“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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In separate discussions on the heels of a $13.2 million sole-source contract award underpinning the work, a Joint Staff spokesperson and two officials from the Virginia-based company briefed DefenseScoop on the near-term plans to enhance the Force Management Directorate (J-35)’s ORION Decision Support Platform, and ultimately offer a more complete, AI-enabled view of the U.S. military’s assets, missions and personnel.

“The DOD operates within a finite force pool, balancing responses to a wide range of global events — from humanitarian assistance to major military operations — often occurring simultaneously. The ORION Decision Support Platform provides a comprehensive view of force capabilities to support real-time decision-making,” a spokesperson from the Joint Staff told DefenseScoop on Tuesday.

Broadly, the J-35 directorate oversees the organizational structure, policies, and resources necessary for the U.S. military branches to collectively maintain readiness and integrate global operations, against a backdrop of complex and evolving threats.

Roots of the hub’s ORION DSP tool stem back more than a decade to the early 2010s. 

“Initially, ORION was developed as a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of a web-based platform that could provide a common operational picture, facilitate collaboration, and support decision-making for joint planning and execution,” the spokesperson noted.

At the time, it was designed to integrate certain data from various DOD sources and produce a comprehensive view of the operational environment.

“The significance of this [latest] news is that it represents a major step forward in the development of a more integrated and collaborative planning capability for the DOD,” the Joint Staff spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

In its current form, the ORION platform consolidates authoritative data from each of the armed services, provides visualization of forces and munitions globally, conducts contingency and crisis analyses, and allows course of action experimentation to inform advice that’s compiled for combatant command planners and other tactical and strategic decision-makers.

“The Joint Staff J-35 ORION is a cloud-based, containerized software suite with web and business intelligence applications. It continues to evolve in line with enterprise [global force management, or GFM] requirements,” said Ryan Legge, BigBear.ai’s president of national security.

Legge noted that BigBear.ai’s history supporting the DOD’s global force management initiative began more than 20 years ago, while its partnership with the J-35 for this effort is about 9 years old. 

“The Department of Defense identified the lack of a standardized, integrated system for global force visibility and feasibility assessments and chartered Project ORION. The challenge was managing multiple siloed data sources that required integration to support joint planning and execution,” he told DefenseScoop. 

The ORION platform, according to Legge, “is built explicitly for the JPEC” and applies agile methodologies for the continuous integration and delivery of advanced analytics and other software services.

This new contract was awarded via DOD’s Tradewinds Marketplace. 

“ORION integrates authoritative data sources identified by the Joint Staff and services, synthesizing information into a holistic global force management perspective. It focuses on warfighting and mission-support capabilities, readiness, availability, and current employment locations — collectively known as ‘CRAE’ data,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said. 

The platform is a major component of the Joint Planning and Execution Community’s operational architecture, as it supports the community’s overarching mission to plan, coordinate, and execute joint operations.

“BigBear.ai is not permitted to disclose the specifics of the ORION platform, but notes it generally provides a comprehensive view of force condition and quality,” Tommy Clarke, the company’s director for DOD programs, told DefenseScoop.

“The ORION DSP suite has numerous analytical dashboards and advanced user interfaces that offer both high-level strategic awareness and the capability for in-depth data exploration alongside collaborative risk mitigation capabilities,” he said.

Prior to having access to the ORION DSP, the Pentagon’s force management pursuits relied heavily on what Clarke referred to as a discombobulated and time-consuming process using antiquated systems and significant manpower.

“ORION integrates disparate GFM datasets into a user-friendly application suite, enabling greater efficiency in planning, refinement, and analysis of GFM actions. As a result, senior leaders can spend more time understanding data, rather than mining it,” he said.

Still, contemporary challenges associated with data fidelity continue to hinder joint planners’ capacity to rapidly develop reliable courses of action for future operations.

“The current planning process requires that planners spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering and processing data, leaving limited time for actual planning and decision-making. However, with ORION [and forthcoming updates], planners will be able to rapidly gather and synthesize relevant data, freeing them to focus on higher-level thinking and strategy development,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said.

“This will enable senior leaders to have more decision space, allowing them to make more informed, timely, and effective decisions,” they told DefenseScoop.

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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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The service published a request for information in November that sought comments on the organization’s vision for the so-called ADP 2.0 — including plans to sign on multiple companies that can offer additional easy-to-use data analytics tools and support the platform’s growing number of users. Now, officials are taking responses from both the RFI and input given during a recent industry day to craft a final request for proposal, with the intent to award initial contracts sometime this year.

David Markowitz, the Army’s chief data and analytics officer, told DefenseScoop the overarching goal for ADP 2.0 is to create flexibility to scale on-demand.

“ADP 2.0 is really about, how do we have multiple vendors [and] a task order process that we can get kind of a fair price across a range of capabilities — from very simple data pipelines [that can] give me some legacy data and package it in a nice way as a data product, to more complicated user experiences,” he said in an interview.

The platform is a follow-on to the service’s current ADP, which has become more popular among Army users since it was first introduced in 2018, Markowitz said. It features a suite of six data platforms, including Vantage — a data analytics platform built by Palantir that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to assist decision-making.

Vantage originally focused on personnel and combat readiness, but has since become the enabling software system in ADP with around 45,000 active users. In December, the Army awarded Palantir a contract extension worth up to about $400 million for four years to continue supporting the program.

But Markowitz emphasized ADP’s success has created increased demand for the platform across the entire service, prompting the Army to pivot to a multi-vendor contracting scheme. The broad vision is to onboard different companies with various “no-code/low-code” AI toolsets and commercial-off-the-shelf products that users can easily purchase for their specific mission needs.

The Army doesn’t know exactly how many vendors it wants to have contracted for ADP 2.0, but it’s considering ways to allow companies to cycle on and off the program as technology changes and new capabilities are developed.

“If you’ve got a task order, we can easily assign it rapidly but still have some level of competition and best value,” Markowitz said. “We don’t want too many [vendors], because that would slow down that type of separate task order. And we don’t want too few, because we want some view of what we have.”

While the November RFI inquired about what specific capabilities industry could provide to ADP 2.0, it also asked for suggestions on how the Army should structure the contract — either through an other transaction authority or a multi-award task order ID/IQ, for example — to support the program’s goal of flexibility.

Some of the biggest feedback from industry has been how the Army can effectively buy both tools and professional services from vendors, Markowitz noted. 

“Once we have the platforms, you’d rather use other contracting vehicles to get professional services,” he said. “So, we’re trying to explore how to first get a new platform for a new data area and allow [for that] assisted acquisition … to try to make that work.”

Another point of issue for industry has been defining what exactly a task order under ADP 2.0 means, as some missions might require more complicated data analytics and integration work than others. Moving forward, the Army plans to include a range of task orders that clearly distinguishes between different requirements, he added.

Markowitz said the Army’s initial plan was to publish a final RFP by late February or early March and for contracts to be awarded a few months after.

“We’ve gone on this growth strategy of more and more Army becoming a digital Army, a data-driven Army. And the scale and how we have our vendors available to meet the rapid needs of the Army is key to that for our future,” he said.

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In response to questions regarding a contract award unveiled Wednesday, a Defense Department spokesperson shared new details about how and why the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) is rapidly prototyping BigBear.ai’s Virtual Anticipation Network (VANE) to advance complex information operations across the military. 

“The machine learning tools and datasets within VANE could help identify the relationships between datasets over time, to inform senior leader decisions and provide key strategic context to DOD decisions,” the spokesperson said on Thursday.

The CDAO opted to leverage this platform to improve its internal capacity to identify key trends and topics related to potential foreign adversary areas of interest.

VANE was originally developed in partnership with the DOD’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate. In April 2024, the company received “awardable” status to offer the tool on the CDAO Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. 

“Any federal government entity can view, contact, and negotiate [and] enter into a procurement with the awardable vendors” on Tradewinds, the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

This new contract for CDAO-led pursuits “marks a successful transition from a research prototype to an operational prototype, providing critical insights to decision-makers,” company officials wrote in BigBear.ai’s press release.

The deal involves a transition plan, which will guide envisioned future deployments on the CDAO’s in-transition Advana environment and enable “a broader audience across the DOD’s Combatant Commands to access the advanced AI capability,” they noted.

Spokespersons from BigBear.ai did not respond to a request for comment.

In a recently published solutions brief, officials from the company wrote that “VANE is on track to provide data-driven assessments across multiple domains and echelons, including grey-zone warfare, operations at the strategic and operational levels, information warfare, and more.”

The DOD spokesperson did not directly respond to DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the price of this procurement or the platform’s functions and capabilities. 

A contracting record on the Federal Procurement Data System shows that in late September the CDAO entered into an other transaction agreement (OTA) with BigBear.ai for a “VANE Prototype.” 

The total contract value — including the base and all options — is listed as more than $1.3 million.

“The current prototyping effort is focused on exploring the utility of VANE in supporting CDAO’s customers,” the DOD spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

Without providing further details, they added that the office harnesses “the VANE platform to support data analytics related to strategic competition and other projects.”

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“When I came in, I said that understanding the requirements as they’re being generated, and matching them to capacity, is the single most powerful capability we can have,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop in a recent interview ahead of her retirement.

On Friday, her last day leading the command, the pioneering Air Force pilot’s boss confirmed that she was leaving Transcom and the joint force with a clearer and more comprehensive grasp of America’s arsenal and options for high-stakes logistics and in-demand equipment. 

“Certainly [Van Ovost] was focused on this from the very beginning. But not just that. She’s been focused on also expanding our capability — what’s available to us. And she’s done a lot of things to increase capacity and commercial maritime assets and work on agreements between us and industry,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told DefenseScoop in a media roundtable immediately following the ceremony at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, where Van Ovost passed command of Transcom to Gen. Randall Reed. “And I think that’s given us a lot of possibilities going forward.”

As its name suggests, the command is the DOD’s primary manager for transportation. It’s responsible for integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea — both in times of peace and war.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop, Van Ovost noted that “coming from someone who started in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, where you just opened up a container and you’re like, ‘Wow, what’s in here?'” she understood on day one at Transcom that “the more you see about where the item is, the better decisions you can make about when and how to move it the most efficiently and effectively way possible for the warfighter.”

Early on, she established four guiding priorities to pursue during her tenure. Two of those — cyber mission assurance and driving decision advantage — placed a comprehensive focus on Transcom’s technology challenges at the time.

Van Ovost directed her team to work closely with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). Together, they facilitated many activities and projects to make sense of the heaps of military and commercial data sources the command should be applying to inform operations, and provide bird’s-eye views into DOD’s weapons and personnel placements all over the world via custom analytics dashboards and other tools.

“Anytime we have a crisis, we stand up an operational planning team and then our people that work on data are in the team right away — and they’re saying, ‘Okay, well, how do I help? What kind of data do you need to see to make decisions?’” she told DefenseScoop.

Among a wide range of missions under Van Ovost’s leadership, Transcom delivered more than $21 billion in weapons and ammunition to Ukraine for defense against Russia, and helped surge assets to U.S. Central Command as conflicts emerged and unfolded in the Middle East.

With each new mission, she noted, logistics experts and others involved are making decisions faster and with more precision. 

“But when I think about the journey we have been on, I do think that decision advantage and cyber mission assurance have been some of the most consequential work that I was involved in. Certainly all of the great heroes around Transportation Command and our components that were involved from, from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Niger — all heroes and all good work. But it’s about the future, right? And so have I set Transcom up for that future?” she said.

Military operational environments are becoming increasingly contested in all domains, and the pace and complexities of mobility missions have only intensified for Transcom over the last three years. 

“And should we go into conflict, we have to expand multiple times,” Van Ovost noted. “That’s why we need the data together, and that’s why we need to start with bots, with generative AI … and then move to predictive AI so that I can understand how to best lay in demand and capacity. But it’s a must. It is a must that we have this augmentation.”

When asked about Van Ovost’s legacy, Austin told DefenseScoop: “She’s a forward-thinking officer. And the impact that she’s had on the organization, and therefore all of DOD, I think will be remembered for a long time.”

At the Transcom change-of-command ceremony shortly before that press roundtable, Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown spotlighted her perseverance and influence as a “trailblazer” in the U.S. defense apparatus.

Among a variety of personal stories and anecdotes, the secretary mentioned how the Air Force Academy didn’t originally admit her the first time she applied.

“You wanted to fly Mach 2. But back then, women weren’t allowed to fly fighters. So once again, you made the path wider. And you became a test pilot — and you flew more than 30 aircraft, including F-15s and F-16s,” Austin said.

“You’ve often said that it’s hard to be what you cannot see. Well, America looks at Gen. Jackie Van Ovost and sees a leader,” he told her.

As for her next steps, the retired commander is now looking to divert that same passion and energy to empowering minority students all around the country, with aims to ultimately help expand and empower the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) talent pipeline.

“I think we’ve made some real inroads, and I just wish the best for everyone,” Van Ovost said.

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Established as a pathfinder program earlier this year, the TacSRT pilot allows the Space Force to purchase “operational planning products” from commercial industry that includes unclassified space-based imagery of specific regions and subsequent analysis of them. The pilot initially focused on U.S. Africa Command and has supported a number of operations since it began — including the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“The goal was to complement the exquisite work done by the intelligence community with unclassified operational planning products delivered on tactically relevant timelines,” Saltzman said during his keynote speech. “It was a pathfinder, with the idea being that we could expand the program if it proved to be value added, and that’s exactly what it did.”

Saltzman said the average time it took for operators to receive operational planning products was about three-and-a-half hours after collection, noting that the timeline had decreased to 90 minutes towards the end of the withdrawal.

Now that it has proved TacSRT’s mechanisms work on relevant timelines, the Space Force is looking to expand the pilot to other combatant commands — and it needs more funding to do so, Saltzman noted.

“As we go to maybe more full expansion, it’s about how much money do we want to put into what we’re calling the ‘commercial marketplace,’ which allows our Commercial Services Office to purchase these products from commercial providers,” Saltzman told reporters during a media roundtable. “So, the next step is just getting more money so we can expand that to other commands.”

Through the TacSRT marketplace, the U.S. military can ask commercial providers to provide operational planning products of a specific region. The Space Force reprogrammed $25 million in its fiscal 2025 budget request to fund the pilot’s architecture and ability to purchase information packets, according to budget documents.

Saltzman didn’t provide any additional information as to how much funding would be needed to expand the TacSRT pilot, nor which areas of operation it would expand to.

He emphasized that the Space Force isn’t buying unclassified imagery alone, but also detailed analysis of the images.

“What TacSRT is doing with this pilot in particular, is we simply ask a question into the marketplace — ‘Hey, what generally does it look like around Air Base 201? Are there any items of interest, trucks that are missing? Is there a huge parking lot, do we see people milling around?’ We simply ask the question, and commercial industry provides us with products that try to help us answer the question,” Saltzman said.

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“The world has gotten much more complicated, and we often think about how certain domains we’re now operating in routinely never existed a couple decades ago — cyberspace, electronic warfare. So these are important elements that we need to factor in as we think of the civilian environment, well beyond the sort of traditional kinetic effects that often are most highlighted as affecting civilians in a negative way,” Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told reporters at a roundtable Friday hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

In his current role, Maier oversees a broad portfolio of activities including counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, civil affairs, information and psychological operations, among others.

Right now, his team has “a lot to focus on,” Maier noted.

He pointed to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, multiple conflicts in the Middle East that “are intertwined and certainly are more complex,” and preparing for what may come with China as the DOD’s top threat.

“In all those cases, I think we are looking to raise our overall sophistication of how we think about warfighting, and civilian harm and the associated mitigation of it, which often is a big term to say — understanding how the civilian ecosystem works in conjunction with potential military operations in the future,” Maier said.

His office is working to provide warfighters on the ground with more capabilities, support and data analytics tools to understand their strategic environments — and how the civilians who live in those places operate.

“We put almost 170 people that have been resourced across the combatant commands, across the intelligence enterprise, and across elements of the Joint Staff and the Office of Secretary of Defense. And we’ve tried to emphasize people who are experts in this space, but also can speak to commanders in military terms that they can benefit from. So this includes putting — we call them CHMROs — civilian harm mitigation and response officers that focus on security cooperation and helping our elements that do that in the department,” Maier explained. 

A new Center of Excellence was also recently established to enable more resources for the commands.

“As we’ve started to exercise this and build the emphasis on [mitigating] civilian harm into large-scale exercises it becomes particularly daunting when you think of, if you will, the scale of that type of [future] conflict where we’ve talked openly about thousands of strikes in an hour,” Maier said. “And now we’re talking about very advanced precision weapons at long range that you’re just not going to be able to use the manual processes of the past. And so you’re going to really have to have a particularly strong focus on the data analytics to help us understand what we’ve hit, has there been an impact, and where do we see changes in the overall environment, including the civilian environment.”

Cutting-edge tech could help the department address those issues.

“That’s not going to be something we’re going to be able to do with humans alone. So we’re going to need the automation and aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning and all those things that we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side, but are going to have to be built in and baked into that with a focus on civilian harm,” Maier said. 

Looking to the future, he argued that it’s imperative for DOD to further invest in who he called the “critical enablers” within special operations units.

“If you’ve got [Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha], the kind of core 12-man Green Beret team, they’re going to have to go out and understand how to do cyber and get in a beam for a potential adversary satellite and understand how to operate in the environment of ubiquitous technical surveillance, just as much as they’re going to have to be able to 10-times-out-of-10 hit the target they intend to hit if they’re going kinetic,” Maier said.

In response to questions from reporters, he also acknowledged reports of Israel causing drastic civilian harm in Gaza using U.S.-supplied weapons. 

“How the Israelis are conducting the operation in Gaza, I think we’ve been very open, has concerned us at times. Probably as I’m speaking to you right now, there’s a conversation going on with the senior Israeli official. I think the secretary of defense has had, I don’t know, many, many, many, dozens of conversations with his counterpart — and civilian harm is always a feature of this, because we think it has big strategic implications,” Maier said. 

During the discussion, Maier also briefly addressed questions about how the U.S. Special Operations Forces community will play into the Pentagon’s ambitious plans for Replicator. Through that initiative, the Defense Department hopes to counter China’s ongoing military buildup by fielding thousands of autonomous systems through replicable processes by August 2025.

“I think from the SOF perspective, because we often are the ones that are able to do smaller projects, work them more quickly, test them with operators, in some cases, actually in an operational context. Then we can, in some cases, be proof of concept for Replicator that then, if something works, can be scaled up much more quickly through Replicator than it might have been through a standard prime that we would have as a contract,” he said.

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As part of its plan to “reoptimize” for great power competition, the service is revamping how it generates readiness for contested environments in the Indo-Pacific by conducting new large-scale exercises, enhancing supply chains and more. Through these initiatives, the Air Force is looking at how AI and ML can enhance preparedness by improving command and control in operations and the way the organization accounts for spare parts, Allvin said Wednesday during a media roundtable with reporters.

But to do so, the service needs to integrate data from various siloed systems, he noted.

“I think one of the things that I think we probably regret the most is how we developed our individual datasets and networks as bespoke, organic things, and so it’s hard to connect them,” Allvin said. “The data is all there, it’s putting it together, developing the algorithm and gaining the insights that will help us to learn faster.”

The Air Force is learning about command-and-control needs and how AI can play a role from its recent Bamboo Eagle events, a new exercise series intended to test out the service’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept that looks to scatter deployed combat aircraft out of smaller bases while working closely with mobility aircraft in the fleet.

The exercises demonstrate what the Air Force needs to do to effectively execute that deployment and where it needs to improve, he noted.

“Some of that has to do with better ingesting situational data to be able to say, ‘At this time right now, what do I know that I didn’t know when I made the plan,’ to be able to update the plan and maybe re-orchestrate how the post operations may go,” Allvin said.

The Air Force is planning another large-scale exercise — known as Return of Forces to the Pacific (REFORPAC) — slated for summer 2025. Building off of Bamboo Eagle, the exercise will address how mission-ready the service would be if it needed to deploy in a complex, contested environment, particularly how it would sustain operations and conduct logistics while under attack.

While issues surrounding AI for command-and-control efforts might still need to be worked through, the technology is a bit more mature for how the Air Force understands and prepares its inventory of spare parts. The service currently has a better understanding of its individual weapon systems and predicting where they are, when they might break and what additional parts it needs to have at the ready, Allvin said.

“Those are sort of things we can play around with ahead of time and see if that particular algorithm or that particular methodology worked, and how well it increased operational impact,” he told reporters.

The service already has some data-analytics tools and platforms that help it make better-informed logistics decisions, such as the Basing and Logistics Analytics Data Environment (BLADE) platform. 

Allvin said the system has improved the service’s understanding of its stockpiles and other logistics factors that affect readiness levels over the last year. Moving forward, the Air Force wants to use those data-analytics tools to get even better at pinpointing which specific parts are most likely to break and when.

“In the past, we’ve sort of lumped it all into weapon system sustainment, and that sort of is a peanut butter spread across a lot of different weapon systems, and so everybody gets marginally healthier [and] marginally sicker,” he said. “When we try and … pick that out and be more specific about, if you have access to these parts on this timeline, then that’s going to enable that particular platform, or series of platforms, to be able to be more mission-capable, faster. That’s just more precision.”

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Department officials released the highly anticipated, 60-page document on Thursday.

“The current and future strategic environment requires immediate, comprehensive, and decisive action in strengthening and modernizing our defense industrial base ecosystem to ensure the security of the United States and our allies and partners. As this strategy makes clear, we must act now,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks wrote in the foreword.

The strategy’s introduction marks “the first of its type to be produced by the” DOD, according to officials. Broadly, it presents “four long-term priorities to serve as guiding beacons for industrial action and resource prioritization in support of the development of” an industrial ecosystem for national defense that is “dynamic, responsive, state-of-the-art, resilient, and a deterrent to our adversaries.” 

To accomplish those ambitious aims, the NDIS sets explicit actions to be pursued by the Pentagon across four critical areas: resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and “economic deterrence.”

Multiple actions assigned across those areas push the department to lean on AI, data analytics technologies and cybersecurity tools as it strives to modernize its industrial base.

For instance, under “actions to achieve resilient supply chains” the Pentagon lists leveraging data analytics to “improve sub-tier visibility to identify and minimize strategic supply chain risks and to manage disruptions proactively.” 

During a press briefing at the Pentagon Thursday, following the new strategy’s release, DOD’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy Laura Taylor-Kale and Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy Halimah Najieb-Locke explained that, in meeting this intent, the agency is pulling together existing efforts that are already unfolding.

One of those pursuits involves the making of a new Supply Chain Mapping Tool for the department to analyze supplier data for 110 different weapon systems.

“[That mapping model] is getting down into the sub-tier level of our supply chains — understanding where there are vulnerabilities, such as failures or choke points,” that make sense for targeted mitigation, Najieb-Locke said.

The NDIS also states that the department will invest in research-and-development efforts that prioritize “advancements in communication technologies, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to improve coordination and decision-making” that can help enhance interoperability among different in-use platforms. 

Officials further plan to seek opportunities to expand the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and other hubs that “speed up the development and production of emerging technologies,” according to the document.

Beyond that, the guidance urges the department to mitigate cybersecurity costs of entry to work in the defense industrial ecosystem and to reduce barriers to entry for small and medium-sized businesses, including impediments associated with implementing and maintaining cybersecurity.

Among a range of other inclusions on cybersecurity, the strategy calls on the Pentagon to “build upon and improve current regulations, policies, requirements, programs, and other efforts to address challenges and evolving cyber threats,” which it names directly.

“This effort will be specifically guided by the DOD DIB Cybersecurity Strategy,” the NDIS notes.

Little is known publicly about that impending cyber-guiding document, but a Pentagon spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Wednesday that DOD Chief Information Officer John Sherman is targeting February for its release.

At the press briefing on Thursday, Taylor-Kale and Najieb-Locke told DefenseScoop that their team has been and is coordinating closely with DOD’s CIO shop to inform the accompanying cybersecurity strategy.

The two officials also confirmed that they plan to release an implementation plan to guide the execution of the two dozen actions in the NDIS — in both classified and unclassified versions — this spring.

The intention behind those is to essentially generate what they said would be a prioritized list of tasks to actualize the strategy.

Editor’s note, 1/11/2024 at 3:40 p.m.: This report was updated with additional information from a Pentagon press briefing held after the initial story was published.

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