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

Plumb started in the role July 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The secretary’s order, signed Friday but first made public Tuesday, came after an eye-opening investigation by ProPublica revealed Microsoft had been relying on China-based engineers to support DOD cloud computing systems.

Short on specific details, Hegseth’s order enlists the CIO — with the support of the department’s heads of acquisition and sustainment, intelligence and security, and research and engineering — to “take immediate actions to ensure to the maximum extent possible that all information technology capabilities, including cloud services, developed and procured for DoD are reviewed and validated as secure against supply chain attacks by adversaries such as China and Russia.”

Hegseth first referenced his order in a video posted to X on Friday, in which he said, “some tech companies have been using cheap Chinese labor to assist with DoD cloud services,” calling for a “two-week review” to make sure that isn’t happening anywhere else in the department’s tech supply chains.

The secretary, in both his video and the new memo, stopped short of calling out Microsoft specifically. However, a spokesperson for the company has since stated publicly that it has made changes to “assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services.”

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Hegseth said in the Friday video, claiming that the system at the center of the incident is “a legacy system created over a decade ago during the Obama administration.”

He added: “We have to ensure the digital systems that we use here at the Defense Department are ironclad and impenetrable, and that’s why today I’m announcing that China will no longer have any involvement whatsoever in our cloud services.”

The memo itself calls on the department to “fortify existing programs and processes utilized within the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that adversarial foreign influence is appropriately eliminated or mitigated and determine what, if any, additional actions may be required to address these risks.” Specifically, it cites the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — the final rule for which, as of Wednesday, is undergoing regulatory review with the Office of Management and Budget — acting CIO Katie Arrington’s new Software Fast Track program, and the FedRAMP process as existing efforts the Pentagon CIO should rely on to ensure the department’s tech is secure.

Within 15 days of the order’s signing, DOD’s Office of the CIO must issue additional implementing guidance on the matter, led by department CISO Dave McKeown.

On top of that, it taps the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security to “review and validate personnel security practices and insider threat programs of the DIB and cloud service providers to the maximum extent possible.”

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Leslie Beavers, who also served as acting DOD CIO for a period at the end of the Biden administration and during the early days of the second Trump administration, will step down as DOD principal deputy CIO at the end of September.

“The Office of the CIO would like to congratulate Principal Deputy DoD CIO Leslie Beavers who announced today that she will be stepping down from her position at the end of September after more than 30 years of uniformed and civilian service,” reads a LinkedIn post from the DOD CIO’s office. “From projects such as Mission Partner Environment and the standup of the Cyber Academic Engagement Office to work to accelerate Identity, Credential, and Access Management enterprise solutions, Ms. Beavers’ unique blend of uniformed, civilian, and private industry experience drove success and innovation.”

Beavers also played a key role in the Office of the CIO’s delivery of its Fulcrum IT strategy in 2024 with then-CIO John Sherman.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop, Beavers detailed the genesis of Fulcrum, which has become the guiding strategic framework for the Pentagon’s IT modernization.

“It was really important to crystallize the department’s vision into what success looks like, which is what we are attempting to do here in Fulcrum because I am trying to get program managers across the department — not just within the CIO organizations, but in all the different weapon systems program offices — to make decisions a little differently, to make them with the user experience in mind, to make them with interoperability as a priority first and really defining what success looks like, and giving them that vision,” she said.

When Sherman stepped down from the CIO role at the end of June 2024, Beavers filled it temporarily until Katie Arrington was appointed to perform the duties of CIO in March. Since then, Beavers retained her deputy role, supporting new efforts under Arrington’s leadership like the Software Fast Track initiative and “blowing up” the Risk Management Framework.

It’s unclear what Beavers’ next role will be after her departure or who will take her place when she officially leaves. DefenseScoop reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

Prior to serving as principal deputy CIO, Beavers was director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance enterprise capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security and an intelligence officer in the Air Force at the rank of brigadier general. She also held roles in the private sector with GE and NBC Universal.

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In receiving the patent, which was issued Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the leaders behind Data² hope to help open the black box of AI to inject more trust in the adoption and use of the technology, particularly in high-stakes mission sets like defense, intelligence and national security.

“These are organizations that, at the end of the day, have a low tolerance for failure, especially in the defense and in the intel space. Wrong answers have real consequences,” CEO Jon Brewton told DefenseScoop. “But what this means is they can finally build and deploy AI that they can trust and use to make mission-critical decisions. And I think that’s a real differentiator, because we’re not talking about just generic chatbot features. What we’re really talking about is building systems that are getting more reliable and have a systematic process for creating trustworthy outputs.”

Brewton, a former airman, founded Data² with Chris Rohrbach, a retired Navy SEAL commander, and Eric Costantini, a Marine, as well as Jeff Dalgliesh, with whom he worked in oil and gas, another industry that was key to the company’s inception. Additionally, the organization’s advisory team features members like former Federal CIO Suzette Kent and Nancy Morgan, a former chief data officer of the U.S. intelligence community. Early on in 2023, when the group was launching what would become Data², they took the idea through the Catalyst Accelerator program with the Air Force Research Lab and Space Force, and introduced a proof of concept associated with the intel community.

That subject matter expertise has been key to the company’s journey, particularly in understanding the gaps it is trying to fill for the services Brewton and his co-founders once served in.

“We rely on our subject matter expertise and our backgrounds to point us and narrow our focus around what we really pay attention to,” Brewton said, adding that they are targeting “high reliability industry applications” in sectors like defense, intelligence and finance.

He continued: “The future we’re trying to build is one where a military commander on the field can trust the AI-generated battlefield assessment, so cybersecurity analysts can rely on AI to respond to threats in near real time. We’re really trying to make AI trustworthy for governments, so that they can use it in those mission-critical areas, and so that people and machines can really start to make better decisions together… [and] so that they can start generating value from the data that they already have in this technology and capability.”

Brewton explained that the patented capability was built to be technology agnostic and can work with any AI model or ecosystem, because it uses “knowledge graph” tech on top of an organization’s existing data, “grounding the AI in a fact base” so that “every AI-generated answer is anchored in verifiable, traceable source data with citations down to the data record level.”

Despite major progress, today’s foundational AI models still have major limitations that cause hallucinations and are often unreliable, which is a concern for defense officials.

For that reason, Brewton said, Data² took a data-focused approach to “solve for the lack of sort of trust, transparency and explainability.”

“Ultimately, what we found out very, very early on in the process, which informed the patent that we developed, is that better data architecture, better data structure, is really the key to unlock how you can grow in explainability, traceability and transparency — not better models,” he said.

Currently, the business approach of Data² is to partner with larger technology vendors, like Amazon, Microsoft, Dell and Nvidia, with large footprints through which it can offer its services in the broadest way possible with some “brand equity” and association with “some of the industry’s most trusted technology partners, top-tier technology providers to the U.S. government at scale.”

“It’s not limited to a data architecture, it’s not limited to a data type, it’s not limited to a large language model, it’s not limited to an environment,” Brewton said. “We’ve tested fully cloud-hosted environments, all the way down to a completely air-gapped deployed edge kit.”

While the plan moving forward is to continue to lean into that partner ecosystem to make headway with defense and intelligence activities, Brewton said, acquiring the patent “really substantiates what we believed all along was a really transformational approach to how to scale AI, especially in these mission-critical spaces.”

“Our patent really represents sort of a first step towards making AI usable by governments and other highly regulated organizations,” he added.

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Randy Resnick, senior advisor of the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office in the DOD, said Wednesday that the department is developing those guidance documents as expansions and variations of the 91 baseline “target-level” zero-trust activities it has already released for industry models to meet.

The new IoT and OT guidance are expected sometime in September, Resnick said at the GDIT Emerge: Edge Forward event, produced by FedScoop.

DOD uses what it refers to as “fan charts,” Resnick said, to lay out the various security controls vendors must build into their zero-trust solutions to meet the baseline for military services and defense agencies. In total, there are 152 controls — 91 at the target level and 61 at the advanced level, which “offer the highest level of protection,” the department said in guidance from 2024.

Resnick said that the fan chart for operational technology is “different” than that of the 91 activities needed to meet target-level compliance, though “there’s a lot of overlap.”

“The number of activities to hit target-level OT is different,” he explained.

For securing IoT systems with zero trust, Resnick said it’s essentially the same 91 target-level activities, plus two additional controls.

Explaining why it was necessary to build out additional overlays for OT and IoT systems, he said the way you respond to an incident is quite different, especially for operational technology.

With OT, Resnick said, “You want to have it fail open, or you want to have it fail in a way that doesn’t disturb or cause more mischief or harm than you want.”

Once those pieces of guidance arrive in September, just one more such directive remains for the DOD to issue: zero-trust overlays for weapons systems, said Resnick.

With the 2027 deadline looming, Resnick said he feels like “we’re in good shape,” especially after his office was spared in recent DOGE cuts, he said.

He explained that the department continues to experience successful pilots with industry that meet target or advanced levels of zero trust. And with more of those solutions taking shape, it’s getting closer to the point where DOD organizations will be able to “just buy it, implement it, install it, and pretty much get there before the end of [2027],” Resnick said.

The hard part will then be installing the solutions, he explained.

“We’re talking professional services and a whole army of people that are probably going to be required,” Resnick said. “We’re talking about full swap-outs and new infrastructures. This is not a small problem … I certainly hope that industry is thinking like that.”

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“It’s not that people are afraid of the technology — they just don’t understand how the technology can work for them,” Colin Crosby, data leader for the U.S. Marine Corps, said at the UiPath on Tour Public Sector event, produced by FedScoop. “And until we can communicate that more effectively to the organization, to individuals, then you’re going to find some challenges.”

Crosby’s point was one echoed by his colleagues on the panel representing the Navy, Coast Guard and Defense Logistics Agency, who said they too struggled with accurately presenting the realities of AI in the military context.

“We need to demystify AI,” DLA Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts said. With so much hype and excitement placed around the technology, it’s often made out to be some “monolithic unicorn,” when in reality, it’s “just another tool that’s a force multiplier,” he added.

But by demystifying AI, officials can make it “simple enough” for the wider military workforce to understand how it works and what it can be used for, said Roberts.

Capt. Dan Rogers, deputy chief data and AI officer for the U.S. Coast Guard, said the best way to open the eyes of military personnel to what AI truly is, is by giving them a small taste to get them hooked.

“I think the best way to demystify is to give people samples,” Rogers explained, saying it’s no different than a Chick-fil-A sample or a Lay’s potato chip. “You’re going to want the whole bag once you start tasting these things.”

It is those people who become early adopters and then become advocates to spread the adoption of AI organically.

“The organic movement is actually a much more effective way of selling this organizationally than having somebody come in and talk in these kind of nebulous [terms] like, ‘We need the data for the enterprise to make better decisions,'” Rogers said. “I mean, duh, but what’s that mean?”

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Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system — Maven Smart System NATO — to support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

NATO plans to use the system to provide “a common data-enabled warfighting capability to the Alliance, through a wide range of AI applications — from large language models (LLMs) to generative and machine learning,” it said in a release, ultimately enhancing “intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making.”

Neither party commented on the terms of the deal, but it was enough to drum up market confidence in Palantir, whose stock rose about 8% Monday morning. NATO, however, said the contract “was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system.”

Ludwig Decamps, NCIA general manager, said in a statement that the deal with Palantir is focused on “providing customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance, and empowering our forces with the tools required on the modern battlefield to operate effectively and decisively.”

Palantir’s commercialized Maven Smart System plays into the growing need for an interconnected digital battlespace in modern conflict powered by AI. The data-fusion platform served as a core element of the Pentagon’s infamous Project Maven. However, NATO warned in its release that it shouldn’t be confused with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven program, though the company’s AI is a component of the greater NGA program’s infrastructure

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command Control (CJADC2) attempts to do this by connecting disparate systems operated by the U.S. military and international partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains. Palantir has already inked a $480 million deal with the Pentagon to support those efforts with Maven. Last September, the company also scored a nearly $100 million contract with the Army Research Lab to support each of the U.S. military services with Maven Smart System.

Meanwhile, the contract with the U.S.-based Palantir comes as NATO has become one of the recent targets of President Donald Trump’s ire because he believes other members of the alliance aren’t committing enough of their spending to the organization’s collective defense, saying in March: “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them.”

NATO’s Allied Command Operations will begin using Maven within the next 30 days, the organization said Monday, adding that it hopes that using it will accelerate further adoption of emerging AI capabilities.

“ACO is at the forefront of adopting technologies that make NATO more agile, adaptable, and responsive to emerging threats. Innovation is core to our warfighting ability,” said German Army Gen. Markus Laubenthal, chief of staff of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, the military headquarters of ACO. “Maven Smart System NATO enables the Alliance to leverage complex data, accelerate decision-making, and by doing so, adds a true operational value.”

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The DOD is looking to the next-generation wireless tech to further build on the improved speeds, latency and capacity it gained with 5G and support the U.S. military’s use of new capabilities at the edge.

With that, Macklin said the Pentagon is beginning to experiment with 6G in a variety of ways.

“6G will introduce some new features that some of the community are aware of, but I don’t think all fully appreciate the implications of that,” Macklin said at Elastic’s Public Sector Summit, produced by FedScoop.

As an example, the FutureG Office has been experimenting with a concept called Integrated Sensing and Communication, which uses radio frequencies of all objects — including those not actively transmitting data — connected to a network to create situational awareness of the surrounding environment, according to Macklin.

“So as these RF signals are going out there, moving from radio towers connecting to our devices, they transmit our voice data … they transmit data as our devices connect to the internet. But as those RF signals are bouncing around the environment, they can also paint a picture of what’s going on in that environment,” he explained.

One way in which the U.S. military could apply this emerging concept is to improve awareness and management of drones in a given environment, Macklin said.

“We’ve got a lot of drone delivery businesses that will expand their operations, right? So where we understand the standards are currently heading with that is drone swarm control, drone deconfliction, and then also drone detection,” he said.

Macklin continued: “If you’ve been tracking what’s been going on in the news recently, when you add a national security perspective to that, we sure have had a lot of incidents where folks who are weaponizing commercial drones. So I think your imagination can run pretty fast with why that is important, why we need to lead innovation in that area.”

Late last year, the Defense Department expressed frustration when it couldn’t figure out who was responsible for flying drones near military installations in New Jersey. But a new capability like Integrated Sensing and Communication supported by 6G might aid in addressing such incidents with threatening drones, Macklin implied.

And, because of existing investments in 5G wireless technology, fielding 6G shouldn’t come with a huge price tag in terms of supporting infrastructure.

A capability like Integrated Sensing and Communication “will be integrated into existing digital infrastructure. You don’t need to add a lot of new equipment. You can provide new capabilities out of existing infrastructure,” Macklin said.

As the Pentagon continues its efforts to explore and adopt next-generation wireless technologies like 6G, Macklin said it’s participating in a “whole-of-government approach” that allows modularity and interoperability called Open Radio Access Network, or Open RAN. He called it “our big play to drive innovation within the U.S. and with other stakeholders.”

In November, the department awarded Hughes Network Systems a $6.5 million contract to develop an Open RAN prototype at Fort Bliss, Texas, to test and evaluate advanced wireless capabilities for military applications. The capability was expected to offer “increased functionality and scalability of 5G wireless networks, incorporation of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) into DoD systems, and greater flexibility in acquiring or replacing the software and hardware used in military equipment,” the department stated in a press release.

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The DOD Office of the CIO announced the move by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to place Arrington as the acting CIO in a post on LinkedIn. The post also confirmed that Leslie Beavers, who had been acting CIO since John Sherman left the role last June, will return to her primary role as principal deputy CIO.

“In this capacity, Ms. Arrington serves as the primary advisor to the Secretary of Defense for information management/Information Technology (IT); information assurance, as well as non-intelligence space systems; critical satellite communications, navigation, and timing programs; spectrum; and telecommunications,” per the LinkedIn post.

A defense official confirmed Arrington started in the role Monday.

The Pentagon CIO is a presidentially appointed role that requires Senate confirmation. It’s unclear if the Trump administration plans to nominate Arrington to the role, and the defense official did not comment when asked about the possibility.

Arrington returned to the Pentagon as CISO on Feb. 18. During the first Trump administration, she served as chief information security officer for the department’s acquisition and sustainment directorate and was regarded as a key architect of the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program, which aims to improve the cybersecurity posture of the defense industrial base and contractors by requiring minimum cyber standards to win contracts.

The final rule for the CMMC program went into effect last December.

Arrington is also known for her political career, running for Congress as a representative for South Carolina’s 1st District in 2018 as a Republican, during which she earned President Donald Trump’s endorsement. However, she lost that race to Democratic nominee Joe Cunningham.

Her tenure during the Trump administration was also marked with controversy. In 2021, Arrington was placed on leave in connection with an alleged unauthorized disclosure of classified information from a military intelligence agency and her security clearance was suspended. She eventually settled a lawsuit over the matter against the DOD in 2022 before announcing another bid for Congress that year.

The controversy surrounding her security clearance became a key discussion point in her run for the House, and she lost the Republican primary to Nancy Mace, who was ultimately elected into office.

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By March 5 — next Wednesday — DOD components must take down all “news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)” from the web, according to the directive, calling the effort a “digital content refresh.” That media must be archived and retained following Pentagon records management policies, states the memo from Parnell, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs.

The Defense Media Activity has been tasked with playing a lead in the matter, given its role in hosting a vast swath of the DOD’s web content. It “will support systematic content removal” from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) — the department’s repository of content and media like photos and videos, among other things — and the American Forces Public Information Management System (AFPIMS), the legacy platform upon which DMA hosts roughly 1,000 websites for DOD entities.

But ultimately, the memo states, “Components are responsible for archiving and removing any DEI content on AFPIMS and content that has not been systematically identified on DVIDS.” Additionally, those components that don’t host websites on AFPIMS are solely responsible for the removal of any DEI content.

If any DEI content remains on AFPIMS websites after the March 5 deadline, the Defense Media Activity will remove it — though components can request extensions.

The same goes for any social media accounts that display DEI information. If components are unable to remove and archive that content by March 5, “they must temporarily remove from public display all news articles, photos and videos published between January 20, 2021, and January 19, 2025, until the content is fully reviewed and DEI content removed,” the memo states.

It continues: “While DEI-related content outside of this date range must also be removed, articles, photos, and videos from the last four years are the immediate priority to align DoD communication with the current Administration.”

On those social platforms, the department requires components to issue a blanket statement “to acknowledge content was removed to align with the President’s executive orders and DoD priorities in accordance with DoD Instruction 5400.17, ‘Official Use of Social Media for Public Affairs Purposes.'” The directive says similar guidance may be necessary for websites “to aid user experience.”

On social media, examples of this have already emerged:

Speaking about the new guidance, a U.S. military official told DefenseScoop that archiving the content “doesn’t do anything to support the warfighter. It honestly doesn’t do anything outside of a talking point.

“It may be time intensive for some units, but it’s probably an opportunity for the military to downsize their social media accounts, which they’ve been trying to do for some time,” the official continued. “At the end of the day, we support the administration, and we’re focused on warfighting. This is not a big deal and we’re focused on fighting and winning our nation’s wars.”

There are a few exemptions to the guidance, particularly involving websites with customer-focused content about things like base conditions, activities and services; current and historical leadership bios; DOD Education Activity communications; and operations and activities of the U.S. military’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation and Commissary functions.

The memo references President Donald Trump’s various executive orders on eliminating DEI in the federal government and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” memo from January as the drivers for the content removal.

These actions come as the Defense Media Activity is in the midst of a major modernization of its web-hosting mission, looking to consolidate the more than 1,000 websites it supports into a central platform called WEB NextGen — an effort that could result in major cost savings for the department. DMA awarded an 18-month contract in September 2023 to test capabilities for the new platform in anticipation of shuttering AFPIMS.

Brandi Vincent contributed to this story.

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