“This draft solicitation has been canceled as the Advancing Artificial Intelligence Multiple Award Contract (AAMAC) program is currently on hold,” officials wrote in the contracting document published Wednesday.

Advana is a mash-up of two words: advancing analytics. It refers to a complex data warehouse and platform that supplies the military, defense officials and their approved partners with decision-support analytics, visualizations and data-driven tools. 

Advana’s origin traces back to DOD’s chief financial officer’s unit, when staff needed to pull data from thousands of disparate business systems that were not interoperable at the time. 

In 2021, Booz Allen Hamilton won a five-year, $647 million contract to expand the program. Shortly after that, Advana’s management and oversight was one of the main Pentagon elements transitioned to underpin the CDAO when that office launched and became operational in 2022, during the Biden administration.

In the fall of 2024, senior Defense Department officials unveiled aims to potentially award follow-on contracts — and ultimately fund up to $15 billion to a diverse range of companies over the next 10 years. The draft request for proposals to inform the DOD’s potential development of an AAMAC solicitation was released in November.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the near-term vision for the CDAO’s path ahead — as well as Advana’s — has not been revealed. There’s also been an exodus of senior staff from the office, including some who will not be replaced as newly installed defense leaders prioritize President Donald Trump’s demands for cuts and efficiency. 

In response to questions about the reason for the solicitation cancellation, the AAMAC hold, and the plan for the platform moving forward, a defense official told DefenseScoop: “Advana continues to mature technically and programatically. It serves as a foundational enterprise capability. The department will initiate activities in the coming months to leverage best of industry support to meet department requirements.”

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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.

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His planned departure comes as President Donald Trump is installing new leaders across the Defense Department, and the government’s vision for the CDAO’s future (as well as Advana’s) remains unclear.

The name Advana is a mash-up of two words — advancing analytics — and essentially encompasses the office’s original intent at the platform’s inception.

Its roots trace back to DOD’s chief financial officer’s unit, when staff needed to pull data from thousands of disparate business systems that historically were not interoperable. In 2021, Booz Allen Hamilton won a five-year, $647 million contract to expand the program. Not long after that, Advana’s implementation and oversight was one of the main Pentagon elements transitioned as a foundational pursuit within the CDAO when that office became operational in 2022.

Broadly, Advana is a complex data warehouse that also arms the military, defense officials and their approved partners with decision-support analytics, visualizations and data-driven tools.

In September 2024, CDAO leaders unveiled a new Advana re-compete plan designed around funding up to $15 billion in contracts to a diverse range of companies over the next 10 years. 

Sources who spoke to DefenseScoop this week on the condition of anonymity suggested that amid the ongoing transition of presidential administrations — and with O’Toole’s plan to depart before the end of next month — the DOD’s next steps for Advana are uncertain. 

O’Toole joined DOD as Advana engineering solutions lead in 2019 after serving as a staff data scientist at Booz Allen, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He did not respond to DefenseScoop’s requests for comment on Friday.

A DOD spokesperson acknowledged but did not directly answer DefenseScoop’s questions about O’Toole’s planned farewell, and whether the CDAO aims to hire a new program officer to oversee the Advana portfolio or appoint an interim manager in the near term.

“Advana continues to be led by the Deputy CDAO of the Directorate of Scaled Capabilities,” the spokesperson said.

Garrett Berntsen currently serves in that deputy CDAO position, according to an unclassified internal document recently obtained by DefenseScoop.

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And according to Transcom Commander Air Force Gen. Jackie Van Ovost, that digital hub continues to improve and steadily inform mission-based learnings with each new deployment and application.  

“It may not be right when a crisis hits, but soon, we know we’ve got to get the data under control,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop in a recent interview.

As its name suggests, Transcom is ultimately responsible for providing all of the Defense Department’s transportation and mobility operations across air, land, and sea. By nature, it is a significant owner and operator of military logistics data.

Since 2021 when Van Ovost took leadership as Transcom’s first-ever female commander, the command has been increasingly assigned global operations in and around highly contested locations — like in the Middle East and Ukraine, where contemporary warfare and conflicts continue to emerge and unfold.

That same year, the DOD also started heavily investing in its nascent enterprise Advana technology platform. 

Broadly, Advana hosts government-owned data from sources that span the world in a one-stop flexible architecture that enables analytics, data management and data science tools, as well as associated decision-making support services for department and military components. DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office currently oversees and facilitates Advana’s use. 

In a recent, separate interview, Garrett Berntsen, the CDAO’s new deputy for mission analytics, told DefenseScoop that with Van Ovost at the helm, Transcom has been a “key partner” that’s “fundamentally leading the way” on Advana’s use among the commands.

Notably, the CDAO recently revealed that it is conducting a massive re-competition of its Advana contract. When asked about the recently reported brief pause in the platform’s use, a Transcom spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the hold “had no effect” on the command’s user experience so far.

“We’ve continued to have full Pegasus capabilities, to include bringing in additional data sources, building additional dashboards and applications, and experimenting with AI capabilities,” the official said.

Van Ovost is set to retire from that role this month. But early on as commander, she called on Transcom’s first-ever Chief Data Officer Markus Rogers to prioritize data management and analytics resources within Advana.

“It was really nascent. But frankly, the Afghanistan [non-combatant evacuation operations, or NEO], which was a crisis — that spiked us out as far as, ‘OK, how do we organize? How do we get the data on what passengers are moving, what’s their affiliation, what’s the ground truth?’ And eventually, we were able to get that into Advana, so everybody could see it. What we learned with that, now we’ll apply for any kind of NEOs,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop. 

Despite devastation from a suicide bomb detonated by the Taliban during that operation in the fall of 2021, Transcom helped lead the evacuation of more than 124,000 people — marking​​ the largest NEO in U.S. military history.

Subsequently, Van Ovost and her team started to puzzle out how they could tap into the State Department’s NEO-tracking systems and “get that truth data” on individuals, whether it be for missions “stopping at a location for an overnight” that involve light processing of information on people, or “taking them all the way to final destination.” 

“Now this seems very simple and something the airlines do every day. When you get on an Italian airplane, you show your passport and go on up. But obviously, in a NEO situation, you may not even have an identification on somebody. So how do we do that? And [Advana] helped us with that,” Van Ovost explained.

Transcom’s data-focused officials started collaborating with their counterparts at other combatant commands, and in particular U.S. European and Africa commands. For her part, Van Ovost was serious about motivating other leaders to get their Advana-feeding data sources in order for appropriate use. 

Once people knew four-star generals were interested in conveniently applying that vast data and operational information, they became more invested in cleaning it all up and making it more widely available. 

“So the more discipline we have from the top-down to demand it, the more you’re going to see it in the populace, and then the more people get confident in using that data — and with briefing live from the data — like you see at [U.S. Northern Command] and at [U.S. Central Command],” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop.

The U.S. government has provided more than $61.3 billion in weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine since Russia launched its latest full-scale invasion of the neighboring nation in February 2022. 

To date, Transcom has played a central role in the provision of that materiel to Ukraine.

“We have done so much with respect to the movement of stuff for Ukraine, which is also a data-heavy endeavor from end-to-end that we’re placing into Advana. We’re working with the Army on, ‘Where’s the ammunition coming from, and whatnot?’ And that’s been helpful,” Van Ovost said. 

As the services are getting more quality data that they can rely upon “under control” and accessible, she explained, everyone involved can orient and coordinate around the challenge at hand in one place — and each write their own apps on top of that data.

“We moved about 100 data sources in there, and now we have access to hundreds more through Advana. And we wrote 35 apps — so everybody got to see it in a different way. It didn’t really matter, whether you were in the budgeting directorate, in the planning directorate, in the operations directorate, you all had different apps and you could see different things out of that very same data. And that’s the magic — getting people excited about, ‘What does the data do for you?’ But you don’t get there unless you have the data,” Van Ovost said.

Over the course of her leadership at Transcom, the commander added, “the pace has not stopped.”

“The environment is becoming more clearly contested in all domains, and so you have to take that into account in everything. You cannot continue to do things the same way,” she said.

Most recently, Transcom was a major mobility player in the U.S. military’s retrograde of its forces, drones and other assets at two locations out of Niger last month.

“What we were able to do through Advana was place all of the data for the movement requirements being populated by the people at those airfields into a system so that we could see it. Africom could see it, the Joint Staff could see it, and we essentially can self-synchronize what actually needs to flow at what timelines, and submit for things like diplomatic clearances and hazardous clearances, which can be a hang-up that can slow things down if you do not prepare for that,” Van Ovost said. 

“So the fact that we were able to all see the same thing and synchronize, we were able to have zero delays with respect to the movement of that stuff to the final destination. And [as we move forward] I’ll be able to characterize exactly how much it costs and the timeframes, and then how would you maneuver that if we had to do it in another location? So, we’re learning a lot in that way,” she told DefenseScoop.

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There’s still much to unravel and resolve, however, around how the overarching acquisition process will pan out and the number of vendors that might be involved, three senior CDAO officials told DefenseScoop during the event. 

“You can’t just plop something this massive down and then just be like, ‘This is our strategy.’ So we’re getting lots of feedback on it,” Garrett Berntsen, the CDAO’s deputy for mission analytics, said.

The word Advana is a mash-up of two others — “Advancing Analytics” — a phrase meant to encompass the Chief Digital and AI Office’s original intent for effort.

Broadly, Advana is a technology platform that houses government-owned data in a flexible federated architecture that enables analytics, data management and data science tools, and associated decision-making support services for the department and military components.

During the industry summit on Wednesday, some of Advana’s key users from around DOD spotlighted real-world impacts of the platform — and particularly amid the Russia-Ukraine war and the U.S. military’s evacuation from Afghanistan. On the sidelines of the open-press portion of the event, three senior CDAO officials briefed the two reporters who joined in on their overarching vision and deliberate intent to garner as much feedback on their plans as possible, directly from potential partners in industry.

“This is us sharing what we think — and how we think we’re aligning or pivoting our acquisition strategy with how the technology is evolving — and trying to either validate or understand, are there lessons learned or best practices [from outside of DOD] that we can adopt in order to make this successful?” Acting Deputy CDAO for Acquisition and Assurance Bonnie Evangelista told DefenseScoop.

Advana’s roots trace back to DOD’s chief financial officer’s unit, when officials needed to pull data from thousands of different business systems that previously weren’t interoperable. But in June 2021, Booz Allen won a five-year, $647 million contract to expand the program.

Implementation and oversight of Advana was one of the main Pentagon elements to be transitioned as a foundational effort within the CDAO when that office became operational in 2022.

In the meeting Wednesday, officials told DefenseScoop that the primary “driver” behind this re-compete opportunity is that the current contract is ending and there can’t be any gaps or degradation in service.

“There’s always other options [when contracts end], but I think the path we’re going down now we believe is going to be most optimal — and part of today is to get some feedback” from industry on that, Evangelista said.

At the same time, those involved also hope to enable more flexibility and competition from a procurement perspective.

“There’s a technical evolution that is opening up the breadth of capabilities within the Advana platform, and so the acquisition approach is now being aligned to match that in a way where we believe we’re growing acquisition capabilities so that contracts can accommodate [contemporary needs]. We know this is an uncertain future in technology, but we’re trying to accommodate as much as we can — so we have 10-year, multiple award [indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity] contracts that we are trying to establish for at a value of $15 billion over those 10 years,” Evangelista explained.

Berntsen put it another way: “If you were hypothetically to onboard the only companies on a 10-year vehicle on day one, and never do any additional onboarding, you would only have the companies from 10 years ago. That means right now, OpenAI could not be in this — they didn’t exist six years ago.”

So the overarching construct, he added, “is having a mechanism to onboard companies into this vehicle, performers, and then additional input points for [others, as well as] on-ramps and off-ramps built in.” 

Eugene Kuznetsov, deputy CDAO for enterprise platforms and services, told DefenseScoop that the office’s own maturation — paired with growing demands for the platform and Plumb as its new leader — also motivated the re-compete.

“This is sort of the time to take it to the next level of scale in terms of capabilities and bringing out both the platforms and the mission analytics portfolio to sort of the next step of evolution. So it’s a coincidence of factors, but I think certainly the biggest one is just the contract ending, and the need to do that. But also we are ready, and especially with Dr. Plumb’s Open DAGIR vision, you kind of see how this goes to that next step, or next level,” Kuznetsov said. 

As a platform, Advana will be foundational for how the CDAO carries out that new Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories — or Open DAGIR — framework. It marks the office’s latest approach to scaling AI across the services.

The CDAO aims to host more events to engage industry on its strategy for Advana in the near term as it all comes together, and officials also released a new request for information to collect comments on the plan.

Until those responses come in though, there’s still many uncertainties about the Pentagon’s path forward with Advana — and how many contractors could ultimately be involved.

“I think part of today is to help understand what is the right number — if there is a right number,” Evangelista noted.

“One thing we want to really message, or want people to take away from this … is that you don’t have to do everything. So, you don’t have to do every part of the tech stack in Advana. Even if you have a single piece, but you do it really well, you can have one of the IDIQ contracts and have an opportunity to provide support or capability inside the platform. So because of that detail as well, it could significantly expand the number. And we just don’t know what that looks like,” she said.

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The command is increasingly tasked with executing global operations in and around contested environments, like in the Red Sea, where Iranian-backed Houthis are launching missiles and drones in attempts to close the sea line of communication as a response to Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza. 

“When we’re looking at any types of disruptions throughout the Red Sea, we’re able to identify what type of critical missions we’re supporting. We can identify what types of ships they were on, and then — from a Transcom perspective — be able to identify what type of cargo was on those ships, and potentially how it could impact our missions,” Marine Corps Maj. David Costanzo, deputy chief of Transcom’s Operations Integration division, said in a recent interview with DefenseScoop.

Strategic moves Transcom started making almost 7 years ago to better understand and organize all of its sprawling internal and external data sources and apply analytics capabilities to inform decision-making are now having direct impacts on those current operations.

Maj. Costanzo and Transcom Chief Data Officer Markus Rogers briefed DefenseScoop on the command’s evolving ability to rapidly tap into data and deliver digital tools that support and enhance worldwide military transit and operations — including custom dashboards that monitor and visualize U.S. security posture, among other workflows. While the Transcom officials couldn’t share specific details about the dashboards, like their names, they were able to “talk about kind of what they’re really providing,” Costanzo explained. 

The pivot 

After serving as a longtime networks and integration leader primarily for the Air Force, Rogers joined Transcom in 2019 as its first-ever chief data officer. 

Alongside Costanzo in the interview, he told DefenseScoop that his top aim in this capacity continues to be ensuring that command officials “have the right data, at the right time — and that they can understand and trust — in order to make decisions.” 

“Transcom has been, I’ll say, on this ‘data journey’ for a very, very long time. We are, by our very nature, that information broker type of organization in the way that we support all the combatant commands. So, the data journey is not new to us,” Rogers explained.

Around 2018, the command started to fully grasp the emerging power of what he referred to as “big data analytics” that could impact high-level decision-making. 

“I’ll be very honest upfront here. For the first about two years, that journey was not really that good. And I say that because it shapes the way forward and kind of how we made this pivot going forward,” Rogers said.

Leadership was buying in and the command began to see appropriate investments and resourcing at the time, but the CDO said his team just couldn’t get on the right track to deliver. 

“[In terms of] things that you really need as you go do this, first you’ve got to have sort of the infrastructure tools and capabilities needed that you can leverage so that you can actually manage data and leverage data for analytics. We were trying to do that. We were building a platform of our own and ran into a lot of problems in delivering that — all the way from standard acquisition challenges, security challenges, priority challenges — things like that are really hard. So, during that time, we were really not making any advances,” Rogers told DefenseScoop.

Then, he said, “we made a pivot. And so, three things kind of happened in that about two-and-a-half, three years ago timeframe.”

First, Rogers and his team restructured all the data resources within Transcom, which were spread across multiple branches, and organized them under the CDO purview.

From there, the command pivoted to procuring its own one-stop environment through the Defense Department’s big data platform for advanced analytics — Advana. The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) manages that centralized hub for all civilian and military components, and it was just becoming fully operational around that time. 

“The CDAO provides Advana as a platform-as-a-service. But what we do is we pay for our own community space — Pegasus. If you’re familiar with Jupiter, for the Navy, it’s the exact same thing that this is for Transcom. There’s eight or nine of them now that are out there,” Rogers said.

This offered the command an established capability that was already in place from the Defense Department and easy to access. Plus, it was designed to interconnect with all of the DOD’s heaps of datasets, not just those from Transcom.  

Then, marking the third enabling piece, CDAO liaisons embedded with the command and started providing direct access to the office’s assistance and resources, via the AI and Data Acceleration, or ADA, initiative.

“When we pulled those three things together, that’s what allowed us to make sort of this advancement going forward where we now had capabilities and toolsets that we can leverage and the expertise to actually leverage. And that all tied into the partnership with [the J3 directorate] and Maj. Costanzo’s team, with them being some of the first customers that we actually brought in to leverage [this],” Rogers said. 

‘Intrinsic visibility’

Costanzo has served in the Marines for almost 15 years, and at Transcom for the last three. 

“I work in the J3 [logistics and planning directorate] for part of our Operations Integration Division. We’re charged with identifying the IT requirements from our Global Operations Center and really try to be the advocate from our team to be able to operationalize our logistics data and be able to integrate it to be able to support our operational requirements. So, we’re working with [Rogers] as kind of the advocate for the planners on the floor themselves,” Costanzo told DefenseScoop in the interview.

Transcom’s Global Operations Center, or GOC, is both a physical space and a dynamic digital environment that provides a holistic and multimodal view for strategic and operational planning and monitors the end-to-end movement of forces.

Broadly, the J3 team’s mission process is pretty standard.

“We get a valid requirement from a customer — a combatant command — that says ‘We need X moved from A to Z.’ And so regardless of what the venue is, whether it’s an exercise, a normal deployment distribution operation, or emerging requirement for something that’s come up unexpected in the world, whether it’s in competition or crisis, then we’re usually applying the same kind of model,” Costanzo said.

Following that model, his team generally tries to identify how to best gain those requirements with their IT and data systems, and then how to communicate that information both laterally across to the other commands, down to components, and up to leadership so that everyone’s abreast of how Transcom’s delivery capabilities might be impacted.

“One example is our [Presidential Drawdown Authority] for Ukraine shipments,” Costanzo explained.

Since Russia’s invasion in early 2022, the U.S. has committed to sending billions in weapons and military support to Ukraine. Early on in that conflict, his team was tasked with identifying what Transcom’s requirements were, which the major said were coming from multiple different PDA numbers in rapid succession. They also weren’t always sourced at the same time.  

Costanzo’s team therefore had to accurately depict what those requirements were going to be and then sequence those with available capabilities on coordinated timelines to make sure that everything was where it was meant to be when it was supposed to be there so that the command could ultimately deliver those capabilities in European Command’s area of responsibility to meet Ukraine’s wartime needs.

“From the combatant command perspective, they really wanted to know — just like any other customer, if you order off of Amazon — ‘When’s my stuff going to be here so that I can execute my mission?’” Costanzo said. 

The J3 officials were able to leverage a lot of Transcom’s execution data coming from authoritative sources associated with both sealift and airlift assets to then provide, in near real-time, when an execution schedule was available for European Command to see.

“We’d be able to project out, over a certain amount of time, exactly what and when things were going to arrive and where they were going to arrive. So then, the combatant command could go ahead and prepare to have resources in place to be able to move those on from the place where we dropped them off to their final destination or where they were needed on the battlefield throughout the [area of responsibility],” Costanzo said.  

“Normally, this was all done through spreadsheets, email, and those types of things. So with this one, we were able to provide dashboards — and it wasn’t just us. When we were producing this, we were helping and talking through the process, and working with the Joint Staff and their team, the ADA team and the CDAO to really provide the dashboards,” he added.

Though he couldn’t explicitly name them or get into much deeper detail about the other types of dashboards and advanced visualization mechanisms Transcom has been generating, Costanzo said they’re all broadly providing force movement, deployment and distribution planning enhancements.

“That’s kind of a long-winded way of saying [they’re] really looking at kind of intrinsic visibility of ‘Where’s our stuff and when is it going to be here for me to use it?’” he said.

With the dashboards in front of military leadership, Costanzo said he and other J3 planners can then say and show: “These are the missions that are expected today, over the next 96 hours, the next week, these are the high priority missions, and then these are the ones that we can expect either on time or delays due to X,Y, Z factors.”

From Rogers’ perspective as chief data officer, the command is now “postured to rapidly adapt as things change around the world” in a way it was never able to before. 

“And we’re also postured in a way to support the other combatant commands with data that we’ve never been able to before,” he noted.

U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility (AOR) is another region where this maturing capacity has recently become more apparent. 

There, Iranian-backed Houthis have been deploying drone and missile strikes against Naval and international merchant vessels in the Red Sea as part of what they say is a retaliation campaign against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

“When operating inside of Centcom’s AOR, there’s disruption. A lot of things we’re looking at that we can influence is potential disruption to our transportation and transportation network. That’s really where Transcom [Commander] Gen. Jackie Van Ovost and her staff can really influence how we operate. And so, they’re really looking at how we take warnings and indications and any type of alerts that could potentially impact and disrupt our transportation network — and if we can identify those early, how can we go ahead and mitigate those risks to ensure that we can protect our force, but also still execute the mission?” Costanzo told DefenseScoop.

Eyeing self-sufficiency

As part of the ADA Initiative, officials from the Pentagon’s CDAO have been conducting digital readiness assessments on each of the 11 combatant commands. 

When asked by DefenseScoop in a recent interview which command, so far, has demonstrated that they were the most “digitally ready” in DOD, Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri immediately pointed to Transcom, explicitly naming Rogers and his CDO team.

“They have been tested through fire. The [Afghan non-combatant evacuation operation, or NEO] — how do you get people in and out of Afghanistan? The Ukraine support in terms of how are you going to move equipment all over the place? And [the COVID-19 pandemic] actually was a big Transcom challenge,” Palmieri said. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding some of the elements Transcom brought to the table that really contributed to its progress so far, Rogers pointed to his original vision to fully integrate ADA officials within the command as soon as they first embedded — so that when they eventually departed, his team would lose capacity but not capability. 

“My focus has been on making the command self-sufficient. Leveraging CDAO support and skill sets of capabilities, all of that, but how do we make ourselves self-sufficient as we drive this forward, in that, if we can’t take care of ourselves, then we’ve not truly transformed — we’re relying on whoever’s going to do something for us. And I think that’s had a huge, tremendous value,” Rogers explained.

That impact is demonstrated by Maj. Costanzo’s team on the J3, he added, noting how “they now have an analytic shop in place where they’re doing this work for themselves and relying less on [his] team, and they’re having huge successes going forward.”

In Costanzo’s view, part of Transcom’s success in this space to date was a result of, very early on, “putting in a lot of effort and focus” on adopting and enabling data integration capabilities to tap into all that’s available across DOD.

“Everything that we did for Afghanistan — some [things were] similar, some different from Ukraine. Everything that was done for Israel — some different, some the same for the current operations now. So, that was really helpful,” Costanzo said.

For the J3 directorate, “the next step forward is really trying to deliver predictive analytic capabilities,” he said, noting that doing so will be necessary “in the future to really create those decision spaces for leadership” in more high-paced, critical conflict environments. 

Building on that, Rogers said that a primary near-term effort in his office is to improve its overarching ability to deliver data as a product to J3 and other commands and components. 

“When I today build a dashboard that says ‘This is where all of the DOD cargo is on a commercial or military ship — here’s where they are, here’s where they’re going,’ that’s still my product or my application, built the way Transcom is consuming that information and not the way Centcom may want to consume that information inside the Maven Smart System and their C2 processes. So, I now want to build that data as a product set, where using modern API technologies, we deliver the answer to that question as pure data, and that you understand where it came from. We’ve done the data integration, all you have to do now is plug into your picture,” Rogers said.

“I’ll also say that we’ve made tremendous progress over the last few years — but we have a long way to go to get what we need to get at. So, there’s still a lot of room on this journey for us to continue with,” the chief data officer told DefenseScoop.

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The AI and Data Acceleration initiative — or ADA, in homage to computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace — was originally a three-year effort funded through fiscal 2024, when Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks first unveiled it in 2021.

While the exact requested amount for ADA in the president’s budget request for fiscal 2025 remains unclear, according to two senior officials who briefed DefenseScoop recently, the Defense Department has opted to keep the program running at least through fiscal 2029, or the end of the Future Years Defense Program.

“I think this is a journey. We’ve made incredible progress, but it’s not going to be done [this year]. And so having that right talent out there to constantly be responsive and aware of their needs is a great thing for the department,” the Pentagon’s Deputy Chief Digital and AI Officer Margie Palmieri said in an interview.

‘Where’s my stuff?’

ADA’s roots trace back to before Hicks in 2021 formed the CDAO, combining teams of officials from the Pentagon’s former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service, Office of the Chief Data Officer, Project Maven and the Advana program within one new hub to strategically accelerate data-sharing and AI adoption. 

Palmieri noted that inspiration for the ADA initiative came from discussions that participants across those organizations were having back then about how to best equip the military’s combatant commands with technological expertise and assets.

“The idea was that we would put one civilian [Government Schedule or GS-15] at each combatant command, and then provide core support to them through department initiatives,” she explained.

After that step, though, “it really took about two years to get all those leads in place — by the time we went through the hiring process and found the right folks who were willing to go live at the combatant commands out across the globe,” Palmieri said. 

Early on, the CDAO leads found that each of the commands was functioning at very different stages of maturation in their paths toward being fully data-driven and were not applying resources in a standard way. However, officials did see a trend in requests for assistance associated with the DOD’s centralized data and analytics platform, Advana.

Recent budget documents refer to Advana as “a technology platform that not only houses a collection of enterprise data, but expands the boundaries of a standard data warehouse by arming military and business decision-makers with decision support analytics, visualizations, and data tools.”

Putting it another way, Palmieri said: “It is a collection of capabilities that, when they come together, give you the power of data analytics. At its core it is a data hub — I’ll call it a hub, it’s kind of a data catalog — so it tells you where all the data is in the department.” 

Quickly, leadership across the combatant commands was broadly interested in using data to inform the readiness of the personnel and logistics elements of their operations. 

“A lot of them just really want to know where their people are. What’s the readiness status? Where are they with operations and exercises and support? What does security force assistance look like inside of their combat command? So, a lot of things that had been done through data calls or through PowerPoint. But doing this in Advana gave us a kind of coherent, CoCom-wide view or department-wide view,” Palmieri explained.

“It’s one thing to have the raw data; it’s another thing to be able to make sense of that data in a way that can be presented to decision-makers,” she added.

In her view, the fast-moving, modern technology landscape — and top U.S. priorities like Joint All-Domain Command and Control — are forcing the department to no longer silo what was previously considered business versus warfighting data.

“In reality, personnel readiness, logistics, the status and positioning of forces, it’s stuck in the middle. It’s neither business nor warfighting. It’s both,” Palmieri said.

The CDAO’s senior representative embedded at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Dan Tadevich, also recognizes an ongoing transformation. 

“There’s a cartoon that I really like. It’s called the blind men and the elephant. If you can visualize this picture of an elephant, and all of us sitting around the table are touching a different part of the elephant. So all that we know is what we’re touching, instead of the fact that there’s an elephant there that you’re trying to get a picture of. In my mind, that’s very illustrative of what we try to do,” he told DefenseScoop during the interview alongside Palmieri.

“You take the logistics work, and you take the operational work, you take all these other pieces, but then you all come together as an operational planning group or planning team, put all your information on the table and you come up with a plan. And so that’s what we did at Indo-Pacom, and that’s what the ADA teams are out there really doing, is helping everybody get access to the data in a much more streamlined and expeditious way — so that you can build those visualizations and things that help you understand the elephant that you’re trying to see,” he explained.

As that bigger picture all comes together, the aim is that military leaders at each command can make high-stakes choices faster and based on more accurate information.

“When everybody is sitting around the table talking about how to execute something, [it starts with] ‘Where’s my people? Where’s my stuff? What can I do with it? And who’s ready to act now?’ So, if you can answer those initial questions, then the people sitting around the table can now start making the decisions and laying out the puzzle pieces in a way, and they give you the picture of what we can do today. Because that’s really what the leadership and the boss want to know,” Tadevich said. 

He and the CDAO’s other combatant command embeds catch up on weekly calls and daily in informal chat rooms to share updates on their progress and ideas for integration or opportunities to share in-development and existing resources.

Among other responsibilities, the ADA officials are also conducting digital readiness assessments on each command. 

When asked which command demonstrated that they were the most “digitally ready”
at this time, Palmieri and Tadevich both pointed to U.S. Transportation Command.

“They have been tested through fire. The [Afghan non-combatant evacuation operation or NEO] — how do you get people in and out of Afghanistan? The Ukraine support in terms of how are you going to move equipment all over the place? And [the COVID-19 pandemic] actually was a big Transcom challenge,” Palmieri said. 

The next chapter

“You won’t see an ADA line inside of our core CDAO budget,” the deputy CDAO noted, pointing out that the undisclosed total comes from several different “pots of money.” But again, Palmieri confirmed that — as part of a recent, overarching restructure of the CDAO’s budget — senior DOD leaders have formally initiated plans to extend CDAO support at the commands via ADA through fiscal 2029.

Palmieri and other CDAO officials did not share the exact number for requested or planned ADA funding (in or after 2025) before publication.

One thing that news of this ADA extension does provide, though, is the chance for current ADA embeds like Tadevich to be hired in “permanent” roles — instead of their current three-year temporary billets.

“That’s been one of the worries, that the three years is coming up. Whether the commands had taken the proper steps to be organically self-sufficient or not, doesn’t really matter — except for if it was going to go away — then it’s a problem, right? So the fact that [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] recognizes that all the commands didn’t move equally, and then they’re committing to continue to help and provide resources and to be that bridge to the next step is, I think, the most important thing that comes out of this,” Tadevich told DefenseScoop.

Now, he and other CDAO officials are preparing to steer what they hope will be a new wave of ADA-driven progress.

“I think the next chapter is we see a lot of value being connected to the combatant commands and their data needs. So having that CDAO rep at the combatant commands that can reach back to make sure that we’re providing the best support to our senior-most military commanders and decision-makers in the field is 100% where we want to be,” Palmieri said.

“The next question is — that’s one person — and we have some resources in the CDAO budget, but ADA was created to really figure out what we want to do is the department in supporting data-enabled decision-making inside the combatant commands,” she added. “And so through our normal budget processes, we’ve heard from a bunch of combatant commands about how they want to grow their teams, about how they want more resources, and more applications to use. They’re really excited to grow this mission space. So our next step in the CDAO is to get a sense of what that should look like for the department.”

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The inaugural Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) procurement forum is scheduled to take place at an office building in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia.

“As CDAO’s ambition, objectives, and budget have doubled within the last year, we are actively seeking ambitious, innovative organizations to learn about our mission, discover opportunities, and compete to contribute to cutting-edge AI standards development within the Department of Defense,” per the announcement, posted on Sam.gov.

The briefing is expected to include the organization’s fiscal 2024 procurement forecast, information about assisted acquisition procurements, an “acquisition ecosystem” primer, and discussions about the Pentagon’s needs related to “Responsible AI,” Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), Task Force Lima, digital talent management, and Advana enterprise platform capabilities.

Members of industry who want to attend are instructed to fill out an interest form attached to the special notice. The submission deadline is Nov. 12.

On Thursday, the Pentagon also rolled out its new data, analytics and AI adoption strategy. During a call with reporters, CDAO chief Craig Martell said feedback from industry at the upcoming procurement forum will help shape the implementation plan that’s being developed.

“How we partner with industry … is going to be extremely important to delivering this strategy. We will not be able to do this without our industrial partners, without academic partners and without our actual, you know, country partners and allies. So it’s going to have a big impact,” he told DefenseScoop during the call.

“If I come with a vision that says, ‘Here’s how I want to pay you because this is what I need,’ and they all say, ‘Nope, that’s not going to work’ — well great, then I have to rethink that. And then I have to ask them, ‘Well, you know, what is it that’s going to be sustainable for your business?’ … I need those industrial partners to continue to build and sustain this. If I have some crazy idea about what I want to build and nobody wants to build it for me, well that’s not going to work. Right? So we absolutely have to do this in partnership with lots of folks but particular to your question, industry,” he added.

Additional CDAO procurement forums are expected to be held next year, according to the announcement.

Updated on Nov. 3, 2023 at 3:20 PM: This story has been updated to include comments from CDAO’s Craig Martell.

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Effective AI depends on data that is “clean” or cohesive enough to build algorithms off of. Naval Surface Force components, which equip and staff warships ahead of their deployments to respective fleet commands for military operations, create and use heaps of data — but currently, it’s all pretty messy from an organizational perspective. 

“Our data landscape is so vast and complex. There’s no common data ecosystem, no data catalog, and not enough clean data,” Task Force Hopper Director Capt. Pete Kim told FedScoop in an interview July 29.

Kim has led the task force since it was launched last summer to drive AI capabilities across the surface force. He and his team have made progress shaping a nascent approach, strategy and implementation plan to guide that wide-ranging effort. As those documents are now being prepared for release, the task force is also working to engineer and refine a digital and conceptual hub that makes sense of the organizations’ multitudes of data and helps personnel better analyze and apply it for AI and ML.

“As you can imagine, it’s pretty challenging to get this infrastructure right,” Kim said. “I think it’s because of the nature of our different security classifications, roles and environments. It’s not as easy as, like, getting an app on your iPhone and doing the updates quickly.”

‘Cracking that code’

Kim now heads both the Surface Analytics Group (SAG) and Task Force Hopper. The experience has been eyeopening.

“I’ve always been in the operational fleet — so, the one providing the data — and I didn’t realize how much data we have in the Navy that is not exploited,” he explained. “I think we tend to look for the data that we need to answer the mail and things like that, but until the last several years, I don’t think we’ve had the capability to really process big data. And we’re doing that now. So, that’s probably the coolest part.”

Still, there’s a long way to go before the service’s ambitious aims of applying AI and ML on a large scale are completely realized.

An initial priority for Task Force Hopper is to help the surface force pinpoint and clean data, so the separate parts of the sprawling enterprise can collectively take full advantage of it. To help demonstrate the vast scope of information, Kim noted that the SAG concentrates on readiness-related data.

“The spectrum is having data from authoritative databases, where it’s very structured data and we’re pulling in all the unique datasets that we need — all the way down to being on someone’s desktop or on a shared drive hidden away somewhere that you’ve got to find the right person or the manager to get to that data,” he said.

In addition to challenges around data availability, quality and governance, Kim noted that technology-centered work in the Navy has traditionally been organized and structured based on platforms and supporting program offices. But AI development cuts across many different stovepipes and organizations. 

“That’s why this federated model is so key in cracking that code,” he explained. 

That nascent approach he alluded to was recently conceptualized by the task force and will be detailed in a soon-to-be-released data and AI strategy and implementation plan. The overarching idea is to have more centralized data governance and a one-stop data catalog — combined with “decentralized analytic and AI development nodes at different places in the enterprise,” where personnel know and use data best.

Each node will focus on certain categories associated with artificial intelligence and machine learning, like maintenance or lethality. The SAG, for instance, is considered an AI node focused on readiness.

“I think every node is going to be a little bit different, and that really depends on the problem set, the use case. And then, again, what’s the state of the data?” Kim said.

If nodes have high-quality, mature datasets, they’ll likely be developing AI models pretty quickly. But if they start near or from square one, they’ll probably have to spend more time on data collection, cleaning and labeling in the first portion of the journey.

“I know that data management is not the sexiest topic, but we do believe this is one of the significant leaps to accelerating AI and ML in a large organization,” Kim added.

Entering a new era

Task Force Hopper is named in homage to the trailblazing computer pioneer and formal Naval officer Grace Hopper, who reached the rank of rear admiral (lower half) before her retirement.

A group of key AI and data stakeholders across the surface force — one of the Navy’s largest enterprises — has been meeting on a biweekly basis over the past year or so. Kim said they’ve kicked off “that data governance process” and are identifying many datasets for their respective realms to prioritize. 

Crafting clearly-defined use cases for the surface force’s many sources of data is also presently top-of-mind for Task Force Hopper.

“When it comes to analytics and AI, we’re kind of entering a new era where you have to have the operator, the warfighter, or the maintainer involved in every step of the development,” Kim said. “I think this is a departure from the past where we just give requirements to some contractor and then they come back in two years with the product.” 

In his view, the task force and SAG are seeing success from “having the right subject matter experts sitting side by side with data scientists, with AI model developers to produce really valuable products.”

Task Force Hopper has also made headway in working with the Navy’s office of the chief information officer, according to Kim, to apply a platform called Advana-Jupiter as its common development environment. 

“It’s got data-warehousing tools and all the applications you need to visualize the data and create AI models,” he explained. “We’re using that platform as a place to have a single catalog so that if folks are working on a project and they’re looking for certain datasets to move forward, they’re not stalled because they can’t find it or it’s unavailable.”

As one, evolving piece of Advana, the Pentagon’s bigger enterprise data hub, Jupiter will enable surface force members to seamlessly access data — and then build AI and ML algorithms informed by it.

“On the readiness side, we’re looking towards predictive and prescriptive maintenance to sustain our ships and increase reliability at sea,” Kim said.

Another readiness node priority area is condition-based maintenance. “As we start employing unmanned surface vehicles, we’re going to need those types of CBM models to support those vessels at sea, since they won’t have maintenance personnel onboard,” Kim noted.

He added that while Jupiter does not need to host every single dataset, “that’s where we want to catalog it so that if someone’s working on a project, it’s like a menu” where they can see the point of contact and details on the data.

“We’re going to use Advana-Jupiter as that platform where we can kind of integrate different datasets, because as we start building more advanced AI models, it’s not just going to be one sensor data source, it’s going to be multiple things,” Kim said.

A key goal for the task force is to help the surface force become AI-ready by 2025. 

“I think with new technology, you always feel like you’re behind. That’s why we’re putting so much brainpower behind this. But as you know, having that high-quality dataset, the tools, the right people for the project — I mean that’s like 80% of the journey. So, if we get that infrastructure part right, the last 10% of producing this widget or what have you is the easy part,” Kim said. “And we can really partner with industry to really leverage the tech that’s out there and develop these unique tools that we need.”

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The DOD’s Advana platform was used in Norther Command’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDEs) that tested the military’s ability to track and respond to complex incoming threats through data. It was a part of testing the new Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) construct where the DOD wants to connect datasets from across the domains of conflict to synchronize battlefield movement’s and give commanders deeper insights.

The department’s chief data officer, Dave Spirk, said during a media roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group that Advana played a critical role in the exercises held in summer 2021.

“Throughout the exercise we were able to leverage live readiness data in Advana,” He said.

Advana started life in the chief financial officer’s office. The system claims to be able to pull data from more than 3,000 different business systems that previously lacked interoperability, according to the website of prime contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Spirk said the platform now has roughly 4,500 active users.

Booz Allen won a five-year, $647 million contract in June 2021 to grow the program.

It was not always clear Advana would become a go-to platform of choice for data processing. When Spirk arrived on the job in June 2020, he said that most people expected him to build a competitor to the system. But, instead he “saw a lot of promise.”

“It is really pretty spectacular,” he said of the system.

Advana was designed around what Spirk has called “board room data.” He said that now that board room data and battlefield data are coming together, the DOD can operate as a more data-centric department.

Other data platforms exist or are being built for cross-DOD use, including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center‘s Joint Common Foundation which aims to also be a development platform for developing machine learning models.

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