“Combatant commands, in particular, have increased their use of MSS to command and control dynamic operations and activities in their theaters. In response to this growing demand, the [Chief Digital and AI Office] and Army increased capacity to support emerging combatant command operations and other DOD component needs,” a defense official said Thursday.

Questions linger, however, regarding the MSS deployment plan — and who is part of the expanded user base set to gain additional software licenses through this huge contract increase in the near term.

The Pentagon originally launched Project Maven in 2017 to pave the way for wider use of AI-enabled technologies that can autonomously detect, tag and track objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.

In 2022, Project Maven matured into Maven via the start of a major transition. At that time, responsibilities for most of the program’s elements were split between the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, while sending certain duties to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. 

All three organizations running the program have been largely tight-lipped about Maven — and the associated industry-made MSS capabilities — since the transition. 

The Defense Department inked the initial $480 million, five-year IDIQ contract with Palantir for the program in May 2024. The Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground was listed as the awarding agency, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the funding agency. Around that time, executives at Palantir told reporters that the work under that contract would initially cover five U.S. combatant commands: Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command/NORAD, and Transportation Command. The tech was also expected to be deployed as part of the Defense Department’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE).

In a one-paragraph announcement on Wednesday, DOD revealed its decision to increase that contract ceiling for Palantir’s MSS to nearly $1.3 billion through 2029.

A Pentagon spokesperson referred DefenseScoop’s questions about the move to the Army.

“We raised the ceiling of the contract in anticipation of future demand to support Army readiness. Having the groundwork for the contract in place ahead of time, increases efficiencies and decreases timelines to get the licenses. No acquisition decisions have been made,” an Army official said.

That official referred questions regarding the operational use of MSS — and specifically, which Army units or combatant commands would be front of line to gain new licenses — back to the Pentagon. 

Defense officials did not share further details after follow-up inquiries on Friday. A Palantir spokesperson also declined DefenseScoop’s request for comment.

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth confirmed this week that there are currently more than 20,000 active Maven users across more than 35 military service and combatant command software tools in three security domains — and that the user base has more than doubled since January. 

Palantir also recently signed a deal with NATO for a version of the technology — Maven Smart System NATO — that will support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

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“This progress moves us closer to bi-directional, real-time data flow between the tactical edge and operational and strategic decision-makers,” CDAO officials wrote.

In response to questions about the document’s contents, a defense official confirmed on Wednesday that the office, in partnership with the joint force, recently closed out the thirteenth iteration of its Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series, which unfolded in conjunction with the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 (PC-C5) event.

GIDE is rooted in the Defense Department’s aims to get new technologies and equipment into the hands of warfighters for iterative testing and refinement through distributed, digital experiments, sprints and military service-led exercises like PC-C5.

Early versions of the GIDE series launched in 2020 and were facilitated by U.S. Northern Command. But in 2022, Pentagon leadership under the Biden administration tasked the CDAO with revamping the effort to strategically enable capabilities that could help realize the U.S. military’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control warfighting construct. 

Since then, GIDE experiments have generally run approximately every 90 days.

In the CDAO document summarizing multiple takeaways from GIDE 13, officials wrote that PC-C5 “served as the first major exercise venue to demonstrate” the EDM line of effort, which the office awarded a production other transaction agreement for in fall 2024.

“EDM is a government-owned technology stack that enables tactical-level data distribution in disadvantaged, disconnected, intermittent and limited — or DDIL — communications environments through a resilient nodal architecture,” they wrote.

A defense official told DefenseScoop that the CDAO is deploying EDM nodes to tactical users and other key locations to ultimately assess the fusion of operational and tactical data and C2 capabilities.

In the EDM context, nodes essentially refer to physical points within the network that are typically near end users or information sources, where data is captured, processed, or stored. This allows for distributed, decentralized data transmission that could underpin future edge computing missions.

“Edge Data Mesh enables data integration and exchange across multiple networks and data formats, including in denied and degraded communications environments,” the defense official said.

“Core to this effort is the commitment to interoperability using Open DAGIR principles and deployed architectures. The government-owned software development kit allows rapid integration of mature and emerging systems and applications with the EDM architecture,” they added. 

Project Convergence is an Army-led experimentation venue that enables personnel from across the U.S. military services and key allies to train together and collaboratively work out various concepts for integration. Army officials have been transparent about their aims to see new capabilities stay with commands for continued use after Capstone 5. 

In the CDAO document, officials stated that the “Scenario B” portion of PC-C5 provided participants with “a critical opportunity to test and develop EDM interoperability with other mission command platforms in field conditions — which remained behind following the exercise’s completion and will continue to provide resilient tactical data transport in the [area of responsibility].”

Activities associated with that scenario were conducted in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. They involved tech experiments with all of the service components at the combatant command level.

“We continue to demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to advance modern [command and control, or C2] capability is to exercise and experiment how we fight — on live networks, with live data, with daily users — and leaving behind capability after every exercise,” CDAO officials wrote.

Some of the other “wins” from GIDE 13 listed in the document include demonstrating the integration of third-party software into DOD’s data infrastructure, and integrating multiple third-party generative AI capabilities into existing operational contexts. 

“This significantly accelerates warfighters’ ability to process complex information, especially across maneuver, intelligence, fires, and logistics workflows, shortening decision-loops and ensuring we achieve decision advantage,” the document states.

The defense official did not answer DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the makers and use cases of those genAI assets that were tested in the GIDE 13 and PC-C5 experiments last month.

“GIDE events have incorporated GenAI capabilities supporting a variety of workflows. These capabilities are a subset of GIDE’s mission command software suite, supporting [combatant commands] outside GIDE experimentation, so operators can continue to refine how they use them without waiting for the next experiment,” the defense official said.

They confirmed that GIDE 14 will take place during the upcoming iteration of Pacific Sentry and “Joint Exercise SoCal in Indo-Pacom.”

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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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Task Force Lima was stood up last year to help the Defense Department better understand how it can effectively and responsibly leverage gen AI tools such as large language models. Officials have taken lessons learned from that effort and stood up the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC).

“Over the course of 12 months, Task Force Lima analyzed hundreds of AI workflows and tasks that AI tools could make more efficient or more effective. And we categorized all of those use cases into a smaller set of 15 areas aligned into two big categories: warfighting functions — like command and control [and] decision support — and enterprise management functions like financial management and healthcare information management. Upon completing its work, Task Force Lima submitted a detailed report,” Radha Plumb, head of the department’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), told reporters at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday.

The cell is being stood up to implement those recommendations with the aim of accelerating the delivery of frontier models and next-generation AI capabilities across the department, she said.

The initiative will be led by the CDAO in partnership with the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

The cell will be charged with identifying and testing technology through rapid experimentation and prototyping, assessing the effectiveness of technology and determining whether it can be scaled and sustained.

“If warranted, we’ll use defined acquisition pathways to scale the technology across the DOD enterprise, and that can be within CDAO, with the military departments or with other key components,” Plumb said.

“This rapid experimentation approach will allow us to test and identify where these cutting-edge technologies can make our forces more lethal and our processes more effective, but equally critically, the AI RCC will define the requirements for enterprise infrastructure … and support scaled AI development that includes compute development environment and AI-ready data,” she added.

The warfighting use cases that the cell will focus on include command and control (C2) and decision support, operational planning, logistics, weapons development and testing, uncrewed and autonomous systems, intelligence activities, information operations and cyber operations, according to a DOD fact sheet.

Enterprise management use cases include financial systems, human resources, enterprise logistics and supply chain, health care information management, legal analysis and compliance, procurement processes, and software development and cybersecurity.

The Pentagon is planning to allocate $100 million from fiscal 2024 and 2025 research, development, test and evaluation funding toward some of the initial efforts, according to Plumb.

Part of the investment will include $35 million for four frontier AI pilots that will kick off “immediately,” according to Plumb. Those will be conducted in partnership with the combatant commands and other DOD organizations in 90-day increments, including via the Global Information Dominance (GIDE) series of experiments.

About $5 million will go toward “rapid user-centric experimentation,” according to a DOD fact sheet.

The CDAO plans to work with DIU to tee up additional pilots “in the near future,” Plumb noted.

In mid-January, the Pentagon also intends to award about $40 million in Small Business Innovation Research contracts to fund generative AI solutions, including from non-traditional vendors. The department is still in the source selection process.

“We’ve received hundreds of responses to our request for solutions to leverage generative AI in specific DOD ecosystems, everything from applying commercial applications to healthcare and financial management to solutions in critical warfighting areas like autonomy,” Plumb said.

Another $20 million will go toward boosting compute and creating digital “sandboxes” to facilitate development, experimentation and testing. The department is taking a multiple cloud approach and plans to lean on major providers working under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability enterprise on that effort. The four vendors with contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program include Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

“We will have a sandbox with each major cloud provider. We’ll start with two sandboxes that will be available in mid-January with two providers, and then fast-follow with two additional sandboxes on the other two cloud instances by the summer,” Plumb told reporters.

The CDAO chief said she couldn’t provide a specific timeline for when new tech shepherded by the rapid capabilities cell will be ready for deployment, noting that it will depend on the performance of the technologies in testing and experimentation.

“I think industry continues to innovate and improve both the quality and reliability … of their generative AI models, and we’re watching that very closely and in close partnership with our industry innovators. The second piece, though, is … the department has to have its own reliability standards. We talk a lot about responsible AI. What that really means is, do the models perform the way you want them to perform? And do they do they do the things you want them to do? And do they not do things you don’t want them to do?” Plumb said.

“That’s true for all of our platforms and capabilities. We have to do that in weapon systems, we have to do that in our digital solutions, and we have to do that in our hardware. We have a specific set of standards and applications that we apply in the generative AI context to bound the risk and ensure the performance meets the reliability. Part of the pilots, the test and evaluation, and the generative AI-specific responsible toolkit are creating the pathways for that,” she added. “To my mind, this is a really ‘better brakes make faster trains’ approach where we’ve got a toolkit, we’ve got to test the technology, and then we’ve got to rinse and repeat to get it to the reliability level that will allow us to deploy it. That’s going to vary use case by use case, but that’s the approach we’re taking here.”

The risk management framework includes things like authority to operate (ATO) processes — which the Defense Department is trying to streamline — and identity credential and management (ICAM) solutions.

“Those are the tools that let us as a department, continue to review and make sure digital solutions we bring in from the commercial sector meet our cyber requirements and don’t provide threats,” Plumb said.

“There’s a broader set of issues in which we have to think about how we deploy AI into our ecosystems, how we think about data security and the data use in our systems now. That is an ongoing part of our discussions and part of what we want to get after with these [rapid capabilities cell] pilots. How do we bring in the very best commercial technology, marry it with our sort of unique, often classified data, use that for our warfighters, and then be able to scale that? And that is explicitly one of the things we need to work through within the context of these pilots. That’s going to vary a lot depending on what kind of data you’re using. And you can imagine security risks that relate to health information look very different than security risks that relate to cyber information, which in turn look really different than the risks related to autonomous systems. So there is a workflow use case specificity to this. That’s part of the pilot effort,” she said.

As for the leaders of the disbanded Task Force Lima, some will be joining the rapid capabilities cell and others will be working on other priority projects for the CDAO, according to Plumb.

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Roots of the Defense Department’s GIDE series trace back to 2020, but in 2022, it was revamped when Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the Chief Digital and AI Office with strategically enabling technologies that could help realize the U.S. military’s nascent CJADC2 warfighting construct through the initiative. Each GIDE event is now leading up to a worldwide, joint activity where U.S. combatant commands and multiple international military partners collaboratively are expected to unleash next-generation command-and-control capabilities in late 2025.

“We’re in the middle of planning GIDE 12 right now, which is about 45 days away,” Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, an Air Force pilot and senior CDAO official overseeing the rapid experimentation effort, told DefenseScoop Thursday.

During a panel at a GDIT event produced by FedScoop in collaboration with AWS, Strohmeyer shed light on what his team has been learning in the latest GIDE iterations and shared new details about what to expect in the upcoming event.

“We’ve certainly had international partners join for the past several [experiments]. But for this one, we are going to be significantly expanding that,” he said.

During the last few iterations, the U.S. military’s Five Eyes partners — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. — had to “watch from a distance,” Strohmeyer noted, due to what he said were technical challenges associated with sharing data.

But for GIDE 12, “we’re going to be able to technically integrate much more than we’ve ever been able to in the past — and, sometimes in an autonomous way, be able to share data between us, which we’ve not been able to do in the past. So, that’s exciting for us,” he said. 

Broadly, this year his team has three “mission threads” they’re pursuing with GIDE. 

“The first one is ‘global integration,’ or the ability for the Joint Staff and our allies and partners to see the world collaboratively and make decisions much more quickly than we were able to make in the past — and rather than a regional way, in a truly global way and truly digitized way,” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

The second mission thread involves helping the military services enable joint kill chains, and the third encompasses driving improvements with allied and partner data-sharing.

It’s all meant to enable the minimum viable capability (MVC) they’ve developed for CJADC2 so far, which Strohmeyer said is performant but not yet perfect. 

“Our goal is to significantly expand that out for GIDE 12, and also test it in a really robust operational environment to allow us to be able to see, can we achieve true global integration with some of those allies and partners against a very robust mission set, and can we actually do it in a way that’s performing and that’s ready for [current] operations?” Strohmeyer said.

He confirmed that several elements that contribute to the MVC have been fielded and are already “being used in real-world operations right now.”

Though he didn’t name the combatant commands participating or locations where it’ll all unfold, Strohmeyer repeatedly emphasized how the next GIDE will push that MVC further and be more global in nature than those that came before.

A key focus of GIDE 12, he noted, involves “a horrible military acronym” known as C5P — or Cross Combatant Command and Coalition Cooperative Planning. 

“Essentially, it’s taking what is currently hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of man-hours, to be able to collaborate and come up with a slide that says, ‘This is what we’re going to do’ — and instead create a truly digital, in-minutes collaboration that can allow us to be able to get in in advance of our adversaries and hopefully deter a fight from happening. So that’s what we hope to do,” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

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The move, which the mission commander of the U.S. military’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) previewed in a discussion with DefenseScoop last month, comes on the heels of an award to Palantir for its Maven Smart System and the launch of the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR) effort.

According to an announcement released Thursday evening, contractors interested in participating in the new challenge — which will support those initiatives — can submit their proposals in the form of a 5-minute “pitch video” via the online Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, addressing the tasks and subtasks laid out in the formal call for submissions.

Vendors whose proposed solutions fit the bill may be integrated into upcoming events known as GIDE 12 and 13 starting this fall.

Global logistics and sustainment challenges present hurdles that the U.S. military is trying to overcome with better data management solutions, including through the use of artificial intelligence. Concern is growing as the department’s logistics networks are expected to be at greater risk in future conflicts if they’re targeted by adversaries’ advanced weapon systems.

“While logisticians from the Joint Staff, Combatant Commands, and Service Components excel at developing these dynamic logistics plans, they require manual curation of data into often-static products in an analog workflow that varies across organizations. The lack of a common, enterprise-level data ontology for logistics and sustainment leads to sub-optimal decisions from stovepiped and static data — challenging the Joint Force’s ability to provide quick, dynamic, and predictive logistics and sustainment plans. These challenges are compounded in a contested environment,” the Tradewinds post notes.

The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) oversees the GIDE series in partnership with the combatant commands and the Joint Staff.

The newly launched challenge will support an innovative acquisition process, according to a release.

“The initiative has the potential to impact every Combatant Command, and warfighters will witness industry solutions applied immediately to their problem sets in a common CJADC2 global integration decision platform. Warfighters will rapidly share feedback in an iterative fashion, while executing the mission,” per the release.

The call for proposals on Tradewinds notes that the Pentagon needs a common data ontology, digitized workflows, access to live data, and insights derived from that information.

The inaugural GIDE challenge “is intended to develop the global logistics data ontology in [Maven Smart System] while enriching current ontology and workflows with existing government logistics data,” the document states, noting that the initiative will give new industry partners the opportunity to provide live logistics and sustainment data, “curated digital insights,” and integrated applications “containerized” and integrated into the Maven Smart System at Impact Level 5 as part of the broader Open DAGIR effort.

Submissions are due Sept. 6.

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Early iterations of the GIDE series launched around 2020 — but the pace started really picking up in 2022, when Pentagon leadership pivoted to make it the military’s key mechanism for pushing forward technologies that enable a future warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2. The initiative is now led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

“We’ll have the next series coming up in the next couple of months, building up to a worldwide, joint activity where we’re going to have a carrier strike group that the Brits are going to take and cross three different U.S. COCOMs and four different international partners on the trip out, and then the three different COCOMs and international partners on the trip back,” CDAO Chief Information Officer Daniel Holtzman said Tuesday at an event hosted by Defense One.

“That is the ultimate example of [CJADC2] — how do we sail that fleet through this partner that wasn’t a partner yesterday, that’s now a partner who needs to connect to us and we don’t have a year-and-a-half to build a new [combat development system], and get it installed, and get it authorized, and put a U.S. person there? So, we are pushing the bounds,” he added.

The next big event in the series — dubbed GIDE 12 — is slated to unfold in the fall. More associated events will follow, and then that culminating engagement involving the carrier strike group is envisioned to fully come into fruition around the end of 2025. 

“We have some planning cycles. What we are doing in the next GIDE is a series of experiments that all lead up to that activity. We’re connecting international partners — the U.K., Australia and others — in ways in the cloud that we prototyped that are pushing the bounds on certain things that get to [the] underlying data,” Holtzman said.

A CDAO spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the participating international partners and U.S. combatant commands are “still being coordinated.”  

Holtzman is a longtime defense and cyber leader who has written software code for Navy nuclear weapons and what he told DefenseScoop is the first AI language ever built at MIT for research. 

Right now, in his view, the Pentagon’s “biggest focus” with GIDE is about moving away from pursuing the “shiniest” new technologies — to instead demonstrating what real-world mission capability options actually are, and then accelerating deployments from there. 

“The operator needs and the warfighter needs what they need. But I don’t go to an  F-16 pilot and tell them how to fly the plane — and I don’t need an F-16 pilot to tell me how to build a cloud,” Holtzman told DefenseScoop. “So we’re using GIDE to [connect all the players and] deliver the capability we need now, because there’s skirmishes going on now, but not to lock us in, so we can take what [we learned and] put that into a requirement and into enterprise so we have that enterprise capability.”

The CIO added: “I would sum it by saying, traditionally, [my] view is the user will do whatever they need to do to get the new gun. And when they shoot the first six bullets, where’s the sustainment? Where’s the next set of bullets? Where’s the cleaning for the gun? Where’s the training range? Where’s all that stuff? We can put stuff out fast — and [GIDE is enabling] us to see that.”

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The U.S. military has been conducting GIDE events for several years, but the pace has picked up recently as Pentagon leaders prioritize capabilities that will enable a warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which seeks to more seamlessly connect the data streams of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners for better and faster decision-making. The department’s Chief Digital and AI Office has been put in charge of the events, which also feature the department’s various combatant commands across the world.

There have been 11 numbered events in the GIDE series so far, which now occur every 90 days or so, and the department is gearing up for the twelfth iteration this fall.

“We are about to announce our inaugural GIDE Challenge in the next week or so. And then we’ll see how many [vendors] we can bring into the enterprise. But we’re really excited to start bringing some new entrants in and to be able to hopefully show them off in GIDE 12,” Col. Matt Strohmeyer, the Pentagon’s director for the Global Information Dominance Experiments, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the Air Defense Summit hosted by the Potomac Officers Club on Tuesday.

He said it’s yet to be determined how many industry partners will be tapped.

“It’s going to be a unique approach, but we’re going to be using the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace to announce it and to kind of manage the process. It is going to focus on contested logistics and contested sustainment. That’s the mission set as part of that version 1.0 of JADC2 workflow that we have for global integration. And so there we’ll be looking for vendors to submit proposals on — or there’ll be a document that’s published that shows them exactly kind of what we’re thinking through, what the workflow is, what the tasks and subtasks we’re looking for them to perform are, whether they try to perform on all of it or perform on a section of it. And then we’ll be looking to try to bring them into an evaluation and then into subsequent GIDE events leading up to GIDE 12,” Strohmeyer explained.

His team is now approaching joint experimentation through multiple venues that build on each other, he noted.

That includes weekly engagements that take place outside the numbered GIDE events.

“We call them GIDE technical workshops where we have the actual software that’s on actual networks with actual users. And we go through a very scoped workflow and we just get quick feedback on what’s working, what’s not working … Those then build into something we call GIDE Xs, which are still scoped, but it’s with several operational users on an operational workflow. And it usually takes place over the course of one-to-two days where we’re now going through a more scaled workflow and process to see what works, what doesn’t work, get feedback from operational users. And then those are on about a monthly basis, and those build into the numbered GIDE events, which that next one is GIDE 12. And that’ll be a several weeks-long event where we really see — did these systems perform the way that we wanted them to?” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

“Our goal, by having that threefold approach, is that we don’t just have a lot of development that happens under the surface and we do an event and then it turns out that the software didn’t exactly meet what we wanted it to. We can get iterative feedback on it as we go through the process better than what we’ve been able to do in the past. And we learned that last year. We used to just do numbered GIDE events, and we learned actually in GIDE 8 last year [that] we need more regular feedback. And that’s when we adopted this new approach,” he added.

The upcoming GIDE events will be held in the wake of the Pentagon’s launch of a new CJADC2-related initiative known as Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR), which aims to scale data analytics and artificial intelligence tools across the department.

“The idea behind Open DAGIR is to allow us … to be able to have a common platform that any vendor can come into that has access to a trove of government data that the government controls, and then we can plug and play vendors as necessary,” Strohmeyer said during a panel discussion at the Air Defense Summit. “We’ve made a pretty significant investment to allow us to be able to do that in the term.”

The Global Information Dominance Experiments will serve as a testbed for vendors’ AI tools and other technologies to determine if they meet military requirements.

One of the strategic objectives of GIDE is to provide a venue for combatant commands, the Joint Staff and coalition partners to exercise their ability to digitally collaborate across the globe on a crisis response decision, Strohmeyer noted.

Another strategic objective is to help the U.S. military and other friendly be better postured to close so-called offensive and defensive kill chains, including through automation.

“We found that the first step is really just getting the data right, getting the workflow right, and then applying some algorithms to it. But then eventually, there’s areas where we think we might be able to apply AI to allow us to be able to smartly — with humans cognizant over the decisions that are being made — allow us to be able to close those kill chains better and faster,” he said.

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The Joint Staff stood up an AI task force in February, comprised of staff members from across the entire organization. And recently it completed a 90-day sprint to examine use cases for artificial intelligence applications, as well as long-term organizational structures needed within the Joint Staff for sustaining AI-enabled capabilities, according to Lt. Gen. Todd Isaacson, director for the Joint Staff’s J-6 Command, Control, Communications, Computers, & Cyber bureau.

As a result, the organization now wants its own in-house chief digital and artificial intelligence office, Isaacson said Thursday during a keynote speech at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference.

“Currently we have a [chief data officer] and I serve as the [chief information officer], but we’re looking at ways to reorganize the Joint Staff to get after what I think is some open field running and a real opportunity for us to continue to evolve,” Isaacson said. “This was inward looking at the Joint Staff. As you might imagine, the outcomes were very, very promising.”

While he did not share any information regarding when the Joint Staff might try to stand up a CDAO, the intent represents a trend happening across the Pentagon regarding AI. The entire department is exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies can be used for military applications — including day-to-day administration tasks, data management assistance and operations. 

The Joint Staff’s AI task force also conducted an internal review where they assessed the workflows of all eight directorates, analyzing them “in a decomposed state,” Isaacson said. The goal was to understand where existing AI-enabled capabilities from the commercial sector could be used to streamline the organization’s processes, he noted.

That also includes generative AI technology, he said. The subfield of artificial intelligence uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on.

“What we found in that 90-day sprint was we had more use cases than we could actually get after. So, we were super excited about that outcome,” Isaacson said.

The Joint Staff is on a larger path to improve modernization of both its own organization and the entire U.S. military — an effort spearheaded by Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown. Brown has directed the J-6 to take the lead on many of those efforts, and the directorate has recently established a campaign plan for digital modernization, Isaacson said.

He noted the effort is focused on four areas: developing, maintaining and attracting a digitally enabled workforce; improving the Pentagon’s networking infrastructure; acquiring advanced tools and capabilities; and rapid adoption of new technologies.

“One of the things that the department doesn’t do well is rapidly adopting, but we’re doing it better than we used to and we’re continuing to endeavor to make it better as we partner with our industry partners,” Isaacson noted.

He also said that the J-6 is constantly taking insights from the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE).

Hosted by the Defense Department’s CDAO, the experiments are held in conjunction with combatant command exercises and are designed to test new capabilities for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). The warfighting construct is designed to move data across distributed networks of sensors and weapons connected by faster communication, processing and decision layers informed by AI and ML.

“As we conduct those experiments, what we have found is that data integration — the tagging, the labeling, the exposure, the availability — is a key component to achieving the dominance in the information space that we described,” Isaacson noted. “Experimentation and demonstrations are at the center of everything that your joint force is doing as it relates to digital modernization.”

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On Thursday, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office announced a new initiative called Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories. The initial set of procurements is focused on CJADC2, including the award of a $480 million contract to Palantir that was announced this week for its Maven Smart System, and a prototype other transaction agreement for the company to quickly and securely onboard third-party vendor and government capabilities into a government-owned, contractor-operated data environment.

The department is aiming to develop a “multi-vendor ecosystem with supporting business models that enables industry and government to integrate data platforms, development tools, services, and applications in a way that preserves government data ownership and industry intellectual property,” according to a release.

CJADC2 is a warfighting construct that aims to better connect the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international partners under a more unified network. Defense officials intend to leverage AI to help commanders and other personnel make faster and better decisions and improve operational effectiveness and efficiency.

Beginning June 1, user access to the Maven Smart System is poised to greatly expand at five combatant commands. That same day, the department plans to launch a “sprint” to further lay the groundwork for onboarding new capabilities.

“We’re going to be doing a six-week sprint starting June 1 that has members of our IP cadre to help us on the intellectual property side, along with key experts in acquisition, contracting and requirements development. What we want to do is develop an agile requirements process that lets us take inputs in from the CoComs, map them to specific technical requirements that we looked at for industry, and then socialize them. What we want to do in that sprint is bake in the metrics for success that we can show to industry and then test in our side experiments, similar to what we did in the lead-up to the minimum viable capability [for CJADC2 that was announced a few months ago] and do that in a repeatable way,” a senior defense official told reporters Thursday during a background briefing.

Other transaction authority will be key to the Pentagon’s plans for rapidly bringing in promising technologies from industry.

“What that OT lets us do is essentially compete the applications outside of the Palantir ecosystem, identify the best developers for that application need for those warfighting requirements, and then direct those to be subcontracted into Palantir, protecting the IP of those third parties, and really taking advantage of the fact that the government owns the data, even though Palantir is operating the infrastructure,” the senior defense official said.

The department’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), which allow the combatant commands to exercise CJADC2 capabilities, will serve as a testbed for vendors’ technologies to determine if they meet military requirements.

“We run those every 90 days. And we’re going to kick this off with an industry day in mid-July to transparently communicate to industry what our requirements are, how they can apply through the selection process, and what our criteria for assessment and selection will be going forward,” the official said. The Pentagon wants to see “where we can add to our capabilities to leverage the data that we have and that Palantir stack and build on the [CJADC2] minimum viable capability and the Maven Smart System application.”

The department envisions multiple types of applications and pathways for integrating them into the architecture.

“They can be applications that are fit for a particular urgent or emergent need that we want to build and deploy rapidly, but we may not want to sustain for years or decades. And those can be funded through the OT, delivered [and] fielded very quickly. And then think of them as attritable things that we can deprecate as we no longer need them. The second class is that set of applications that are … something we want to be enduringly available, and those can be transitioned into the IDIQ itself integrated with the Palantir stack,” the senior defense official told DefenseScoop during the briefing.

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