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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Led by the 805th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, the biannual capstone allows the service to test new tech and assess their applicability for battle management and tactical command and control. After a successful iteration at the end of last year, the unit is poised to continue experimentation and rapid development of new capabilities and concepts to support the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort throughout the next year.

Although effective execution of CJADC2 involves countless technical and bureaucratic challenges, the 805th — also known as the Shadow Operations Center – Nellis (ShOC-N) — used its most recent capstone event in December 2024 to understand how AI-enabled technologies could assist battle managers in conducting dynamic targeting.

“Modern battlefields are exceedingly complex and require the ability to distill an immense amount of information into a cohesive, actionable amount,” ShOC-N commander Lt. Col. Shawn Finney told DefenseScoop. “The emergence of artificial intelligence in warfighting applications potentially gives battle managers the ability to focus on the most salient aspects of the operational area by reducing the volume of information they must evaluate.”

At the recent Capstone 24B event, the unit experimented with advanced prototypes across three lines of effort: human-machine teaming; international partner and allied integration; and cloud-based C2 decision advantage.

The capstone simulated multiple “combat-representative” scenarios, including offensive counter-air, defense counter-air, electronic warfare and special operations, Finney said.

Notably, officials tested artificial intelligence platforms such as the Maven Smart System and Maverick AI application. The tech allowed battle managers to conduct “tactical control, execution, and assigning” of both friendly and adversarial assets within a common operating picture, according to an Air Force news release. The AI was also able to ingest planning data to give battle managers insights into complex and evolving scenarios.

During the event, the Maven system was for the first time successfully integrated into the Air Force’s new battle management kit, known as the Tactical Operations Centers-Light (TOC-L), at a live exercise.

TOC-L is a mobile, scalable C2 kit embedded with different software and applications that creates a single air picture from hundreds of fused data feeds. The service began prototyping it in 2022 and has since delivered 16 kits to different units around the world — including to ShOC-N — so they could be used in experimentation efforts.

The program is “constructed in a way that we can quickly deliver these prototypes, get them in the hands of our operators, and inform future TOC-L requirements — and really inform, more broadly, the control and reporting center weapons system,” Lt. Col. Carl Rossini III, deputy chief of the deployable systems branch at the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System Division, said in an interview.

Battle management teams used the TOC-L system and AI capabilities during Capstone 24B to simulate a dynamic targeting cell, able to rapidly identify and defeat assets that weren’t planned for during operational planning. Rossini said they gleaned insights from the event that ranged from very technical procedures to broader concepts.

“One was how well that [dynamic targeting] cell could operate with some other systems we were evaluating for operational command and control, and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] for how we manage dynamic targets and authorize those targets for prosecution,” he said. “We also had good learning on the construct of that [dynamic targeting] cell in particular, like the roles on that battle management team.”

The Air Force is developing an integrated “system-of-systems” called the DAF Battle Network to support the Pentagon’s goals for CJADC2. Broadly, the concept looks to connect disparate sensors and weapons operated by both the U.S. military and foreign partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer across all warfighting systems and domains.

Steve Ciulla, TOC-L program manager, told DefenseScoop the Air Force is investing in the AI-enabled tools featured at ShOC-N’s recent capstone as a way to accelerate decision-making.

“Those are the specific things they were looking at, in terms of testing some of those cutting-edge software capabilities and speeding up the process of identifying striking targets — the dynamic targeting — and looking at how AI could help do some of those things, [and] also some human-machine learning as well,” Ciulla said.

While both Maven and Maverick AI successfully demonstrated automated capabilities during the capstones, Finney noted that the 805th will continue to experiment with them to mature the technology further.

“The human-machine team concept continues to evolve as we uncover new and better ways to unlock the potential of both the hardware and software while also understanding where software still has gaps that humans must perform,” he said.

Moving forward, the 805th plans to execute an experimentation campaign series throughout 2025 comprising four experiments — three of which will contribute to the Air Force’s Bamboo Eagle exercise and the Army’s Project Convergence — culminating in a final capstone event. Finney described the series as taking a “building block approach” in how the team uses lessons from previous events as baselines for subsequent experiments.

“This approach exposes large training audiences of warfighters to experiment results in a rapid and iterative fashion. We firmly believe in the experimentation-to-exercise process,” he said. “Through this, potentially immature capabilities can gain significant reps and sets within a single calendar year.”

As for the TOC-L team, Ciulla said they are focused on exercising the systems in the Indo-Pacific region over the next year. The goal is to conduct as much joint and international integration as they can across multiple exercises — including Project Convergence 25, Bamboo Eagle, Return of Forces to the Pacific (REFORPAC) and others.

The exercises will help inform the Air Force’s next iteration for TOC-L acquisition, expected to kick off by summer. The service intends to improve on current kits and scale the number of systems globally, Ciulla said. 

“It’s not going to just end with this phase one experimentation effort,” he added. “We’re still going to be getting this feedback loop [and] user data coming in to support our development, design for the next iteration of the system to tell us what the biggest risks are, what’s working [and] what’s not working.”

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Project Convergence Capstone 5, hosted by the Army, is an experimentation venue for all the U.S. military services and key allies to train alongside each other and test concepts for integration. This is in line with one of the Pentagon’s top priorities called Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

This year’s event will expand upon previous iterations, taking place in two scenarios: one in March at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, focused on enabling operations at the corps and below level along with joint and international partners, and the other in April along with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to exercise at the combatant command level with all service components.

The Indo-Pacific portion will be much more expansive than what the military did as part of last year’s Project Convergence capstone event.

“Last year, I said we had fake Guam, we had a simulation built that we had something we were defending and all the things that went along with it. This year, we’re taking all that stuff we did in tents at Camp Pendleton [in California] and we’re going to the Pacific. We’ll be operating out of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Japan and Australia,” Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, commander of Joint Modernization Command, said in an interview. “We’ll be doing the same type of things, but it’ll be at actual operational distances across the International Date Line, using the actual live networks. We’ll have all the live intelligence data, plus the simulation wrap that we put on it to do all the key activities, defense of Guam, offensive and defensive activities, etc.”

Miller said the Pacific portion is focused on transitioning from crisis to conflict — using a familiar real-world scenario of defending of U.S. and coalition territory, a nod to China’s ambitions to take Taiwan — involving theater-level offensive activity, such as strikes on maritime targets and land targets, while forces are continuing to try to gain intelligence and information about the enemy and defend themselves from adversary volleys.

At Fort Irwin, the exercise will be focused on more tactical operations that go beyond the day-one portion of conflict at the theater level once land, air, sea and special ops forces are introduced. This could be a Pacific or European scenario, Miller noted, as the technology the military is testing will be agnostic to theater.

As part of the exercise, there will be what Miller described as “leave behind” capabilities.

“When we’re done with this … everything from cross-combatant command coordination to target effector pairing at lower echelons, they will have capabilities they will keep that they will be able to fight with on the Indo-Pacom warfighting network. That’s a big deal,” Miller said.

Those leave-behind capabilities fall into two broad categories. The first is related to the minimum viable CJADC2 product that deals with cross-combatant command coordination and collaboration. This is focused on how forces make rapid decisions and understand resources across all the combatant commands in conjunction with the Joint Staff and senior policymakers in the nation’s capital.

This coordination across combat commands is another key difference in this year’s Project Convergence. It’s not just Indo-Pacom, but there will be a total of six combatant commands that are at some point touching the exercise. Officials recognize that a war in one combatant command’s area of responsibility will likely have global implications.

Those collaboration tools span around six or seven workflows, Miller said, which include the Maven Smart System as well as asset visibility and intelligence. There are also machine learning models that are built-in to help provide coordination and situational awareness across the various geographic regions.

The capability provides “the connective tissue so that we don’t have, when something happens, four different combatant commands producing PowerPoint presentations about what their recommendations are, that then the Joint Staff or somebody else has to somehow try to put together,” Miller said. “That’s a time-consuming process and the information gets stale in a hurry.”

The second set of capabilities is focused on the ability to conduct offensive actions from across all the services and coalition partners using any sensor available.

Most importantly, this capability is looking at how to strike heavily protected formations and targets.

“We have to understand, again, what are the totality of the effects we need? Some of it is we need this types of missiles or we this types of subsurface things,” Miller said. “Another part of it is things like how do we bring an enemy out of [emissions control] so we can make sure we know where they are for sure, [and] how we fuse different forms of intelligence rapidly.”

Officials are using the actual maritime strike concept from Indo-Pacom for the scenario.

Army objectives

When it comes to testing out Army-specific objectives for Project Convergence, Miller said the entire basis for the event is built around the forthcoming Army warfighting concept. The event will be based on a much more coherent scenario for how senior leaders think the Army will fight in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe.

Miller outlined four primary warfighting notions they’ll seek to explore during Capstone 5. The first is expanded maneuver aimed at how the joint force is thinking about time and space in all domains. Second is cross-domain fires, involving how to shoot and create effects across all domains of warfare. Third is formation-based layered protection, which is the idea of how to protect units in all domains, such as the electromagnetic spectrum, dispersion of command posts and countering unmanned aerial systems. Last is command and control and counter-C2, or preventing the adversary from being able to command their forces.

To test this out, the Army is looking at a battlefield framework that goes from corps all the way down to the platoon level.

The initiative will provide a unique opportunity to test an operational concept at the corps level in ways the Army typically hasn’t before.

Corps exercises are traditionally done at the command post level and are simulated. However, Project Convergence is providing a holistic training opportunity at all echelons similar to a combat training center rotation. Those events are typically focused on brigades and are the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train. Project Convergence will essentially be a combat training center rotation for corps and below as opposed to last year’s event, which saw independent pockets of experimentation — such as medical — separate from other operations.

The Army will also be looking at how to do maneuver in a multi-dimensional aspect, to include within the electromagnetic spectrum.

While the Army can’t replicate all these dimensions and capabilities at the National Training Center, it has built a robust simulation environment intended to overwhelm participants with what they might expect during large-scale combat against a sophisticated nation-state adversary.

“If you’re in a command post, what you’re going to have in front of you is a very, very detailed, hectic, confusing picture of what is going on in the air and on the ground for any friendly and enemy UAS systems. Everybody’s trying to jam everybody else. One-way attack munitions. All the same time we’re trying to fire rockets and cannons through that space. We’re trying to fly manned [and] unmanned rotary-wing aircraft. We’re trying to resupply. All of the stuff that has to happen to do an operation,” Miller said. “How we think about planning and operating in that space is huge. We have technologies that are brought in to help us make sense of all that. We’re very focused on making sure commanders and staffs understand what they look like in the electromagnetic spectrum and what their vulnerabilities are [and] at the same time what the enemy’s vulnerabilities are. That’s a big focus.”

They’ll also be focusing on robotics and human-robot formations, particularly for breaching, to ensure human soldiers aren’t the first forces in contact with the adversary.

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The Pentagon is planning to implement a novel mission partner environment architecture on a live network in support of a maritime mission being led by the United Kingdom in 2025. The goal is to employ zero trust and data-centric security capabilities on a federated architecture, composed of “multiple secure, collaborative data services between partners and hosted users,” a spokesperson for the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told DefenseScoop in a statement.

“This enables us to create a global information sharing capability,” the spokesperson said.

The event will leverage previous work done by the Pentagon’s Project Olympus, according to a department news release. Led by the Joint Staff’s J-6 directorate for command, control, communications and computers/cyber, the effort looks to solve challenges that prevent international allies and partners from sharing critical warfighting data by testing, developing and integrating various enabling technologies via experiments and demonstrations.

During the 2025 maritime mission, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada will utilize zero trust and data-centric security capabilities that were previously tested during Project Olympus 2024, including the Indo-Pacific Mission Network and Collaborative Partner Environment, according to the spokesperson.

Other international participants include Norway, Australia, Chile, Spain, France, India, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Oman, New Zealand and Singapore.

“As part of this activity, we will assess command and control effectiveness and performance and CJADC2 capability maturity relative to a primary line of effort within the CJADC2 Strategy, Modernize Mission Partner Information Sharing,” the spokesperson said.

CJADC2 is the department’s new warfighting concept that aims to connect disparate systems operated by the U.S. military and international partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

Although the Pentagon announced earlier this year that it had developed a “minimum viable capability” for CJADC2, there are still a number of technology and policy hurdles that inhibit the department’s ability to effectively share information with allies. As a result, the U.S. is adopting new mechanisms — such as zero trust and data-centric security standards — that allow for protected information sharing.

“We’ve historically looked at security as the antithesis for information sharing,” Jim Knight, the United Kingdom’s lead for Project Olympus, said in a Pentagon news release. “The security folks come in and want to sort of clamp down. With zero trust and data centric security, they are security mechanisms, but they are enabling information sharing.”

Zero trust is a cybersecurity framework that assumes adversaries are already moving through IT networks, and therefore requires organizations to continuously monitor and validate users and their devices as they move through the network.

The strategy differs from traditional “perimeter-based” security models that assume all users and devices can be trusted once already inside a network. It requires Pentagon components to modernize their IT infrastructures, as well as adopt new governance processes.

“I think that’s a key focus point,” Knight said. “For the first time, we’re getting that balance right in terms of applying more security. And by applying more security, we’re getting greater information sharing.”

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“The good news is it’s just a very natural evolution from what was already there,” Plumb told DefenseScoop Monday during an exclusive interview at the Pentagon.

When it first achieved full operational capability in 2022, the CDAO was structured around four combined predecessor organizations: the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program. Plumb, who before this role served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, assumed leadership after the office’s first chief, longtime commercial tech executive Craig Martell, departed in early 2024. 

After comprehensively reviewing the office’s inner workings, her team spent the last several months shuffling its structure to take a new path forward designed to expedite Defense Department components’ access to and adoption of AI for contemporary day-to-day operations. In the interview, Plumb provided DefenseScoop with a first look into the re-organization and the motivations behind it, as well as why she believes it makes sense ahead of her planned departure and the entrance of the second Trump administration.

“I will transition in mid-January, but the rest of the CDAO is career and technical expertise staff, and they will just stay and so a lot of the priority missions will continue,” Plumb noted.

Pressing needs

Putting it simply, some of the CDAO’s original teams — including those working on Advana, joint command and control pursuits, AI assurance, what was previously referred to as the algorithmic warfare group and others — have been renamed and reassembled into new efforts aimed at delivering in-demand AI and analytics across the enterprise, and via ongoing operational missions. 

“Over the last six months, it was really clear that two things were happening,” Plumb explained.

On the one hand, she spent time with CDAO colleagues focused on what she called “the integration that has to happen between those [DOD] customer needs, and the platform services” delivering products that meet them. 

Secondly, through steadily evolving efforts to propel the department’s realization of the military’s next-generation concept for combined all-domain command and control — including through its Global Information Dominance Experimentation series, better known as GIDE — Plumb said she and her team “really saw the importance of, early on, having that scaled capabilities view as we look at new solutions through these acceleration cells.”

Just as the CDAO is organized with lines of effort under policy and acquisition, for example, Plumb has established a new Scaled Capabilities directorate with a Senior Executive Service-level role and, for now, two existing divisions named “mission analytics” (MA) and “enterprise platform services” (EPS), focused on scaling capabilities to the enterprise.

While MA broadly includes CDAO officials working on customer support activities, the AI and Data Acceleration or ADA initiative and several others, EPS — formerly known as algorithmic warfare — is responsible for the underlying infrastructure, software tools and services for enterprise capabilities like the Advana platform.

Separately, but now reporting directly to the CDAO and operating in conjunction with that, is the existing “Advanced C2 Accelerator Cell” — as well as the new AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, which Plumb unveiled last week. 

Describing the fresh vision, she explained: “When we see capability gaps at specific [combatant commands], how do we solve that pressing need — but then build that in a way that’s future-proof and can be scaled to other settings? So for instance, if we solve, as we have, operational real-time issues outside of the United States, then when we have major issues in the United States — like, say, a hurricane, and we need to optimize our operational response to that — how can we take those same tools and scale them to that new use case?”

The new AI RCC envelops maturing AI assurance and test and evaluation work, and CDAO-led efforts to facilitate the military’s responsible use of emerging and still-uncertain generative AI capabilities. 

Notably, the AI RCC (pronounced “arc”) marks the DOD’s next iteration of Task Force Lima. Plumb said it was in some parts born out of the learnings identified by that group. 

“I think one key finding was that there was a pressing need for the department to accelerate its identification of these AI capabilities, and then create pathways to scale,” she said, adding that the idea is to introduce “a small core team that works on pilots in the priority areas” paired with a team tasked with scaling such capabilities for wider use. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop, she said the leadership team is “in the final stages with a candidate” who was recommended as a Defense Innovation Unit “pick” to steer the AI RCC. 

On Tuesday, a DOD spokesperson said Capt. M. Xavier Lugo — who led Task Force Lima through its duration — “has moved to lead another priority initiative at CDAO,” without clarifying which.

In terms of tangible generative AI progress the office has made this year, Plumb said that officials recently accelerated a large language model translation service identified by DIU for use across two military service partners. 

“We basically said, ‘OK, we know there are use cases. We know they’re [budgeting] for them in a few years — let’s not make people wait two years to have access to it.’ So we got a contract that allows the relevant customers to access it through, I think, Advana. But we’re working to integrate it on the Maven Smart System side too, so that our customer base can just start translating, leveraging, sort of the best of commercial tech out right now,” Plumb noted. 

The solution can take “a whole bunch of context and translate more like a person translator than a text translator,” she added.

Sometime in January, the CDAO also aims to open up new cloud-based sandbox testbeds for approved DOD users to experiment with different generative AI applications via the new cell. Plumb declined to share the cloud service providers involved at this time.

Crossover capabilities that enable C2 operations but function between the two rapid acceleration cells will be advanced in future GIDE experiments, according to the CDAO.

“The intent is that they should work themselves out of a business,” Plumb told DefenseScoop.

She pointed to a hand-drawn chart she produced during the interview to visualize the office and new moves, and used the Maven initiative as an example of the overarching approach.

“What we’re doing now is, we worked through identifying how we could scale Maven. We scaled it to a number of [combatant commands]. We’re expanding that scaling. So now, we’ve got the solution. Now that solution needs to move from this accelerator over here to our enterprise platforms, and I don’t have a timeline for you on that transition, but they’re working together — the Advanced C2 lead and our Scaled Capabilities and Enterprise Platforms lead to say: ‘OK what does managing this stack look like?’” she said. 

The CDAO confirmed that all of the new management changes aligned with the reshuffle are expected to take effect by Jan. 6. 

Change ‘during a baton pass’

Plumb acknowledged that upon taking over the AI office, she “put a lot of things on hold” to assess if the organization was operating at its best capacity — and areas where there’s room for improvement.

“I also pulled a lot of authorities up to me to create the management structures we needed,” she explained.

The CDAO’s new make-up comes as Plumb prepares to exit the office next month as a member of President Joe Biden’s departing administration.

“Transitions are a time of uncertainty and stress. I think the CDAO has really done a lot — has been through a lot, but it’s done a lot — to prove out how valuable this type of work is. This is a natural evolution in that process. That it comes at this time is just, we can’t lose time during a baton pass between administrations on these AI capabilities. And so we wanted to keep the momentum going,” she told DefenseScoop. 

Principal Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri is set to serve as the acting chief of the office in the interim until Trump’s pick is named, and officials tapped to lead the reshuffled non-political positions are listed on the office’s recently updated website.

Plumb expressed confidence that steady bipartisan, bicameral support from Congress and commercial players — and the increasingly in-demand value proposition the CDAO offers to enable CJADC2 and more — will prove it even more valuable in the months and years ahead.

“I think the next three to four years are going to be probably dispositive on how the Department of Defense integrates AI into its warfighting and enterprise management. This is the time when the solutions are coming, and we know they can be transformational. So the next year, the team really needs to get those foundations, and they’re set to do it, get the foundation set, get those pilots going, and get the assessment criteria clear,” Plumb told DefenseScoop. 

“We’re almost fully staffed up now in terms of hiring personnel and had a big hiring push over the last six months. So we’ve got a team that is talented and has the vision and can execute. So, I look forward to seeing what happens,” she said.

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In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Department of Defense acting Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers briefed DefenseScoop on this unfolding pursuit — and the overarching aims for expanding it to enable the U.S. military, Canada and their other closest international partners to work more seamlessly and securely together on combined operations.

“At the heart of interoperability between nations is trust and cooperation. And ICAM is partially a technology solution, but the more challenging part is the cooperation portion and the solution,” Beavers explained.

Putting it simply, ICAM for the DOD refers to a broad approach for establishing and maintaining trusted environments where users can tap into authorized resources — like databases and information systems — while ensuring the department knows who is on the network at any specific time. It’s also a key element of the broader zero-trust architecture concept that the Pentagon is currently moving toward.

While many ICAM capabilities are already functioning across the Pentagon, there’s much room for improvement, and innovation — particularly with international allies.

“We were talking about ICAM when I walked in the building in 2018 and I hadn’t seen any really noticeable progress. That’s why I went all in last year to make headway on ICAM. And so, I think we’re to the point where we’ve got good momentum. We’ll keep building on these lessons, and then we’ll take it to the next level and make a functional, scalable, sustainable and secure network for our allies and partners, as well as the joint force,” Beavers said.

The CIO and members of her team meet every six months with their counterparts across the Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. 

When a new top information official from the Canadian Forces, Ross Ermel, joined those meetings fairly recently, Beavers said they immediately “just kind of hit it off.” With shared intent to accelerate ICAM interoperability between the nations, Beavers and Ermel volunteered to collaboratively scope the complex challenges down from the large chunks they’d been going after to a much smaller problem they could pilot a technical solution for and work out the policy issues around to ultimately make some meaningful headway.

“And we had a big win last week when we made that happen for 35 people. It sounds like a small number, but it was the first technology solution where we truly federated our identity, credential and access management. That means that the U.S. identity provider computer trusted the Canadian certificates coming through, and vice versa. So that is a big step,” Beavers said.

Though she didn’t share the name of the ICAM capability or any platforms that might be involved in the pilot, the CIO confirmed that this is associated with a combined IT system that the U.S. and Canada built together and have been using for years — but the identity piece has always been managed on the American side only. 

In federating it, the Pentagon team is now expanding its “trust” to the systems of another nation.

“So this enables them to log in from Canada, using their own identity provider to get access to these combined systems that we both use. So, it sounds small, but it is quite monumental,” Beavers told DefenseScoop. 

Building momentum on these smaller-scale “baby steps,” she said the next steps involve working through the engineering and policy challenges to expand it with other Five Eyes partners in a way that should also work with every member of the NATO alliance down the line.

“We’re using kind of this small use case as the pathfinder, and then we’re building on those lessons, with an eye on exporting to NATO,” Beavers explained.

She and Ermel are set to spotlight this work at the NATO Edge Conference on Wednesday.

When previewing this latest progress for DefenseScoop, Beavers added that she’s hopeful the nations involved right now will go all in on building out the solution and accelerating the overall adoption — “because the follow on will be an update to [Allied Communications Publication 240], which is the Five Eyes directive on how to set up networks.” 

Notably, the CIO and her team also consider this work to be “foundational” and “a major enabler” to the Pentagon’s plan for fully realizing next-generation, Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) that leaders believe will be a key to winning in future warfighting constructs.

“The important thing to understand is this is part of a three-step journey that gets us to full interoperability with allies and partners,” Beavers noted.

Step one encompasses instituting zero trust in the cloud. ICAM is the second piece that allows the DOD to know and trust who accesses its information in the clouds and makes them all function together. And the third step is attribute-based access control, which Beavers said occurs at the application level. 

“So, we are making steady progress, and by the end of next year — with a bit of luck — we should have those three solved, at least in a simple use case, which will jump-start us as a community to build out a lot more functionality,” the CIO told DefenseScoop. 

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Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance.

“Because the bandwidth that’s available in these pLEO satellite connections to our ground control stations is so big, we’re talking hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth with negligible latency, it makes things possible that you couldn’t do anymore. You don’t need to be persistently connected anymore,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Marine Air Control Group 38, said during a webcast Monday hosted by C4ISRNET, adding that this also includes the cloud.

In the past, U.S. troops were used to constant connectivity to higher headquarters or to pass data back and forth. Now, they will have to operate somewhat disconnected at times, but these new technologies are providing more bandwidth in those scenarios.

“pLEO is a game changer … That high amount of bandwidth and that low latency really changes what’s possible on modern networks,” Quinter told DefenseScoop in an Oct. 7 interview. “Because the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, you have significantly less latency than you typically would. What that means is it makes certain things possible that wouldn’t [otherwise] be possible.”

These constellations provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes. Now, troops can have up to 200 megabytes or more depending on how much officials are willing to spend, allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.

Those constellations are also more resilient given there are more smaller satellites in orbit as opposed to a lower number of exquisite, geosynchronous orbit satellite communications architectures.

“Some of our senior leaders used to refer to those [military satellite constellations] as big, juicy targets for anti-satellite ballistic missiles. With the proliferation of these smaller, flat sats in lower orbit, orders of magnitude — four, five, six — and there’s plans for there to be 10-12,000 of these satellites in lower orbit, there’s inherent survivability in that constellation, just from the sheer numbers,” Quinter said in the webcast.

Those connections, however, are easier to jam, and officials have always been careful to warn that their access must factor into what the military describes as a PACE plan — or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency — depending on the operation.

But the enhanced connectivity those constellations provide will allow forces to operate more dispersed and disconnected on the battlefield, a key tenet as observations from current conflicts indicate static units will be much more vulnerable.

“Once you have that kind of bandwidth, you don’t need to be persistently connected. You could establish a hybrid cloud network,” Quinter said.

Quinter served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix. He noted that during that process, officials used to say the critical requirement to enable that concept is cloud.

Key to realizing that goal is the DOD’s enterprise cloud contract vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders. Officials in the past have indicated how important this vehicle is to the CJADC2 concept and enabling connectivity and interoperability of forces across the globe.

“We are working with companies … through their cloud environment and trying to establish that hybrid cloud architecture at the edge of the network, which could persist without a connection over pLEO. You could turn that satellite connection on and off as necessary to be more survivable,” Quinter said.

He noted that as long as units have enough processing power and storage at the edge, they don’t need to be constantly connected. They just need to be able to process the information in the field.

“I say ‘hybrid cloud’ because it needs to be both private and public, like we need to be taking advantage of the prime contractors that are on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract,” he said. “Those will enable us to leverage [a] big data center when we are connected to the enterprise. But we also need to have the hardware at the edge of our network that can handle cloud, hybrid cloud at the edge.”

Quinter noted that the entire DOD is looking at how to get forces to operate more persistently disconnected. He likened a future scenario to submarines that are usually disconnected, but they surface when they need to, download the necessary data and dive back down to resume their patrols.

“We learned that as communicators, that we need to have a PACE plan. You hear other folks from other communities talking a lot more about that now, but I would say that with the technology that’s available right now, you could essentially operate in a no probability to detect, no probability of intercept environment, because hybrid cloud will enable you to do many, many things on the edge of a network that you typically, at least historically, have not been able to do,” Quinter said.

This notion will require a paradigm shift and change in thinking for many service members that have been used to being constantly connected.

“One thing that I have noticed over the last two years in particular, [is] that we have a lot of teaching and educating that we need to do across the force when it comes to cloud,” he said. “I think there’s not enough people that understand how that technology works in particular, which puts us at a disadvantage, because as we’re designing these circuits to install, operate, maintain them in the network in a combat environment, we need to know what’s in the realm possible. I think cloud is not something with that we’re teaching in the schoolhouse yet, but we’re getting there.”

There is a bit of a misconception among many, Quinter added, given cloud is associated with large data centers.

“When people think about cloud, they think about data centers, like back in [the continental U.S.]. In their mind, I think it’s a natural default for most people to think, ‘Well, if I’m not connected to the data center, then how am I using the cloud?’” he said. “That’s what I meant by the level of education that’s required, even across the comm community, for people to understand what is and is not possible when it comes to cloud.”

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The release of a sources-sought notice Wednesday is the latest signal by the service that it wants to enhance the capabilities of the largest drone in its arsenal.

The Corps is acquiring MQ-9 long-endurance unmanned aerial systems built by General Atomics to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities and to serve as a secure communications gateway and network bridge for the joint force. Officials envision the platforms exchanging data with satellites, other drones and aircraft, ships, expeditionary advanced bases, land maneuver forces, ground control stations and land-based sensors. The effort is expected to contribute to the U.S. military’s warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

“If you’re going to be out-sticked by the adversary, then in terms of sensing and in terms of striking, you’re of no value. You have to be able to sense at range, you have to be able to make sense of what’s happening, and you have to be able to share that data ubiquitously across the battlespace with the joint force, which is why our MQ-9 is so important,” Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said at a Brookings Institution event in July.

On Wednesday, the tactical unmanned aerial systems program office (PMA-266) put out an RFI seeking industry input to identify potential solutions for a high-performance computer (HPC) to deploy on the Reaper.

“Ideally, the system, as delivered, should be ruggedized and ready to use with minimal logistics, training, and support. The system should meet the requirements to obtain an Authorization to Operate (ATO) at the Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) level. The HPC will be installed in the Centerline Avionics Bay (CAB), mounted underneath the midsection of the fuselage,” officials wrote.

Desired characteristics include a data read/write speed of 16 gigabytes per second; communications interfaces (both internal and external) to support a data transfer rate of 100 gigabytes per second; a maximum length, width, height and weight of 20 inches, 10 inches, 8 inches and 55 pounds, respectively; and a slew of other attributes related to power consumption, environmental considerations and security features.

The Corps wants a system at technology readiness level 7 or higher that can support a variety of software packages including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, PyTorch, YOLO, TensorFlow, and other open-source AI and machine learning tools, the RFI noted.

“One of the most important requirements to meet will be the security classification requirements,” officials wrote, acknowledging that those might be the most difficult for contractors to meet.

“We expect to need a Cross-Domain-Solution (CDS) and a High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor (HAIPE) in conjunction with the HPC. Ideally, those would be embedded into the HPC enclosure but may sit outside,” they added.

Responses to the RFI are due by Nov. 24.

The Reapers that the Marines have been acquiring are 36 feet long with a 66-foot wing span, have up to 27 hours of endurance, can fly at an altitude of 50,000 feet, have a payload capacity of 3,000 pounds external and 850 pounds internal, and can fly at a true air speed of 240 knots, according to slides presented at the Modern Day Marine conference in May.

Increment one for the Corps’ so-called MUX MALE initiative is expected to include 20 MQ-9A Block 5 systems plus associated ground control stations and Sky Tower data networking and comms relay pods. At least a dozen of the drones have already been fielded.

In addition to a new high-performance computer that could be mounted on the Reaper, the service is also looking to make the uncrewed systems more difficult to detect by equipping them with a secretive high-tech pod that can counter enemy sensors.

“Some of the pods that go on our MQ-9s are classified … [so] I’ll be careful here,” Smith said in July at the Brookings Institution event, explaining that there’s a type of pod that “can mimic things that are sent to it that it detects, turn it around and send it back. So it becomes a hole, it becomes a black hole, it becomes mostly undetectable.”

DefenseScoop asked Smith if he was referring to an electronic decoy capability that makes it harder for adversaries to locate the drones.

“On the MQ-9 … without crossing classifications levels [in a public forum], it has the ability to somewhat disappear off of an enemy radar. I’ll just leave it at that,” he replied.

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During the test, the contractor for the first time connected its hybrid SATCOM terminals to two commercial internet satellite systems — one stationed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and another in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), according to the firm. The demonstration was the company’s first for AFRL’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) effort, also known as Global Lightning.

“Northrop Grumman is responding to the U.S. Air Force’s need for rapid deployment of resilient communications to develop and field the technologies required by our warfighters to meet today’s challenging missions,” Steven Conn, the company’s director of advanced communications and signals intelligence, said in a statement. “This successful test, leveraging a diverse team of commercial and defense SATCOM providers, is critical for the pace of maturity on the Global Lightning program and the ability to begin flight testing in the near future.”

At the July demonstration, Northrop Grumman established connectivity between its hybrid SATCOM terminals to a commercial proliferated LEO communications provider at Ku frequencies, as well as with the ViaSat F1 satellite in GEO at Ka frequencies. The event validated ubiquitous communications and the ability to rapidly switch between constellation systems and orbital regimes, according to the organization.

Global Lightning looks to leverage commercial space internet services to establish path-agnostic communications for warfighters. The program is linked to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, which aims to connect disparate systems across the battlespace under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

AFRL has given awards to various defense contractors and commercial SATCOM providers for the effort in recent years. In 2023, Northrop Grumman received a four-year, $80.3 million contract from the research lab to execute the demonstrations as part of its “call 3” phase that will demonstrate connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet constellations across two use cases — communications in the Arctic region and airborne comms.

L3Harris also received a three-year deal worth $80.8 million to perform work on the call 3 exercises for Global Lightning. The company announced Sept. 10 it had completed a critical design review for its Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio (RASOR) capability that will be used to test connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet.

“Following this successful CDR, we plan on conducting integrated hardware testing within the next year to support Air Force flight tests currently scheduled to begin at the end of 2025,” Adam Milner, L3Harris’s senior manager of space networks, said in a statement.

Viasat, SES Space & Defense, SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are among the commercial SATCOM providers that have been contracted for the Global Lightning program since it began.

Meanwhile, AFRL is already looking forward to future demonstrations. Viasat announced Tuesday that it received a $33.6 million contract from the research lab to develop and deliver active electronically scanned array (AESA) systems as part of Global Lightning’s “call 4” phase.

The commercial AESA antennas are expected to support communications for tactical aircraft and enable connectivity across multiple frequencies, orbits and commercial networks.

“We believe hybrid resilient communication solutions are central to future government mobility operations and our teams are committed to continuing to help solve these multi-band, multi-orbit, multi-constellation interoperability challenges with high performance, cost-effective capabilities,” Michael Maughan, Viasat Government’s vice president of space and mission systems, said in a statement.

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And now during the next push of rapid technology experimentation that’s approaching nearly a year later, Centcom aims to ramp it up and expand its reach by inviting personnel from across more of the military to “plug in,” according to three senior defense officials. 

“We’re really focused on integrating more of the services for this one,” the combatant command’s Chief Technology Officer Schuyler Moore told DefenseScoop.

Refined over the last couple years, Digital Falcon Oasis encompasses Centcom-led events held on a 90-day drumbeat, that bring together people, technologies and processes in real-world scenarios to train collaboratively and drive the adoption of digital warfare capabilities they’ll all likely need to use jointly in future fights.

Moore discussed the series’ evolution during a panel alongside the Navy’s acting Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli and Chief Technology Officer for the Army Chief of Staff Alex Miller, hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Sept. 13.

In an exclusive interview after that event at CSIS’ Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies, the three officials briefed DefenseScoop on some of the ways Digital Falcon has already impacted contemporary military operations and what’s in store for the upcoming iteration.

“We can, and will, and are taking the feed from what’s happening here and using that as informing our innovation pipeline,” Fanelli said.

The ‘turning point’

At the CSIS roundtable — moderated by Greg Allen, who leads the think tank’s new Wadhwani center and previously led artificial intelligence-related policy and strategy initiatives at the Defense Department — Moore reflected on the original vision for Digital Falcon and how it has matured so far.

“[It’s] based on a very specific and simple premise, which is that the best way to test software tools is to give them to the users and get them feedback as much as and as quickly as humanly possible. And it’s a really interesting and blunt experience for us because, especially I think in the early stages of the experiment, we were really just trying to get the muscle memory of how you sprinted and how you communicated between users and engineers — and they were looking at each other like they completely spoke different languages. So we were trying to do a lot of translation,” she explained.

But with each new sprint, participants’ familiarity with the processes and capabilities increased to a point where they fully understood the “game.”

“So you will roll into an exercise — our next one is going to be in October — and they will sit down. They understand the experience and that you’re supposed to bump around with this software tool, figure out where it breaks, figure out where it works, and then you give that feedback,” Moore said. 

In the conversation with DefenseScoop, the Centcom CTO elaborated on how Digital Falcon Oasis is steadily facilitated and coordinated.

“We orchestrate it out of [the command’s Tampa, Florida] headquarters, but all of our components participate. So if you are [U.S. Air Forces Central and U.S. Army Central] and you’re up at Shaw Air Force Base [in South Carolina], you’ll be logging in and using the tools and getting your feedback at the end of the day. If you’re forward in Qatar, in Kuwait, for Operation Inherent Resolve, if you’re at [Naval Forces Central Command] in Bahrain — all of those teams are participating. Coordination just happens to be happening at headquarters, but that’s good because it reflects the way we fight,” Moore said. 

Ahead of each sequence, Moore said she “literally [goes] from joint directorate to joint directorate” to collect engineering priorities from those who are on the ground using and experimenting with the digital tools.

“We then have battle-rhythm events leading up to the exercise where we’re preparing all of the components in the work that they’ll need to do. Sometimes we’ll actually have physical assets — vessels out at sea, aircraft up in the air — that are involved. And so it goes from engineering priorities for the software coordination of what the actual practice is going to look like, or sometimes just rolling it into operations as we go,” she noted.

In Moore’s view, the command was “lucky in many ways” that it launched the experimentation series around January 2023, and had conducted approximately three iterations around this time last year.

DefenseScoop asked the CTO if Centcom is deploying capabilities in ongoing operations in the Middle East theater that have been developed and improved upon through Digital Falcon.

She responded: “We absolutely are — and the turning point was Oct. 7.”

The command was running different scenarios and experiments up until that day, when Israel’s war against the Palestine-based militant group Hamas started after the initial ambush. Then, Moore said, the Centcom team focused on Digital Falcon went hands-off and watched users surge the tools that were ready and move away from those that were not ready for full deployment as the U.S. military addressed the growing crisis that engulfed much of the Middle East region.

“It was a mix of both — and both are really useful feedback where, for example, the targeting tools that we’d spent a lot of time on were used immediately. Adoption for those literally doubled overnight. We had to rework the compute and the actual infrastructure underneath it because we had so many users. There were some other tools where people said, ‘We’re doing real-world operations and that’s not ready.’ And that alone was fantastic feedback,” Moore said. 

Her team waited and watched how U.S. operations in the region subsequently played out last fall, and then re-engaged with service members to continue to introduce and drive adoption of new capabilities to meet the rapidly changing needs.

“The software tools that we have — that didn’t exist two years ago — have fundamentally shaped what we do now,” Moore told DefenseScoop.

Now, this suite of command-and-control software applications and other assets being enabled and pushed forward through each experiment are the same ones that she and her team use for daily tasks and log into each morning. 

“It’s worthwhile saying we struggle internally around how we call Digital Falcon Oasis an exercise series — but at this point, it really isn’t. It’s operational. We’re using it because we happen to have operations where we’re like, ‘This is a good opportunity to surge particular testing of this feature.’ But we’ve talked internally about, do we call it an experiment? Because it is constantly an experiment. But [the word] ‘exercise’ increasingly, candidly, does not reflect the reality of how we use it,” Moore said.

From potluck to race car

The military services’ relationships with U.S. combatant commands are changing because the ways those CoComs conduct business is shifting — and the Digital Falcon Oasis series is a direct reflection of that, the three chief technology officers explained. 

“What we are trying to think about as services is, how do we plug into a CoCom commander’s decision-making cycle and then enable it at the most tactical level?” Miller, who is the first official to serve as a CTO directly for the Army’s chief of staff, said.

Gen. Randy George tapped him to be “voice and advocate,” according to Miller, for the soldiers who are using and deploying these capabilities in day-to-day military operations.

At the CSIS roundtable, Miller discussed how the Army was involved in Digital Falcon Oasis 1 and 2, as well as the intent for what’s in the pipeline. Notably, the Army’s 513th military intelligence brigade is responsible for Centcom’s analytic control and intelligence processing. 

“So as long as Centcom says, ‘Here’s how we will conduct command and control the Army,’ we’ll be involved — because that is how we will provide intelligence to the C2 apparatus,” Miller told DefenseScoop during the interview.

He emphasized that the 18th Airborne Corps is America’s global response force, while the 82nd Airborne Division is the nation’s immediate response force — both of which are key Army units.

“They are a corps and a division, which means that if we cannot plug into any theaters, we just have the most reps in Centcom C2, then we’re just wrong. That’s sort of the ‘up-and-out.’ The ‘down-and-in’ — and we aren’t quite there yet, but I think we will be in, if not a couple months,  next year — is how do we connect the operational and tactical command and control to that strategic control at the CoCom level? What does that look like from a technical perspective and from a doctrine perspective?” Miller said. 

This pursuit is also an important element as the Army seeks to achieve its new concept for “transforming in contact.”

“[That] has really been about the division and the brigades — how do we connect that? Because normally what we do is we go to a CoCom, we bring stuff, and then we knife fight each other on connecting. And that can’t work anymore. It’s not fast enough,” Miller said.

If commands are exposing data and interfaces in new ways, in his view, systems need to be purchased at the service level to interoperate and consume that information. 

“The other part of that is figuring out who needs what data and what data do they not need all the time, because we’ve got into a very bad habit of acting like everyone needs all of the data all of the time — and that is not a reality. There’s too much to do anything useful with at the tactical level,” Miller added.

Centcom’s Moore chimed in with a creative comparison to help highlight this ongoing cultural transformation within the military.

“An analogy we’ve frequently used [to describe] the historical way of the services interacting with combatant commands — it was something like a potluck, where you make your own dish and then you bring it, and then that’s fine. You don’t have to worry about what other people are bringing. You just show up. But the reality, increasingly, is it’s like bringing different pieces of a race car,” she explained. 

“And if you have not thought about the other parts of the race car in what you are bringing, you are in for a very bumpy ride. And so I think the exercise series helps us at least share our views of how different parts of this need to be built independently, but then also how it fits together when we’ve got to actually start racing,” Moore told DefenseScoop. 

The Air Force and Navy have also supported the Digital Falcon Oasis series and made their own gains. 

And this year, according to Moore, Centcom’s partnership with the sea services will significantly expand.  

“This exercise in particular will have a lot of partnership with the Marine Corps and some of the systems that they’re using. We’ve had some experience with ‘big’ Navy and with the Army about integrating their systems — but the Marine Corps has been really wonderful in leaning forward and saying, ‘Hey, we see that you as a command are using these software tools. We believe that these are the tools that we will be bringing into the fight. Let’s integrate and do that test of whether we can send data back and forth,’” Moore noted.

In the interview, Fanelli, the Navy’s acting CTO and technical director of the program executive office for digital and enterprise services, also shed light on how this work contributes to the implementation of his department’s new Information Superiority Vision 2.0. 

That strategy is meant to help guide and govern how data is used to “improve every aspect of operations within” the Navy and Marine Corps, Fanelli said.

Centcom’s Digital Falcon Oasis, among associated and other activities, is deeply influencing how the Department of the Navy plans to invest in technology in the near term.

“We have more data, so operational decision-making informs all other decision-making in a more impactful and a more streamlined and faster way, based on what they’re feeding us,” Fanelli explained.

To him, tech-informed concepts of employment are opening up new opportunities for the DON and its components.

“And so the relevance of our [tactics, techniques and procedures, or TTPs] is increasing based on what they’re learning, and that applies much broader than any particular use case,” Fanelli said.

In the interview, he and the other CTOs also reflected on how Centcom would not be where it is at — particularly in terms of maturing rapid experimentation efforts to drive adoption of joint C2 capabilities — were it not for the top-down leadership and prioritization led by Centcom’s commander, Gen. Erik Kurilla. 

“He is, in many ways, the power user of the software applications,” Moore said.

As the series continues to evolve, Centcom leadership, she added, is now moving deliberately to “build Digital Falcon Oasis into the formal battle rhythm of the command.” The next event, coming up in October, will help the team cement that objective.

“And the reason that that’s so important to us is that we never want any of these efforts or exercises to be a cult of personality. Innovation should never be anchored on an individual. It should be just embedded in the organization,” she said. 

“So this will be the first time that we have this formalized, documented, ‘blessed’ event that will happen. Even if I were to get kidnapped tomorrow, the exercise series would continue. And we’re really excited about that,” Moore told DefenseScoop. 

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