Orozco has been the deputy CIO since September 2024 following an organizational reshuffle under the department’s broader plan to reorganize for future large-scale conflicts. As acting CIO, she will oversee the Air and Space Forces’ IT, cybersecurity, data and artificial intelligence modernization efforts. Orozco is taking over for Venice Goodwine, who is retiring as DAF CIO. 

Prior to becoming deputy CIO, Orozco was the director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, where she was responsible for highly classified efforts known as special access programs (SAP).

She previously served as an active and reserve duty Air Force officer for two decades, entering civil service in 2008 with the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s intelligence directorate and then transferring to the Department of the Air Force in 2013.

According to her official bio, Orozco was key to standing up the Air Force Counter Insider Threat program — designed to mitigate potential risks from Air Force personnel who may try to harm national security — and has led other Pentagon efforts in security reform.

Orozco will take charge as acting CIO following Goodwine’s departure Friday. In March, Goodwine announced on LinkedIn that she planned to leave federal service and explore other opportunities outside of government.

“After years of tackling complex challenges, I’m looking forward to this period of rest and reflection. But make no mistake—this is just a break, not an ending. I remain excited about future opportunities and new ways to contribute,” Goodwine wrote.

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“This concludes a rewarding journey through military service, private industry, and government leadership. It’s been an honor to support our mission, lead technology initiatives, and work alongside the exceptional personnel of our Air and Space Forces,” she said in a post on LinkedIn announcing her exit. 

Goodwine was tapped to serve as DAF CIO in August 2023, and oversaw modernization efforts for information technology, cybersecurity, data and artificial intelligence for both the Air and Space Forces. She led several initiatives throughout her tenure that aimed to streamline the DAF’s experimentation and adoption of emerging AI capabilities, while also pushing for increased transparency on the department’s development and spending on the technology.

In 2024, she helped stand up the DAF’s NIPRGPT 1.0 platform, where airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors can interact with a generative AI chatbot on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The tool served as a way for the department to experiment with large language models to help determine best use cases in the future.

Goodwine was also involved in the department’s work to adopt zero-trust cybersecurity frameworks, as mandated by the Pentagon. Her Zero Trust Strategy, released last year, emphasized leveraging cloud-based capabilities and integrating identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) solutions.

Prior to serving as DAF CIO, Goodwine was the director of enterprise information technology for the department. She previously spent more than two years as chief information security officer at the Department of Agriculture.

Goodwine is an Air Force veteran, having joined active duty in 1986 and serving as a signals intelligence analyst. She then served in the Air Force Reserve from 2002 until her retirement from uniformed military service in 2022.

Although she is leaving federal service, Goodwine noted in her LinkedIn post that she is open to other opportunities outside of government.

“After years of tackling complex challenges, I’m looking forward to this period of rest and reflection. But make no mistake—this is just a break, not an ending. I remain excited about future opportunities and new ways to contribute,” she wrote.

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The center, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, was stood up in 2019 and was responsible for delivering cyber capabilities. The recently announced change making it a field operating agency that is secretariat aligned will require no movement of people, and it’s expected to reach full operational capability by October 2025.

“This is a significant step toward streamlining and consolidating Information Technology functions and ensuring unity of effort in IT service delivery across the Air Force and Space Force,” Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force, said in a statement. “By combining and aligning these functions to their authoritative owner, the IT enterprise will be able to produce capabilities in shorter, more rapid development cycles — ensuring requirements are expediently actioned and delivered to the Airmen and Guardians who need them.”

As a field operating agency, the center will develop and manage services such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, mobility, and data centers, to ensure interoperability and consistency across the department, according to a LinkedIn post from the Department of the Air Force CIO.

The move — which was effective Dec. 20, according to a release — is in line with Kendall’s ongoing effort to reoptimize the DAF for great power competition, a sweeping set of changes overhauling how the service is organized and creating new commands as it transitions from 20-plus years of counterterrorism operations and focuses on countering advanced adversaries such as China.

As part of those changes, the Air Force has sought to elevate the role of cyber and IT functions, with forthcoming moves including elevating Air Forces Cyber and splitting the intelligence and cyber roles at the deputy chief of staff level. The latter change aims to elevate the role of IT, cyber and warfighter communications with a dedicated three-star general serving as the chief advisor to the secretary.

“The bifurcation of IT did not meet my intent to rapidly deliver capabilities based on the requirements provided by our people,” Kendall said.

The evolution of the Cyberspace Capabilities Center, which will include the realignment of functions from other organizations and future administrative changes, will more effectively organize, train and equip the IT enterprise and cyber personnel, according to the Air Force.

“Our men and women are used to change, but we’re especially excited about this opportunity to refocus our mission centered around service delivery for the enterprise. We can already see the synergies building between our team and the DAF CIO’s staff,” Col. Chris Rubiano, Headquarters Cyberspace Capabilities Center commander, said in a statement. “We look forward to onboarding other Enterprise IT functions from across the Department and working with stakeholders to grow processes which help us best develop capabilities for both Airmen and Guardians.”

The move also aims to align with the Air Force’s notion of “one department, two services,” since the inception of the Space Force in 2019, with the need to better represent the structure among both entities.

“Many people don’t realize how vast our office’s statutory authority for IT is — there are many responsibilities that my office cannot delegate and that we are responsible for delivering and synchronizing across the Enterprise, which is inclusive of all IT — from business, to warfighting, to intelligence, to services of common concern,” DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said in a statement. “I have a responsibility to the secretary, but also his staff and both services, to ensure their IT requirements are captured and developed in a way that is not only responsive but cost effective and interoperable with one another. We can do this through effective governance, and alignment of the Cyberspace Capabilities Center as a Field Operating Agency to my office, will help reinforce adherence to the capability delivery process.”

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The online tool, dubbed CLARA, is designed to increase visibility and overall understanding of the department’s AI-related initiatives by serving as a centralized repository that provides information, progress and potential collaboration opportunities on projects, the DAF CIO noted Monday in a post on LinkedIn. The goal is to ensure stakeholders across the department stay informed and aligned in regards to these types of technologies.

“Every warfighter deserves clarity on the tools and capabilities at their disposal,” Acting DAF Chief Data and AI Officer Chandra Donelson said in a statement. “Transparent access to our resources ensures everyone is more equipped and ready to excel in any mission.”

Much like the rest of the Pentagon, the Department of the Air Force has been exploring how to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for the Air and Space Forces. The DAF has been experimenting with new technologies and launched pilot efforts focusing on how AI can assist both services — ranging from day-to-day tasks to tactical operations.

With a number of programs underway, CLARA will be used to monitor progress, spending and potential duplicative initiatives, DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said Monday during a keynote speech at the annual Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference.

“One of the things Congress has levied upon us is we must be able to have an AI inventory so we can report how much money we’re spending on AI,” Goodwine said. “But importantly, how are we tracking the time back on mission for our airmen and guardians? CLARA is a way in which we’re going to do that.”

In April, officials set up a DAF AI Launch Point to act as a “one-stop shop” for all of the department’s emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, Goodwine said. The website includes information on policies, strategy, training and education, as well as the AI Exchange App Store where airmen and guardians can begin experimenting with AI-enabled technologies.

Among those new tools is NIPRGPT 1.0 — a generative AI chatbot hosted on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). Released in June in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the experimental platform allows the DAF to test different large language models and learn how they can be used in real-world scenarios.

NIPRGPT 1.0 has enabled experimentation with some open-source large language models, such as Meta’s Llama family of LLMs and Mistral AI, Goodwine noted.

Under what is being called NIPRGPT 1.0+, the department is looking to incorporate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to combine large language models with the department’s internal data.

“What we want to show you which model is best for which use case,” Goodwine said.

Along with NIPRGPT, the department’s AI Exchange platform also includes redForce AI — a DevOps platform that supports rapid artificial intelligence capability development for warfighters — and the Mission-Driven Autonomous Collaborative Heterogeneous Intelligent Network Architecture (MACHINA), which is part of the Space Force’s space domain awareness network architecture. 

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DAF Chief Information Officer Venice Goodwine released the department’s Zero Trust Strategy this week, in which she lays out seven strategic goals and accompanying objectives that will allow the Air and Space Forces to operate using a zero-trust concept in the future. The DAF intends to move beyond baseline maturity for zero trust and work to reach intermediate maturity by the end of fiscal 2028, according to the document.

Each of the strategic goals and objectives are directly aligned with the Defense Department’s Zero Trust Strategy, released in 2022. The Pentagon-wide implementation plan requires organizations across the department to achieve what it calls “target levels” of zero trust no later than the end of fiscal 2027.

“Ultimately, this strategy makes the warfighting changes we need to evolve as a department possible by simplifying access for our Airmen & Guardians and imposing higher costs on our competitors and adversaries,” according to the executive summary of the new Air Force strategy. “The seven pillars capability elements, and activities, focus DAF resources to align with the DoD Zero Trust Strategy and industry leading Zero Trust models.”

Zero trust is a cybersecurity framework that assumes adversaries are already moving through IT networks, and therefore requires organizations to continuously monitor and validate users and their devices as they move through the network. The pivot towards operating under zero trust will require Pentagon components to modernize their IT infrastructures, as well as adopt new governance processes.

The DAF strategy emphasizes the importance of moving many of its systems to a cloud infrastructure. The department’s goal for baseline maturity will focus on improving security and access “through direct cloud access, software defined perimeters, dynamic access control policies, and datacenter segmentation,” the document stated.

The Air Force first plans to deploy micro-segmentation capabilities via Next Gen Gateways security stacks that will assist in transitioning off of the Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) infrastructure — which will sunset by fiscal 2025. The department also intends to adopt Microsoft Defender and Comply-to-Connect capabilities to establish robust endpoint security.

To achieve zero trust beyond basic maturity, the DAF will field both an operational enterprise ICAM solution and an enterprise endpoint management, security and monitoring solution, the strategy noted. As it begins consolidating its IT networks, the department will require a basic-level data tagging, labeling and protection solution.

The document also identifies automated management via multi-factor authentication; cloud-native management; control and access; basic data protection; and more granular attribute, policy, and risk-adaptive-based access controls as other objectives for intermediate maturity.

“At advanced maturity, focus shifts to include non-IP-based systems/control systems and cyber operations integration – distributed and resilient digital assets and a command-centric cyber operations tempo,” officials wrote.

Last year, the DAF CIO’s office published an enterprise zero-trust roadmap that offers a quarterly summary of its plans to implement the new concept. The department is using the roadmap as it develops unclassified and classified implementation plans. Initially, the focus will be on operations in the Indo-Pacific, followed by other networks, tactical systems and disconnected environments in other theaters, according to the new strategy.

Along with new technologies, the strategy emphasized the importance of adapting to the culture shift required to implement zero trust, and called on leadership throughout the DAF to collaborate on the transition at an enterprise level.

“Application, data, and mission owners must be active participants in data tagging, attribute definition, and access decision requirements. These are the fundamental elements of Zero Trust that will drive success or failure,” the document stated. “Failure to implement this strategy bears significantly greater risk in connecting CJADC2 military IoT systems together, increasing the potential impacts an adversary could inflict from data exfiltration and degraded systems to critical mission failure and potential loss of life.”

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Launched by the Air Force chief information officer and the Air Force Research Laboratory on Monday, the so-called NIPRGPT platform will allow airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with a chatbot on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet).

The GenAI-powered platform is not a final product for users, but rather a way for the department to experiment with generative AI tech in real-world scenarios as it continues to explore the capability’s potential, according to a press release.

“Technology is learned by doing,” Chandra Donelson, the DAF’s acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said in a statement. “As our warfighters, who are closest to the problems, are learning the technology, we are leveraging their insight to inform future policy, acquisition and investment solutions.”

According to the department, users can have human-like conversations with NIPRGPT in order to ask queries and receive assistance on various tasks, including correspondence, background papers and code. The platform is freely available to users with a Department of Defense Common Access Card, and interactions between the chatbot and human users occur in a secure environment.

As an experimental platform, the Air Force plans to focus on various key metrics of NIPRGPT’s performance — including “computational efficiency, resource utilization, security compliance” and more — in order to gauge generative AI’s “practical applications and challenges and ensure that future implementation is effective and efficient,” a DAF news release stated.

The department is encouraging users to provide feedback on NIPRGPT to help inform potential future integration of the technology. The platform will function as a “critical bridge” as the department works with the commercial sector to deploy the capabilities while navigating “intense security parameters and other processes,” Air Force Research Lab CIO Alexis Bonnel said.

“Changing how we interact with unstructured knowledge is not instant perfection; we each must learn to use the tools, query, and get the best results,” Bonnell said in a statement. “NIPRGPT will allow Airmen and Guardians to explore and build skills and familiarity as more powerful tools become available.” 

NPIRGPT is also part of AFRL’s Dark Saber software platform — a software engineering ecosystem of airmen and guardians equipped with the tools needed to develop and deploy next-generation software and operational capabilities.

Organizations across the Defense Department have been exploring how generative AI could be used to assist the military in both day-to-day and tactical operations. The technology is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on.

In 2023, the Pentagon set up Task Force Lima to assess and synchronize generative AI exploration and adoption across the department. Some large language models have been deployed for use in limited environments at DOD, such as Microsoft’s GPT-4. The Navy also launched its own AI-powered chatbot last summer, although the platform is not powered by large language models.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Air Force recently wrapped up a series of roundtables with industry and academia to explore how and where generative AI can be used for its operations. CIO Venice Goodwine said in a statement that the roundtables demonstrated that generative AI is actively growing.

“Now is the time to give our Airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel,” Goodwine said. “There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts.”

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The CES personnel management system is based on an authority Congress granted the Pentagon in 2016. It is intended to provide the Defense Department greater flexibilities and options for recruiting and retaining cyber professionals, including by using a market-based pay structure.

“It is important that we have a ready, skilled, resilient workforce. And how do we do that? Again, we do it collectively. So one, [through a] talent management strategy. How will we recruit, retain, reskill, upskill our workforce? We know that there’s a competition [for cyber talent] …  So on the civilian side, what we’ve done is the Cyber Excepted Service. That is the one way that we will ensure that we can compete with the salaries in industry … [through] the target local market supplements,” Air Force CIO Venice Goodwine said at the annual DAFITC conference. “That is our way to make sure that we can close that gap, that income gap … We implemented it this last year and we’re now trying to make sure that we get more of our civilians into CES.”

In her current role, Goodwine leads the service’s enterprise information technology, data and artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity directorates. She also oversees career management initiatives for 10,000 IT and cyber civilian personnel, according to her Air Force bio.

Recruitment isn’t the only concern. The Air Force is also focused on retention and providing options for personnel to return to the department if they take a break from government service.

“It’s one thing to hire you. But I want to keep you. But I will tell you what’s a little different. I know as civilians we often come [and] we start our job and we want to do our 30 years and retire. I’m actually okay if you leave and go to industry. I want to … make a way for you to come back and not to lose what you’ve already contributed. So, let’s rethink how we do talent management. That’s our goal,” Goodwine said.

Goodwine’s comments came as the Defense Department is trying to transform the way it approaches human capital management with new and innovative approaches. Earlier this month, the DOD released its new cyber workforce strategy implementation plan to get after that.

There is currently a 24% vacancy rate in cyber positions across the department, according to Mark Gorak, principal director for resources and analysis for the DOD CIO.

While the uniformed services currently aren’t having problems attracting cyber talent to initially join their ranks, that isn’t the case for the civilian components of the force, he noted when the implementation plan was rolled out.

The Air Force isn’t alone among the military departments keen on better leveraging the Cyber Excepted Service. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers last year that her organization is exploring more ways to use CES authorities, as the Army still faces difficulties in competing for cyber talent.

“One of our challenges frankly is competing with the private sector,” she testified. “Everyone is looking for cyber experts, and in the private sector, they’re obviously well compensated. So that’s something I want to see us explore.”

Gen. Randy George, the nominee to be the next Army chief of staff, wants to use the CES to address shortfalls within the military’s cyber mission force — which includes 133 teams staffed by the services for U.S. Cyber Command to conduct cyber operations.

“While an [Office of the Secretary of Defense]-led force-generation study is ongoing to recommend cross-[Department of Defense] opportunities to correct readiness shortfalls across the Cyber Mission Force, the Army is looking to expand the application of the Cyber Excepted Service to provide expedited recruiting and more flexible retention options for civilians,” he wrote in a written response to lawmakers’ questions last month.

Goodwine’s remarks Monday were her first since being appointed the Air Force’s new CIO earlier this month.

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Goodwine takes over from Lauren Knausenberger, who stepped down from her position as Air Force CIO in June. Goodwine worked in Knausenberger’s office as the director of enterprise information technology from 2021 until recently taking on the new leadership role.

An official at the Air Force confirmed to DefenseScoop that Goodwine has been the service’s CIO since Aug. 13.

As the department’s CIO, Goodwine will oversee both the Air and Space Force’s enterprise information technology, cybersecurity, and data and artificial intelligence directorates. She will manage a portfolio valued at around $17 billion, according to the department.

She takes over a number of key IT and digital modernization initiatives underway at the Department of the Air Force, including a move to the Air Force’s enterprise cloud environment known as Cloud One and the follow-on expansion called Cloud One Next. Goodwine will also be charged with the department’s efforts to enhance cybersecurity through zero-trust frameworks.

Prior to her time at the Department of the Air Force, Goodwine worked as CISO for the Department of Agriculture, where she managed $208 million annually in cybersecurity expenditures throughout the agency, according to her biography on the service’s website.

Goodwine is also an Air Force veteran, having joined active duty in 1986 and serving as a signals intelligence analyst. She then served in the Air Force Reserves from 2002 until her retirement from uniformed military service in 2022.

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