The effort is part of the service’s sprawling Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative, one of its top modernization priorities to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures.

Army officials have said NGC2 is composed of a horizontal operational design that involves a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. That application layer is also where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same integrated backbone.

A team of vendors led by Anduril was awarded a nearly $100 million contract last week to continue prototyping for NGC2 and scale it to a full division with 4^th Infantry Division.

Despite the award, the Army is pressing on to continue offering industry opportunities to support the program. The Army is planning to continue releasing periodic so-called characteristics of need statements, which initially served as an acknowledgement of a complex problem space, officials said.

In doing so, the service doesn’t seek to prescribe requirements for industry, but rather provide them with a broad set of challenges they could then seek to develop creative solutions against.

The most recent update, which was just recently signed out, targets decision dominance.

“To me, decision dominance is reflective of a concept,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commanding general at Army Futures Command, told reporters on the sidelines of a daylong conference hosted by AUSA on Tuesday. “The concept of an OODA loop or a killchain has been one that’s been well established for some time and obviously very consequential to the outcome of a military engagement.”

Officials have stated that one of the most important aspects for NGC2 is the data layer. To realize the stated vision for NGC2 — the ability for commanders to do “more, better, faster” — commanders need to make sense of their data quicker than the adversary.

“The biggest thing for us is the data layer and that’s where artificial intelligence and future capabilities like artificial intelligence come in. We have to understand the data and how we integrate data across a different platform. All of our forces need access to that same level of data. For artificial intelligence, for C2, decision dominance is the answer,” Col. (P) Mike Kaloostian, the incoming director of the C2 cross-functional team for Army Futures Command, told the conference. “Whoever is able to sift through the amount of data that’s going to be available on the battlefield of tomorrow, to sort through that and use that information effectively to make decisions that force is going to win war. There’s no doubt about it … AI-enabled decision dominance is where we need to come and what the future is.”

The updated characteristics of need with the new decision dominance focus provides industry with a baseline to work off of.

Officials noted that data has to be in the right place and AI is ineffective if the location of data is unknown or isn’t in a place where it can be analyzed.

As the Army continues to work with industry partners — either working on the prototype or others still vying for future NGC2 efforts — to establish a data integration layer and scale it, there must be a destination for all the data to go.

Industry can help the Army figure out what that data plane looks like and how the service is bringing in data, ingesting it and sorting through it to make it relevant to commanders in real time. Areas the Army is interested in include using capabilities such as edge computing to process data and decisions faster than the adversary in the dirt.

Continuing characteristics of need for industry

When the initial characteristics of need concept was first announced, the plan was to update it every 90 days or so as the Army conducted exercises and experiments to keep industry abreast of the latest observations.

The plan, even after the prototyping contract, is to continue updating it; however, the cadence might shift.

Welch described periodic updates that will be based on lessons learned, which will likely come from home station events with 4^th Infantry Division at Fort Carson.

“We’re focused now on our work with our awarded team. We’re focused on the work that we’ll have upcoming through the” commercial solutions offering, he said, describing an ongoing effort with the program office to evaluate additional vendor teams and capabilities with the vision of adding them on in the future. “We’re focused on 4ID in our first prototyping initiative right now and I think there’s a lot that’ll be coming from that.”

He said the Army needs to continue to convey where opportunities exist for industry, and the characteristics of need aims to lay things out broadly, including for the Army, to understand the scope of what it is looking for.

“We’re going to continue to describe what we know about the capability as we work into prototyping, what we think we have solved and where we still think there are challenges,” Welch said.

The prototyping effort will help the Army discover what the NGC2 architecture looks like.

“We were very resistant to providing an architecture up front for companies to bid on, not because we don’t understand the importance of it, but because we feel it’ll likely be emergent as we work through, continue on with the prototype, with whatever commercial software or sets of commercial software may underpin it. That’s something that will emerge as we continue to work the prototyping effort,” he added. “That may be a level of detail that may not be in the characteristic of need, but will certainly be, I think, very useful to industry in terms of understanding where the opportunities, the base of which to innovate upon, is going to get established.”

Welch noted that within the technology stack, he’s always envisioned sub-problem statements that components of teams can try to help solve.

The post Army turning attention to AI for decision dominance with Next-Gen Command and Control appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Cyrus Jabbari stepped into the CDO role at U.S. Central Command in May, but his hiring wasn’t officially announced by the organization until this week.

In his new position, Jabbari will “oversee the strategic integration of data-driven solutions to enhance operational effectiveness across CENTCOM’s area of responsibility,” according to a press release.

Centcom has been on the cutting edge of U.S. military technology adoption. It has three units — Task Force 59 under Naval Forces Central Command, Task Force 99 under Air Forces Central, and Task Force 39 under Army Central — that in recent years have been experimenting with and deploying emerging tech such as AI and machine learning, data analytics, unmanned systems and cloud computing. The command has also adopted tools like the Maven Smart System to aid decision-making.

Jabbari isn’t a newcomer to the Defense Department. He previously served as the first-ever CDO in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In that role, he was charged with developing, managing and overseeing implementation of data policies across the Pentagon’s R&E enterprise, including for organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), Missile Defense Agency, Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Test Resource Management and Defense Technical Information Center, among others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At the R&E directorate, he also chaired the Transition Tracking Action Group, which was stood up in February 2024 to boost DOD’s ability to keep tabs on, manage and make smart investments in technology transition efforts across the Pentagon’s vast capability development enterprise, all the way from the early stages of R&D to fielding, according to a press release.

The action group enabled “a new approach to technology portfolio management that leverages advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to provide DOD officials with the insights [they need] to make informed, innovative decisions,” Jabbari said in a statement last year.

Prior to that, Jabbari supported the Pentagon as a data and analytics lead at ANSER, a non-profit corporation that develops solutions for clients in the national security community, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“Thrilled to officially welcome a fantastic partner Cyrus J. to the team — it’s amazing when the right people end up on the right team and in the right position for the right mission at the right time — magic happens,” Centcom Chief Technology Officer Joy Angela Shanaberger said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday night.

In a separate statement, she said she was “confident his expertise will be a game-changer in our efforts to harness the power of data to drive warfighter-centric innovation across United States Central Command.”

“Joining CENTCOM is both a professional honor and personal calling. This command stands at the forefront of operational experimentation and complexity — where decisions must be made faster, with greater precision, and under immense pressure,” Jabbari said in a statement. “CENTCOM is where data must drive action and where data is valued as a warfighting asset. A lot of great leadership has put CENTCOM on the right path, and I am honored to carry us into our next phase of accelerating data capabilities for ever-pressing missions.”

The position of Centcom CDO was previously held by Michael Foster. He left the command in December near the end of the Biden administration and is currently chief data engineer at Raft, a defense technology company, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The post US Central Command hires new chief data officer appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“It’s about bringing all of those traditionally stovepiped elements together — and employing them at different times and in new and innovative ways,” Col. Michael McFeeters, chief of Transcom’s special activities division, told DefenseScoop last week.

During an exclusive tour of the command’s headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, he and other officials shared new details regarding ongoing efforts to fuse information operations with cyber operations in Transcom’s non-kinetic arsenal, and some of the latest trends they are observing from U.S. adversaries in cyberspace.  

“A lot of this is intel-driven to wherever the threats are. And what threats are we talking about? Are we worried about China, Iran, Russia? Because they’re very, very different in how they conduct themselves and how they execute operations to contest logistics or the battle space that we’re trying to operate in through. So, you know, we have to … think differently based on whatever adversary where we’ll go up against,” McFeeters explained.

Transcom is a functional combatant command charged with executing global logistics and the transport of personnel and equipment for the Department of Defense and its components. 

The command relies heavily on data, digital systems and commercial partners to meet its mission, all of which requires significant cybersecurity protections.

“We’ve tried to change the way we do cyber operations. In the past, Transcom really focused on just the stuff that we own and operate. But the joint deployment distribution enterprise is a global enterprise,” said Patrick Grimsley, director of Transcom’s J6 command, control, communications and cyber systems directorate.

Over the last few years, command officials have expanded operations and been moving to better ensure they can present senior decision-makers with the greatest understanding of existing and emerging cyber risks — beyond the elements they operate within the DOD Cyber Defense Command (formerly known as the Joint Force Headquarters-DOD Information Network, or JFHQ-DODIN). 

“We’re also becoming a lot more active in information operations. So not just looking at cyber in and of itself, but it’s really cyber is part of the non-kinetic portfolio. So how do we fight through or combat some of the threats that are coming at us, again, outside the things that just Transcom controls? And how do we integrate and work with the other combatant commands to do that, too?” McFeeters said.

“I’d say the majority of what Transcom does is defensive cyber operations. And this is part of thinking in a new way [about] how we leverage the IO side of that to help execute Transcom’s mission,” he added.

Information operations involve the employment of capabilities to influence adversaries’ decision-making and protect friendly forces.

“[U.S] adversaries, they’re all out there — and their focuses are very different. Like, Russia is still focused right now on being able to understand and predict when aid and munitions are crossing the border to get into Ukraine, so they can interdict it before they actually get into the hands of the fighters … who can then employ those. China — completely different. China is just trying to get into everything [in cyberspace]. They’re not facing that same existential threat that Russia is. So, they’re playing more of a wait-and-see, and let’s get in there and have effects ready to shut down systems or critical infrastructure,” McFeeters told DefenseScoop.

DOD leadership expects all military and civilian components to follow its zero-trust cybersecurity framework to protect critical national security data and information. As its name suggests, the zero-trust concept presumes all networks are compromised from the get-go.

“You won’t always be able to keep the bad guys out of everything, right? You have to assume they’re there. But I would say that’s where, by bringing together those non-kinetic disciplines becomes important, [for] intelligence and awareness. For instance, if the bad guys get into one of our systems and we know they’re there, we may not want to kick them out. We may want to take advantage of that,” McFeeters said. “And as long as we know where they’re at and we’re confident they have not laterally maneuvered in that space, we may intentionally start putting stuff into that system so they will see or think something that is not reality.”

When asked for an example, he pointed to a scheduling system Transcom might rely on to coordinate deliveries.

“We may put false schedules in there, right? So that if an adversary is watching and they think something is going to go out of a certain place at a certain time, carrying certain goods, that may not be the case. We have done that in the real world before. We will do that again,” McFeeters said.

The post Transcom cyber officials moving to be ‘a lot more active’ in information operations appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Right now, [the lab is] working with Transcom’s Surgeon General on how to build analytic tools with patient data to handle a mass casualty event,” John DeLapp, the futures division chief at the command’s analytics center, or TCAC, told DefenseScoop.

Other projects include but are not limited to advanced AI for large-scale in-flight messaging analyses, and algorithms to inform global air refueling missions. They’re all unfolding via a well-established partnership that the command has dubbed the MIT Lincoln Lab Living Plan. 

Officials briefed DefenseScoop on this collaborative initiative during an exclusive tour of the command’s headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, this week. They also shared new details about an upcoming exercise that aims to optimize data transmission across a broad spectrum of operations.

MASCOT

Launched by the command in 2011, the lab’s “living” plan was conceptualized to be more dynamic than typical static business initiatives — and to enable the two partners to adapt as technologies, circumstances and demands change over time.

“Back then, and even to an extent now, Transcom has had some of the same challenges — stovepiped systems and data, and getting it all together. So, the idea was for Lincoln to help us assess data architectures and to build flexible and robust planning tools, and analytics that would tie planning and analysis together, and propose cross-cutting solutions to that,” DeLapp explained. 

“And what’s happened over time is there have been projects where Lincoln has worked with our air component, Air Mobility Command, on predictive maintenance. They’ve worked with our J6 [command, control, communications and computer systems directorate] in the cyber area. They’ve worked with the J2 [intelligence directorate] in characterizing foreign influence using open-source information,” he said.

Lab officials don’t build and maintain the widgets or systems, but instead prototype technologies and then hand things off to the command or a vendor to fully produce and deploy them. 

“For example, in the air refueling area, our analysis models — with contested environments and all the new challenges — these models are being asked to do more. The model run times are getting slower. It’s getting harder to do them. So, we’ve brought Lincoln Labs on to go research and develop newer algorithmic approaches to speed up techniques and to speed up those algorithms. And then that will get handed off to the contractor that builds and updates it, and then they’ll take that and then incorporate it into the model,” DeLapp said.

In fiscal 2020, the command asked MIT researchers to conduct a comprehensive assessment to gauge which of its directorates were the most and least ready candidates to adopt AI and machine learning in tailor-made use cases.

“That was pretty telling because you can have all this technology, but if the directorate doesn’t know what data they have, or they don’t even know if that data exists, if they don’t even know what a tool can do and what it can’t do, or what it should do — then the time’s not right for you to just go and embrace that,” DeLapp noted.

Roots of the lab’s ongoing analytic and AI-enabling efforts for Transcom’s Surgeon General stem back to challenges pinpointed in that eye-opening assessment. Among its weighty, far-reaching responsibilities, the command serves as the Defense Department’s sole manager for global patient movement, which often involves the rapid and high-stakes transportation of ill and injured military personnel. 

The speed of conflict and urgency of such medical operations can make data-capture and processing typically more complex for Transcom in this context.

Spotlighting such challenges, Transcom public affairs official Erik Anthony told DefenseScoop: “There are some locations where we’ll get paper documentation for these individuals. So when you have even 10 patients moving — and then you do this at scale with thousands of patients — and you have medics running to an aircraft with papers, and then these papers have to make it to three other stops where they’re doing continuity of care.”

The patient movement mission set was identified during the lab assessment as potentially being well-suited for application of AI and ML technology. In fiscal 2021, MIT Lincoln Laboratory began working with the U.S. Transcom Command Surgeon to develop an AI-assisted routing tool to support that mission, he explained.

Now, that’s just one in a suite of tools the lab is developing and refining to facilitate the scalable handling of patient data, automate identification of key patient movements, and support planning for clinical and air assets.

“The Mass Casualty Operations Toolkit — MASCOT — uses [AI and ML] to enhance accuracy, improve workflows, and provide critical insights for both routine patient transport and mass casualty events,” Anthony said.

Once prototyped, the outputs can go on to be maintained as separate tools or used as a specification for incorporation into the Transcom Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System.

According to Anthony, by applying natural language processing and large language modeling in their toolkit, the lab will assist the patient movement community “in reducing their cognitive load when processing patient movement requests resulting in reduced errors and faster decisions, allowing for increased velocity of patient movement operations.”

“This effort seeks to aid clinicians and airlift planners in decision-making, focusing on addressing operational needs for effective medical transport, particularly during a mass casualty response,” he said.

Another in-development tool in the MASCOT arsenal is what officials referred to as a synthetic patient generator.

“When command officials do exercises, they’ll go ‘We want to exercise some conflict. How are we going to move all these thousands of patients?’ Well, what type of patients are they? They’ve all got different requirements and some have different demands on critical care teams. So, if you want to really exercise that, you’ll want to have a capability to be able to generate a variety of patients, and not just do that manually. So the lab is building that out,” DeLapp said. 

This generator capability produces realistic synthetic patient data tied to computer-based scenarios. 

“When there’s a conflict — [with] the pace and the need — you’re going to need tools like that to be able to address those challenges,” he noted.

Up next

In DeLapp’s view, the long-term, flexible nature of the Living Plan is key to enabling the lab and command to access a combination of capabilities that are targeted for — but rapidly evolve with — its complex mission set.

“Because one of the benefits, again, of this partnership and the length of it, is that some of the people on the lab staff have been familiar with [staff like] the Surgeon General — and their processes and their challenges — for several years now, and then also they know where they can help in other areas,” he told DefenseScoop.

Command officials’ next chance to test out the MASCOT suite of decision-support tools being developed and refined by the Massachusetts-based lab will occur later this month, during the Ultimate Caduceus 2025 (UC25) exercise. The event — which is designed to test Transcom’s ability to conduct medical evacuations in both the field and computer-simulated settings — will be hosted in multiple locations this year, including at Travis Air Force Base in California.

“MIT Lincoln Laboratory will generate the patient data based on requirements from the UC25 exercise planners. In the future, this capability will be provided as a tool that planners can use directly,” Anthony said regarding the in-the-works synthetic patient generator.

Another tool in the pipeline for the exercise will streamline patient movement request data reviews at the Transcom Patient Movement Requirements Center.

There’s also a variety of other projects under the Living Plan umbrella that span beyond the command’s medical portfolio.

For one, Lincoln researchers are essentially helping officials in Transcom’s Air Operations Center (AOC) gain capacity to pull key datapoints from massive volumes of instant messages shared between personnel in real-world operations to inform senior leaders.

“A flight manager will chat a message to the crew and the crew will message a chat back. That’s thousands and thousands of chats. So the AOC is working on trying to, one, collect all that, and then two, make sense of all that. And using natural language processing and some generative AI, [they aim to] collect and gain insights into maybe something’s going on in one part of the world — like a runway that is flooded — and it’ll more rapidly inform the senior decision-makers that there’s a problem out there,” DeLapp said. 

“They’re doing that prototyping work and then handing it off to one of the Air Force software factories who then build it out,” he told DefenseScoop.

Due to the unique nature of the initiative, TCAC must evaluate projects to sponsor under the Living Plan each year. DeLapp’s team is now gearing up for their fiscal 2027 review.

The post Transcom pursues AI to enhance patient movement ops and mass casualty response appeared first on DefenseScoop.

During a keynote address at the AI+ Expo in Washington hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project, which brought together some of the biggest companies in the tech sector as well as smaller vendors with more niche capabilities, Caine suggested legacy systems and old ways of doing business won’t be sufficient for maintaining military superiority in the future.

“Peace in our nation will not be won by the legacy systems that we’ve had or the legacy thinking. It will be determined by the entrepreneurs and innovators and leaders, both in government and out of government, that create overwhelming strength. It will be won by our breakthroughs in AI, cyber, autonomy, space, energy, advanced manufacturing, data, compute, you name it. And we need your help with this,” he said.

New capabilities can improve command-and-control systems, decision-making, mission execution and survivability, he noted. However, the Pentagon needs industry to scale new technology to the point that it becomes a “strategic differentiator.”

U.S. adversaries are sharing tech and intelligence, enabling them to field advanced capabilities faster, he warned.

“And on our end, the barrier for entry for technology, for disruptive tech, is low, but the barrier to government business is high, frankly, too high. And yet, the changing nature and character of warfare is happening right before our eyes. We’ve seen examples of that, most recently as this weekend” when Ukraine attacked Russia’s strategic bombers with cheap drones, Caine said. “We’ve got to go faster, my friends. And that’s mostly, in many cases, on us in … the government. Together, though, we’ve got to be focused on fighting the next war, not fighting the last war, and we need entrepreneurs both in the private sector and in government.”

He added that the Defense Department needs to “do some work” to improve the requirements process and be “better buyers.”

“I know this from my time in the private sector where I tried to sell things to the government when I was an entrepreneur. It’s hard,” Caine said.

He has previously touted his experience in the private sector, including at his confirmation hearing.

After retiring from the military and before his return to service to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Caine was a venture partner at Shield Capital, an advisor for Thrive Capital and a venture partner at Ribbit Capital, among other roles.

The chairman noted that reform efforts are already underway at the Defense Department.

In recent years, the Pentagon has tried to expand its acquisition ecosystem by attracting non-traditional contractors and encouraging investors to back startups working on defense-related technologies.

In his speech Wednesday, Caine pointed to progress made by organizations like the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit, which has outposts in major tech hubs across the country and works with nontraditional tech vendors via commercial solutions opening contracting mechanisms.

“We’ve got to drastically scale that capability and that culture inside the joint force, the entrepreneurial culture, which I believe is one of America’s great tools. We’ve got to change our willingness to accept risks, and we’re going to do that,” he said.

The chairman noted that he needs to make sure the joint force is integrated across the globe within the combatant commands and among the services.

“We’ve got to connect them with our interagency allies and partners, including founders and funders, and scale that capability in order to meet the challenges that we need to,” Caine said. “We can do more.”

Caine is a former F-16 pilot who has held a variety of roles throughout his military career, including with the active-duty Air Force, National Guard and the special operations community.

When it comes to relying on advanced tech at the tactical edge, resiliency is key for mission success, he noted.

“My time as a Special Forces officer taught me that two of one thing is [only] one, and one of one thing is none. So we’ve got to be able to build resilient technology [so] that if the power fails or something like that, we’re still capable of doing it,” Caine said.

The post At AI conference, Gen. Caine calls for connecting with ‘founders and funders’ of emerging tech appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s innovation hub, AFWERX, recently awarded Washington, D.C.-headquartered startup Base Operations a Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract for the new tool, which will visualize physical security threats across the globe using public and proprietary source data and modeling assets.

“For the U.S. Air Force, we will develop enhanced capabilities using custom datasets for small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) incident tracking, foreign land ownership analysis near military installations, and port security around AMC coastal bases,” company CEO and founder Cory Siskind told DefenseScoop.

“This addresses the 350 sUAS detections reported across 100 military installations last year, including concerning incidents like the Chinese national apprehended at Vandenberg” Space Force Base in California, she noted.

As Siskind suggested, this deal unfolded at a time when unauthorized drone activity — including over military bases or other sensitive sites around America — has been trending upwards and presenting serious national security concerns. Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen and legal permanent resident, was arrested late last year and charged for flying a drone above Vandenberg and violating defense airspace regulations. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding this contract announcement and whether it was directly motivated by recent reports of unattributed drone incursions over U.S. military facilities, AFWERX spokesman Rob Bardua said “Open Topic contracts are awarded based on Defense Need, Technical Approach and Commercialization.”

The Air Force’s innovation arm “is focusing its investments to rapidly transition emerging commercial and dual-use technologies to remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world,” Bardua said.

Air Mobility Command will be the primary customer for Base Operations’ platform under this new contract award. That command is broadly responsible for providing airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation, and global air mobility support to the joint force.  

“AMC’s specialized teams — Contingency Response Elements, Contingency Response Teams, and Airfield Assessment Teams — often operate in degraded environments where traditional intelligence is fragmented or unavailable. Our platform gives them a single pane of glass for data-driven threat intelligence,” Siskind noted.

The company is customizing the platform to pull datasets from multiple categories — such as waterborne threats near coastal bases, foreign land ownership and acquisitions near sensitive military installations, and small drone flight pattern tracking — with payload analysis and saturation mapping for high-incident areas. 

The technology will apply natural language processing to extract insights from more than 25,000 global data sources.

“The system processes data from 200+ million incidents worldwide, transforming raw intelligence into actionable security assessments in minutes rather than days,” Siskind said.

Base Operations’ platform will also help the command identify emerging risks, monitor threats across thousands of locations in a single dashboard and improve severity assessments, via the “BaseScore dynamic risk” index that will continuously update threat levels to reflect what’s happening in real-time.

According to Siskind, “current threat intelligence scores often rely on overly simplistic high/medium/low risk ratings determined by black box algorithms, raw crime numbers lacking context, or annual statistics that don’t reflect current reality.”

BaseScore “solves this with a precise 0-100 threat assessment scale that allows confident comparison of any location worldwide,” she said.

Before this SBIR award, Base Operations focused primarily on offering corporate security options to customers in the private sector.

“This Direct to Phase II award represents our first formal DOD engagement, but we’re exploring government use cases where we can add value quickly given our sole-source authority,” Siskind told DefenseScoop.

With this sole-source designation, defense organizations can purchase the Base Operations platform without competitive bidding — thus likely accelerating procurement and deployment.

“Our [contract award with AFWERX] moved very quickly — under three months — due to the urgency of the problem space, relevance to DOD objectives, and the streamlined Direct to Phase II SBIR contracting process,” Siskind said.

Sources did not disclose the value of this SBIR contract. 

The post Air Mobility Command enlists AI to better spot and track threats to military bases appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The live-fire event, which took place in Poland, Germany and Arizona on May 11-27, was led by the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under 56th Artillery Command and included international allies.

Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, commanding general of 56th Artillery Command, called it a “premier training event” that tested the task force’s ability to operate across all domains, find targets “at depth” and strike those targets with kinetic and non-kinetic effects.

In U.S. military parlance, the term “kinetic effects” generally refers to munitions or other projectiles, while non-kinetic effects include things like electronic warfare, directed energy and cyber capabilities.

The Multi-Domain Task Force is “improving and refining the technology and the tactics, techniques and procedures. Our soldiers, our sergeants and our lieutenants are the ones who have their hands on this equipment, who are determining the best way to employ it, to get the effects and find the targets that we’re asking them to. And we are putting that feedback right back into the system to improve the capability and optimize not just the equipment that we have, but the way that in which we’re employing it,” Rafferty told reporters Friday during a teleconference.

The results of the exercise are also setting the conditions for the evolution of Rafferty’s command into a multi-domain command in Europe that’s going to take place over the next few months, he noted.

Unmanned systems of various types were key components of the latest iteration of Arcane Thunder, part of an effort to demonstrate the ability to “fight with live data” across a large-scale combat theater.

The Army teamed up with the Navy in the employment of unmanned surface vessels to test out the multi-domain ops concept — which fits in with the Pentagon’s vision for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to better connect the sensors, shooters and information networks of the U.S. military services and allies and partners.

“It’s really trying to perfect the ability to transition from the littoral domain to the land domain, and … how does the MDTF, as part of the joint force, gather data from our joint partners and also share data with our joint partners,” Col. Patrick Moffett, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force, told reporters about the use of unmanned surface vessels during Arcane Thunder. “Working with the USVs, we worked the joint kill chain where the Navy vessels would identify a target, that target would get passed to the second MDTF all-domain operations center, and then we would pass that target to really, for this exercise, to our Polish partners. So that was the tie-in.”

As a land-based force, the Army’s understanding of littorals is often limited, but those USVs gave the task force the ability to better understand what was going on in the sea domain, he noted.

The robo-boats were also used to haul Army equipment in a contested logistics scenario, where the military might need to push that type of gear forward to “isolated elements,” Moffett explained.

But USVs weren’t the only uncrewed systems involved in Arcane Thunder. Drones, high-altitude balloons (HAB) and unattended ground sensors were also part of the mix.

Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, noted that soldiers used sensor data to inform the employment of so-called “launched effects” — such as loitering munitions — to strike targets.

“For us, as we kind of, you know, fought through the scenario-based portion of this exercise, it was using … the micro HAB to provide that geolocation. And then that would trigger battalion- and company-level decision points on if and when … we launched the launched effect to actually close the kill chain on that,” he told reporters.

Stitching together the different technologies involved in the exercise and enabling interoperability between platforms and payloads were some of the biggest challenges the Army had to tackle, he noted.

Rafferty emphasized the importance of being able to pass live data through mission command systems — which in the case of Arcane Thunder, involved forces in both Europe and the continental United States.

He noted that the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under Moffett’s command demonstrated the ability “to make sense of the information and generate enough fidelity to produce targets that then, in some cases, were passed back to the 56th multi-domain headquarters … to work through the process of assigning, you know, the right shooter to those particular targets. So there was a whole range of possibilities and scenarios there.”

Rafferty added: “Really the breakthrough, like I said, was getting that data in virtually real-time from a micro HAB, refined by another platform, made sense of by [Moffett’s team in Poland] and Aaron Ritzema’s soldiers at Fort Huachuca [in Arizona] … and then, in seconds, back here to Wiesbaden and Mainz-Kastel in Germany for, you know, additional analysis and assigning to the right shooter. So really taking that kill chain and taking what was once, you know, hours to really into minutes, essentially … That live data part is probably the biggest breakthrough for us, from my standpoint.”

The post Army weaves robo-boats, drones, balloons and C2 tech into multi-continent Arcane Thunder exercise appeared first on DefenseScoop.

In a sources sought notice released this week, officials unveiled plans for “a new effort” to enable a custom case management system on the intranet that hosts the Defense Department’s top secret and sensitive compartmented information — known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS.

“The intent is to field this capability for AARO personnel at AARO HQ and for use at supporting organizations,” they wrote.

A defense official told DefenseScoop Wednesday that this marks the first “solicitation” published on behalf of the UAP-sleuthing office since its inception. The term UAP encompasses UFOs and trans-medium objects.

“AARO currently uses a variety of tools for its mission management needs and seeks to integrate them,” the official said.

Following mounting public pressure and a mandate from lawmakers, Pentagon leadership formally established the organization in 2022, under the Biden administration. Details about its budget and internal functions have been sparse since then. 

Currently, the department’s intelligence and security directorate is responsible for administrative support to AARO, while the deputy secretary of defense and the principal deputy director for national intelligence exercise control and direction.

According to the performance work statement attached to the new sources sought notice, the office is “responsible for the whole-of-government efforts to detect, identify, attribute, and as appropriate, mitigate, spaceborne, airborne, and maritime objects of interest in or near national security areas.”

One of the hub’s top tasks is to collect, manage and resolve a continuously expanding caseload of reports from current and former government officials — and eventually the general public — about encounters and events that could involve UAP and are relevant to the U.S. government and military.

“A case management system, or CMS, will assist AARO in tracking the status of the UAP reports in its holdings and in meeting its records management requirements, particularly as the office works to launch a public UAP reporting mechanism,” the defense official told DefenseScoop.

The new notice outlines a core list of minimum technical features that would be expected for the potential vendor-developed CMS, including the capacity to categorize UAP cases under investigation based on type, severity, and priority; convert document content into structured data with unique identifiers automatically (like weather, speed or location) that could subsequently be linked to case objects; maintain a history of actions taken on cases and capture their statuses from initiation to resolution; generate automated responses for people’s case submissions; encrypt data in accordance with proper sensitivity levels; and offer customizable views and dashboards for different user roles, among other criteria.

If the office opts to move forward with a full acquisition down the line, AARO envisions at this point that it would buy software development services, the fielding and certification of the software for the AARO JWICS domain, training for AARO personnel to use the capability — as well as sustainment, and spiral development of additional functionality. 

The performance period would likely be set for one base year, with options for up to four follow-on years.

The defense official declined to share further information Wednesday regarding the total cost estimate for any future CMS procurement. They also did not provide an update on the number of UAP reports and resolutions in AARO’s current investigative portfolio, since leadership revealed the receipt of more than 1,600 in November 2024. 

Contractors with an active top secret clearance that are interested in the new CMS opportunity must submit a capabilities statement and other information for consideration to a government email address provided in the notice, by June 9.

The post Pentagon’s UAP investigators exploring new options to better track and manage confidential reports appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The document follows the Space Force’s inaugural action plan, released in 2024, which sought to guide the service in adopting modernized data and analytic capabilities underpinned by AI. The revised version for 2025 looks to build upon last year’s foundational efforts across four lines of effort and provides details on how guardians will further integrate their fledgling cloud-based data repository.

“In this contested and congested domain, superiority will be defined by our ability to integrate with interagency, allies, and commercial partners to advance data capabilities, real-time analytics, and emerging AI technologies to outpace adversaries and maintain operational superiority,” wrote Col. Nathen Iven, acting deputy chief of space operations for cyber and data.

Several action items in the strategy focus on improving the Space Force’s Unified Data Library (UDL) — a cloud-based data repository that ingests and consolidates data from government and commercial sensors in support of the service’s space domain awareness missions. The platform was launched in 2018 by the Air Force Research Laboratory, but users have previously criticized the UDL’s inability to interface with operational systems.

Following a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office which detailed a slew of challenges with the UDL — including commercial integration, timeliness of the data and a lack of a single data standard — the Space Force has worked to improve the technology so it can transition from a prototype to a program of record.

As such, the new strategic action plan tasked the Space Force to establish the UDL as an official program of record using the Pentagon’s software acquisition pathways before the end of calendar 2024.

“The Unified Data Library entered the Software Acquisition Planning Phase, as approved by the Service Acquisition Executive, on Nov 13, 2024. This milestone completes the transition of the Unified Data Library from a prototype to an established program of record,” a spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

A capability needs statement for the UDL that was due before the end of March, identifies additional enhancements to the system.

“The U.S. Space Force Capability Needs Statement for the USSF Data Integration Layer was signed and approved by the Space Force’s Chief Strategy and Resourcing Officer on Dec 18, 2024,” the spokesperson said.

Throughout the rest of fiscal 2025, the service will identify and expose data from various space domain awareness sensors to the UDL for analysis by the National Space Intelligence Center, according to the plan. The library will “integrate into Space Operations Squadrons (SOPS) orbital analysis suite and other high value assets” to facilitate data sharing across the Space Force enterprise, “spanning tactical, operational, and strategic levels-and with Combatant Commands, commercial entities and partner nations,” officials wrote.

Beyond the UDL, the strategy calls on the service to improve how it shares data with commercial and international partners by establishing relative policies, guidance and standards.

For example, officials are tasked to create guidance for digital infrastructure and data storage in order to support integration with commercial assets — likely part of a broader effort to increase collaboration with the commercial space industry. In addition, the service is expected to develop standards to enable partners to share data and models via its Operational Test, Training, and Infrastructure (OTTI) environment.

The strategic plan also looks to bolster data and AI literacy across the workforce, appoint data and AI officers to oversee related initiatives at field commands, and strengthen partnerships with other government organizations, academia, industry and international partners.

“Data and AI are critical for a warfighting service that is purpose-built for space superiority. This plan charts a course to foster data literacy, equip our Guardians with cutting-edge technologies, and drive innovation,” Iven said in a statement.

Updated on March 20, 2025, at 11:05 AM: This story has been updated to include comments from a Space Force spokesperson about the Unified Data Library entering the software acquisition planning phase and the capability needs statement.

The post New Space Force plan charts path for enhanced Unified Data Library appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Once the poster child of a newly data-centric and audit-oriented Department of Defense, Advana has since become yet another exemplar of a DOD software development project that lost its way. Now it rightly finds itself under the DOGE microscope.

The moniker comes from a mash-up of “Advancing Analytics,” and while that may be clever branding, the generic terms also hint at the problem. The original vision for Advana as a data management solution to create auditable data for the Defense Department ballooned over the past five years to become the defense software solution to rule them all. By DOD’s own admission, Advana offers “something for everyone.”

The problem is that this is a terrible way to build software.

As Advana expanded, the intuition was that it would serve as a core data infrastructure across DOD and thereby solve the department’s historic siloed data issues. Instead, the expansion was driven by a single vendor, building a bespoke vertically integrated solution that created a rigid architecture and a set of applications that were applied generically to every problem set.

Great software is purpose-built for specific user personas (i.e., the opposite of “everyone”) and solves defined, distinct problems. That said, a natural challenge of any successful product organization is to identify opportunities for growth without straying too far from what it does well.

Even the greatest technology companies don’t always thread this needle well. There is a reason Google Plus and Apple Ping never caught on, for example. The products weren’t differentiated; the user experience was poor; and the tech giants simply didn’t understand the social media user base. In these cases, however, the market provided swift and objective feedback that these products were off course. Metrics ranging from user adoption to revenue quickly reoriented Google and Apple product teams back to core offerings and onto other experiments.

The government has no self-correcting mechanism. This is how Advana, which gained early success as a system for organizing DOD’s financial statement data, ended up with a billion-dollar budget to build “something for everyone” and unfortunately, did it all poorly.

Origin Story

Advana started with a clear focus and purpose: audit readiness. Early on, DOD officials pointed to the department’s many disconnected audit software systems as a core reason for audit failures. Advana was therefore originally launched as the Universe of Transactions (UoT), designed to address and resolve the data relevant to financial statements and thereby position the department to achieve the long-sought-after and laudable goal of passing a financial audit.

At an industry event in 2019, the DOD Comptroller lead described the problem statement with a question that a DOD auditor had posed to him, “Can you tell me which data sources account for this line on this balance sheet?” Answering that question required tracing back to dozens of different systems with no navigable provenance.

It was clear this reality was unacceptable and by 2019, UoT had made significant progress on the data front, with more than 38 different financial management systems integrated and billions of linked financial transactions. Unfortunately, just as the program was getting traction with use cases related to Budget Analysis, Audit Workbooks, and Dormant Account Reviews, scope creep set in. UoT began expanding its focus beyond financial management and audit to medical readiness, safety, and workforce issues. The “something for everyone” ethos was born.

Two years later, in 2021, DOD awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a $647 million contract to continue expanding Advana’s remit. In 2022, the program migrated from the Comptroller’s office to the DOD’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), its governance mirroring its increasingly expansive focus. In 2024, CDAO paused the launch of new applications to focus on the back-end data management platform and explicitly de-linked the infrastructure and application layers.

Lack of Traction

Today, the estimated spend on Advana is $1.3 billion. In 2024, CDAO announced it would fund the program up to $15 billion for the next 10 years. Yet, as Advana has morphed into a catch-all data management system for DOD, its lack of focus on the platform’s core mission has slowed progress on audit readiness. Rather, unrelated use cases and mission areas expanded beyond medical readiness and workforce to include acquisition, supply chain, and more, partially fulfilling the “something for everyone” idea, but fully satisfying no one.

Part of the challenge associated with this breadth is the inability to be responsive to user needs and requests. Modern software companies deliver dozens of releases with new features, updates, and bug fixes every week. With Advana, users report being in the product roadmap queue for years with little transparency on the timelines. Offices are charged for development of new workflows, begging the question of what the billion-dollar investment actually gets DOD. Prioritizing these workflows as part of the consolidated product roadmap is opaque to stakeholders, further obfuscating time of delivery. 

These are the types of warning signals that would force the executives overseeing any billion-dollar software enterprise to an emergency management session in order to evaluate what has gone wrong and how to change course.

Getting Back on Track

In 2024, CDAO paused new applications to focus on Advana’s back-end data management, and de-linked the infrastructure and application layers. These were critical first steps in righting the program. The upgrades to the backend data infrastructure now provide a platform to layer on top best-in-class commercial applications specific to the day-to-day needs of users.

Today, Secretary Hegseth has an opening to get Advana back on track and in so doing, advance DOD’s prospects of achieving the original goal of a successful audit. Issuing a clear directive that Advana should focus on financial data management and be the technology solution to help DOD finally crest the audit summit would reorient Advana to its original purpose and set the Trump administration up for success where its predecessors have struggled.

To make this a reality, the Pentagon needs to clearly reposition Advana as the financial data and audit readiness platform for DOD, both internally to defense stakeholders and with industry. CDAO should realign Advana’s scope and resourcing with the DOD Comptroller’s audit and financial management priorities and implement governance structures that ensure Advana’s ongoing support and alignment with its core mission. Publicly, the follow-on contract for Advana should explicitly separate performance on the data infrastructure layers (data storage, compute, etc.) which may be broad from a more refined and limited set of task orders on financial management and audit use cases and thoroughly communicated to industry.

A Bright Future

DOD auditability is an essential step to achieving larger strategic goals, including modernizing the force to deter China. Advana has a bright future in a department that has a renewed vigor for fiscal responsibility and financial management. Getting there will require re-focusing the program on the fundamentals. While Advana has made great progress in organizing defense enterprise data, it has failed to be the software system that defense financial managers need to fully realize the Pentagon’s audit priorities. Abandoning the idea that it can be “something for everyone” and aligning to the “best chance to pass an audit” is a winning strategy that DOD has a unique moment in time to adopt and implement.

Tara Murphy Dougherty is CEO of Govini.

The post Make Advana Great Again appeared first on DefenseScoop.