model translation service identified by DIU for use across two military service partners. 

“We basically said, ‘OK, we know there are use cases. We know they’re [budgeting] for them in a few years — let’s not make people wait two years to have access to it.’ So we got a contract that allows the relevant customers to access it through, I think, Advana. But we’re working to integrate it on the Maven Smart System side too, so that our customer base can just start translating, leveraging, sort of the best of commercial tech out right now,” Plumb noted. 

The solution can take “a whole bunch of context and translate more like a person translator than a text translator,” she added.

Sometime in January, the CDAO also aims to open up new cloud-based sandbox testbeds for approved DOD users to experiment with different generative AI applications via the new cell. Plumb declined to share the cloud service providers involved at this time.

Crossover capabilities that enable C2 operations but function between the two rapid acceleration cells will be advanced in future GIDE experiments, according to the CDAO.

“The intent is that they should work themselves out of a business,” Plumb told DefenseScoop.

She pointed to a hand-drawn chart she produced during the interview to visualize the office and new moves, and used the Maven initiative as an example of the overarching approach.

“What we’re doing now is, we worked through identifying how we could scale Maven. We scaled it to a number of [combatant commands]. We’re expanding that scaling. So now, we’ve got the solution. Now that solution needs to move from this accelerator over here to our enterprise platforms, and I don’t have a timeline for you on that transition, but they’re working together — the Advanced C2 lead and our Scaled Capabilities and Enterprise Platforms lead to say: ‘OK what does managing this stack look like?’” she said. 

The CDAO confirmed that all of the new management changes aligned with the reshuffle are expected to take effect by Jan. 6. 

Change ‘during a baton pass’

Plumb acknowledged that upon taking over the AI office, she “put a lot of things on hold” to assess if the organization was operating at its best capacity — and areas where there’s room for improvement.

“I also pulled a lot of authorities up to me to create the management structures we needed,” she explained.

The CDAO’s new make-up comes as Plumb prepares to exit the office next month as a member of President Joe Biden’s departing administration.

“Transitions are a time of uncertainty and stress. I think the CDAO has really done a lot — has been through a lot, but it’s done a lot — to prove out how valuable this type of work is. This is a natural evolution in that process. That it comes at this time is just, we can’t lose time during a baton pass between administrations on these AI capabilities. And so we wanted to keep the momentum going,” she told DefenseScoop. 

Principal Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri is set to serve as the acting chief of the office in the interim until Trump’s pick is named, and officials tapped to lead the reshuffled non-political positions are listed on the office’s recently updated website.

Plumb expressed confidence that steady bipartisan, bicameral support from Congress and commercial players — and the increasingly in-demand value proposition the CDAO offers to enable CJADC2 and more — will prove it even more valuable in the months and years ahead.

“I think the next three to four years are going to be probably dispositive on how the Department of Defense integrates AI into its warfighting and enterprise management. This is the time when the solutions are coming, and we know they can be transformational. So the next year, the team really needs to get those foundations, and they’re set to do it, get the foundation set, get those pilots going, and get the assessment criteria clear,” Plumb told DefenseScoop. 

“We’re almost fully staffed up now in terms of hiring personnel and had a big hiring push over the last six months. So we’ve got a team that is talented and has the vision and can execute. So, I look forward to seeing what happens,” she said.

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Task Force Lima was stood up last year to help the Defense Department better understand how it can effectively and responsibly leverage gen AI tools such as large language models. Officials have taken lessons learned from that effort and stood up the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC).

“Over the course of 12 months, Task Force Lima analyzed hundreds of AI workflows and tasks that AI tools could make more efficient or more effective. And we categorized all of those use cases into a smaller set of 15 areas aligned into two big categories: warfighting functions — like command and control [and] decision support — and enterprise management functions like financial management and healthcare information management. Upon completing its work, Task Force Lima submitted a detailed report,” Radha Plumb, head of the department’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), told reporters at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday.

The cell is being stood up to implement those recommendations with the aim of accelerating the delivery of frontier models and next-generation AI capabilities across the department, she said.

The initiative will be led by the CDAO in partnership with the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

The cell will be charged with identifying and testing technology through rapid experimentation and prototyping, assessing the effectiveness of technology and determining whether it can be scaled and sustained.

“If warranted, we’ll use defined acquisition pathways to scale the technology across the DOD enterprise, and that can be within CDAO, with the military departments or with other key components,” Plumb said.

“This rapid experimentation approach will allow us to test and identify where these cutting-edge technologies can make our forces more lethal and our processes more effective, but equally critically, the AI RCC will define the requirements for enterprise infrastructure … and support scaled AI development that includes compute development environment and AI-ready data,” she added.

The warfighting use cases that the cell will focus on include command and control (C2) and decision support, operational planning, logistics, weapons development and testing, uncrewed and autonomous systems, intelligence activities, information operations and cyber operations, according to a DOD fact sheet.

Enterprise management use cases include financial systems, human resources, enterprise logistics and supply chain, health care information management, legal analysis and compliance, procurement processes, and software development and cybersecurity.

The Pentagon is planning to allocate $100 million from fiscal 2024 and 2025 research, development, test and evaluation funding toward some of the initial efforts, according to Plumb.

Part of the investment will include $35 million for four frontier AI pilots that will kick off “immediately,” according to Plumb. Those will be conducted in partnership with the combatant commands and other DOD organizations in 90-day increments, including via the Global Information Dominance (GIDE) series of experiments.

About $5 million will go toward “rapid user-centric experimentation,” according to a DOD fact sheet.

The CDAO plans to work with DIU to tee up additional pilots “in the near future,” Plumb noted.

In mid-January, the Pentagon also intends to award about $40 million in Small Business Innovation Research contracts to fund generative AI solutions, including from non-traditional vendors. The department is still in the source selection process.

“We’ve received hundreds of responses to our request for solutions to leverage generative AI in specific DOD ecosystems, everything from applying commercial applications to healthcare and financial management to solutions in critical warfighting areas like autonomy,” Plumb said.

Another $20 million will go toward boosting compute and creating digital “sandboxes” to facilitate development, experimentation and testing. The department is taking a multiple cloud approach and plans to lean on major providers working under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability enterprise on that effort. The four vendors with contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program include Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

“We will have a sandbox with each major cloud provider. We’ll start with two sandboxes that will be available in mid-January with two providers, and then fast-follow with two additional sandboxes on the other two cloud instances by the summer,” Plumb told reporters.

The CDAO chief said she couldn’t provide a specific timeline for when new tech shepherded by the rapid capabilities cell will be ready for deployment, noting that it will depend on the performance of the technologies in testing and experimentation.

“I think industry continues to innovate and improve both the quality and reliability … of their generative AI models, and we’re watching that very closely and in close partnership with our industry innovators. The second piece, though, is … the department has to have its own reliability standards. We talk a lot about responsible AI. What that really means is, do the models perform the way you want them to perform? And do they do they do the things you want them to do? And do they not do things you don’t want them to do?” Plumb said.

“That’s true for all of our platforms and capabilities. We have to do that in weapon systems, we have to do that in our digital solutions, and we have to do that in our hardware. We have a specific set of standards and applications that we apply in the generative AI context to bound the risk and ensure the performance meets the reliability. Part of the pilots, the test and evaluation, and the generative AI-specific responsible toolkit are creating the pathways for that,” she added. “To my mind, this is a really ‘better brakes make faster trains’ approach where we’ve got a toolkit, we’ve got to test the technology, and then we’ve got to rinse and repeat to get it to the reliability level that will allow us to deploy it. That’s going to vary use case by use case, but that’s the approach we’re taking here.”

The risk management framework includes things like authority to operate (ATO) processes — which the Defense Department is trying to streamline — and identity credential and management (ICAM) solutions.

“Those are the tools that let us as a department, continue to review and make sure digital solutions we bring in from the commercial sector meet our cyber requirements and don’t provide threats,” Plumb said.

“There’s a broader set of issues in which we have to think about how we deploy AI into our ecosystems, how we think about data security and the data use in our systems now. That is an ongoing part of our discussions and part of what we want to get after with these [rapid capabilities cell] pilots. How do we bring in the very best commercial technology, marry it with our sort of unique, often classified data, use that for our warfighters, and then be able to scale that? And that is explicitly one of the things we need to work through within the context of these pilots. That’s going to vary a lot depending on what kind of data you’re using. And you can imagine security risks that relate to health information look very different than security risks that relate to cyber information, which in turn look really different than the risks related to autonomous systems. So there is a workflow use case specificity to this. That’s part of the pilot effort,” she said.

As for the leaders of the disbanded Task Force Lima, some will be joining the rapid capabilities cell and others will be working on other priority projects for the CDAO, according to Plumb.

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In an email obtained by the publication this week, which she sent widely to office personnel earlier in August, Plumb acknowledges that the “CDAO has experienced several adverse incidents over the past eight months.” 

“It is important in each case to determine through an objective process what happened, how the incident can be resolved, and what lessons we can learn as an organization to avoid repeating any mistakes. As part of this process, I appointed Investigating Officers on August 16 to conduct timely, thorough and accurate investigations of each incident,” Plumb wrote.

She told those who have questions about their obligations to provide information to the oversight officials to reach out to the CDAO’s Office of the General Counsel — and also assured staff that if they are asked to provide information pertaining to the incidents, it does not necessarily indicate any wrongdoing on their part.

“These investigations are routine throughout the department and help us pursue economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in CDAO programs and operations; detect and prevent waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement; and ensure ethical conduct throughout our organization,” she wrote.

Plumb also urged everyone who is contacted by the newly-appointed investigating officers to respond “fully and in a timely manner.”  

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Tuesday, a defense official confirmed the authenticity of the email on the condition of anonymity but declined to provide further information about the alleged “adverse incidents” within CDAO in recent months.

“The CDAO advances data, analytics and AI-enabled capabilities of the Department of Defense. As it is a comparatively new organization, an important CDAO goal is to institutionalize processes that enable the organization to support digital transformation, while ensuring the organization can recruit, retain, and develop a talented, professional workforce to accomplish our mission,” the official told DefenseScoop.

“To that end, CDAO is currently conducting internal inquiries to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in CDAO programs and operations and to ensure the organization creates and maintains the highest standards of professionalism across its workforce. Although we do not have additional information to provide at this time, the CDAO team will continue to perform its vital mission to accelerate DOD adoption of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence,” the defense official said.

The CDAO was formed in late 2021, and reached full operating capability in 2022. Broadly, it combined four predecessor organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — and is responsible for coordinating and accelerating the adoption of data, analytics and AI capabilities by all Defense Department components.

In March, DefenseScoop reported that Plumb would serve as the office’s new permanent chief, following the exit of DOD’s first official CDAO, former commercial technology executive Craig Martell, who led the AI organization from April 2022 to April 2024.

Separate from these newly revealed internal investigations within the CDAO, the DOD Office of Inspector General is also conducting a comprehensive, independent watchdog assessment to determine the CDAO’s “effectiveness” since its origin.

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After delivering a keynote on Thursday at AITalks presented by AIScoop, Jinyoung Englund, the CDAO’s chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare, briefed DefenseScoop about some of her team’s near-term priorities.

In particular, officials are looking to quickly execute on recently approved fiscal 2024 funding, and more intentionally communicate the CDAO’s unique and maturing role in the Defense Department.

“You’ve got to remember — we’re still pretty new for the government. We’re only approaching two years [since reaching full operational capacity]. So when you form a new organization, you have to establish an identity. Building that identity takes time and more so when you’re a merger and acquisition, even in the private sector. And just because you say who you are once doesn’t mean everyone caught the message, right? There’s multiple audiences and multiple stakeholders,” Englund told DefenseScoop.

Four predecessor organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were restructured and merged in 2022 to form the CDAO. Englund, who previously served in several leadership roles at DDS, has been with the amalgamated office since its inception.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks oversees the CDAO and initially steered its launch to centralize oversight and expedite the realization of the department’s then-scattered data and AI initiatives. She hired former Lyft machine learning executive Craig Martell as the nascent hub’s first permanent chief.

There have been some hurdles, but Martell and the team made notable progress in the CDAO’s first two years of existence, including by producing the Pentagon’s latest AI and data adoption guidance and the military’s first minimum viable capability for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

Now, the office is moving into a new chapter. 

In March, DefenseScoop reported that Martell was resigning from his post and that Radha Plumb was selected to serve as his successor. Prior to joining the CDAO, Plumb previously served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and, before that, as Hicks’ chief of staff.    

“When we first started this organization, we needed a visionary. And we needed someone who could tell the department what right looks like. And that’s why we had [Martell] — we needed someone who has actually done this at scale,” Englund told DefenseScoop.

“The benefit of it being [Martell] is that when you’re in the bureaucracy for too long, you don’t know it, but you start to limit yourself because you’re like, ‘Oh, but we can’t do that.’ You lose that imagination piece, you lose the ‘if there were no barriers then what is possible’ outlook — and that’s what [Martell] had. That was his value proposition to DOD. But anytime a new company is stood up, at some point you now need to transition to an institutional leader, someone who knows the bureaucracy, in our case, and can navigate it to now fully resource this division,” she said.

During her on-stage presentation at AITalks, Englund noted that under Plumb’s new leadership, the CDAO “is now in a position to secure” what it needs to help the department accelerate its acquisition, coordination and adoption of artificial intelligence.

“So this is my message: Let us help you. Help us help you reduce the [time and toil] it requires for the DOD to operationalize AI — and by that, I mean, whether you’re military, civilian, contractor, industry performers … or international partners,” Englund told the audience.

Much of her keynote focused on articulating and clarifying what the CDAO’s set responsibilities and functions are within and for the department. That same emphasis, vocalizing the office’s duties, has also been shared in recent public presentations by others from the office over the past few months. 

“As an organization, we’re really focused on user feedback. And some of the user feedback has been, ‘We’re confused.’ Not entirely our fault, because some people don’t listen, or some people are not paying attention — and that’s totally normal human behavior. So I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of that, like just helping to distinguish what is it that we’re doing versus what is that you need to bring to the table,” Englund told DefenseScoop about the overarching intent. 

In terms of her team within the CDAO algorithmic warfare directorate’s near-term priorities, the chief strategist pointed to plans to quickly execute on investments enabled by the recently passed and long-delayed defense appropriations bill for fiscal 2024.

“Now that we have the budget, we have to spend the money. We have, what, like a little less than two quarters [remaining in the fiscal year] to now spend all the money that we asked for? And so that’s what the teams are doing. For so long, since last fall [near the beginning of fiscal 2024], every team member has been kind of on edge. And it takes time and attention away when you’re constantly preparing for shutdowns. Now that that’s lifted, now our teams can focus on delivering,” Englund said.

She also confirmed that Plumb is conducting her own, broader assessment to figure out and ensure the commitments made by the CDAO so far are the right ones to pursue moving forward. 

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The move came on the heels of a “Tiger Team” review involving officials from across the department, which highlighted a number of shortcomings and systemic challenges with the current setup that make it harder to procure and transfer critical technology to international allies and partners.

Austin on Tuesday issued a series of directives to officials and agencies that implement arms exports and security cooperation.

“To accelerate discussions with allies and partner nations about FMS requirements and reduce delays during the FMS case lifecycle, the Department will change the way it organizes, trains, and equips for security cooperation, including by establishing a Defense Security Cooperation Service on par with the Defense Attaché Service,” the Pentagon said in a release.

To lower barriers to the export of key capabilities, “the Department will review and update relevant policies and empower accountable officials to improve the efficiency of the review and release of technology to allies and partner nations. The Department will also continue to support interagency efforts focused on technology review and release,” it added.

Other steps to be taken include developing a methodology to facilitate non-programs of record, establishing contract award standards and metrics, and creating “process maps” to monitor the FMS prioritization and award process.

Another key goal is expanding defense industrial base (DIB) capacity to not only produce items needed by the U.S. military, faster — but also supply foreign partners.

“The Department will incorporate ally and partner requirements into ongoing efforts to expand DIB production capacity. This will include developing a comprehensive study to incentivize DIB investment in production capacity and building surge capability for high-demand, low-supply platforms, systems, and services. The strategy will include use of multi-year contracts; enhanced use of the Special Defense Acquisition Fund; five-year predictive analyses of partner demand; and sustained engagement with the DIB,” per the Pentagon release.

Austin also directed DOD officials to work with other stakeholders in the FMS process, including the State Department and Congress, to identify additional opportunities for improvement.

Notably, the Pentagon is setting up a permanent Continuous Process Improvement Board (CPIB) tasked with making sure the Tiger Team recommendations are actually implemented, tracking metrics and making more adjustments over time. This panel will report to the secretary of defense.

“We know that there are consistent challenges inherent in FMS and that this is something that requires our senior leadership to keep a close eye on over time. So we’re committing as I said, to a … continuous process improvement initiative. It will involve using modern technology to collect data, to establish metrics where we are, I think, collectively committed to embracing a more data-driven approach to FMS,” Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Sasha Baker — who co-led the Tiger Team with Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Radha Plumb — told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

DefenseScoop asked Baker if the changes were also aimed at improving the transfer of technologies like software and artificial intelligence capabilities, not just hardware and services.

“What we’ve looked at is the system as a whole and there any number of recommendations that we’re making that I think will benefit the process, regardless of which widget is coming out on the back end. It may, to your point, be the case that as we move further into things like AI, for example, we may discover that there are unique challenges there that require unique or more bespoke solutions. Part of the reason we have this Continuous Process Improvement Board is to identify and raise those issues early so that we can get after them and we don’t have to sort of wait for years and then come back and say, ‘OK, well, we haven’t really been doing this right, so let’s fix it.’ Let’s fix it on the front end,” Baker said.

As new technologies emerge, the Pentagon will have to figure out which ones can be transferred to allies and partners and which ones need to be more closely held.

“Particularly as we move into, to your point earlier, increasingly advanced technologies, how do we ensure that we have a process in place to adjudicate what can be released and what needs to stay proprietary to the United States? That’s not a new problem, it’s not something that we’ve just uncovered today or over the course of this [Tiger Team] process. But we do think that we’ve put in place some recommendations here that if we follow through on them are going to address what has been, frankly, a long-standing pain point for the department,” Baker said.

Plumb added: “I think some of the exportability work we do now and looking at what exportability looks on both hardware software and then the integrated system … is going to be helpful, both for space and for things like software-enabled capabilities, AI, etc., so that that work is transferable. And then on the hardware production itself, much like all of our sort of overall hardware contracting and production, that … very much should be helped by the process to speed the contracting, set targets on those contracting, but then make sure we are appropriately capturing partner demand for that and incorporating that in the production lines for the capabilities we need.”

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