The document, dated June 17 and signed by acting CTO Justin Fanelli, noted the need to “accelerate the adoption of game changing commercial technology.”

The list of priorities “can help shape resource allocation decisions across the enterprise,” he wrote, adding that it should serve as a “signaling tool” to industry partners and private capital to inform how they allocate their resources and focus their efforts.

Artificial intelligence and autonomy top the list of “Level 1” technologies in the hierarchy.

“AI and autonomy play a vital role in information warfare by enabling decision advantage and enhancing the ability of human-machine teaming. The DON seeks AI-driven solutions for real-time data analysis and automated decision-making to enhance operational effectiveness,” Fanelli wrote.

Level 2 technologies under this category include capabilities like applied machine learning and natural language processing; model verification and AI risk governance; mission platforms and human-machine interfaces; and edge AI infrastructure and DevSecOps pipelines.

Next on the list is quantum tech, which Fanelli said will transform secure communications, computing and sensing for information warfare. He noted that quantum encryption could protect the department’s networks from adversaries, and quantum computing would boost data processing and cryptographic resilience.

Level 2 technologies in this area include tools such as post-quantum cryptography and quantum-enhanced communication; hybrid quantum-classical architectures; quantum gravimetry and inertial navigation; and “quantum interconnects and cryogenic systems.”

“Transport and connectivity” are third on the list. According to Fanelli’s memo, the Navy is prioritizing advanced networking, secure communications, 5G and FutureG tech to enable real-time data sharing and command and control.

Level 2 technologies under this category include things like 5G and FutureG nodes and mesh architectures; dynamic spectrum sharing and anti-jamming techniques; datalinks and “ship-to-X” mesh networks; and cloudlets and intelligent routing.

Fourth on the list is command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — also known as C5ISR — as well as counter-C5ISR and space capabilities.

“The DON seeks to integrate advanced sensor networks, improve automated data fusion, and develop resilient space-based architectures to support real-time intelligence gathering,” Fanelli wrote.

Level 2 technologies in this area include capabilities such as multi-INT engines and automated targeting; operational pictures and targeting algorithms; hybrid constellations and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) from space; and open architectures and multi-coalition information sharing.

Fifth on the list is tech related to cyberspace operations and zero trust.

“Cyber threats are evolving rapidly, making Zero Trust Architecture essential for securing DON information networks. Priorities include advanced cyber defense frameworks, threat intelligence automation, and proactive security measures to counter adversarial cyber operations,” per the memo.

Level 2 capabilities under this category include things like identity and access management — such as attribute-based access control and federated identity systems — micro segmentation and risk-adaptive controls for zero trust, cyber threat hunting and deception, and operational technology (OT) security — such as industrial control system and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) protection and remote access.

The complete list of tech priorities for Levels 1, 2 and 3 can be found here.

“A lot of these areas are mainly being driven by commercial tech,” Deputy CTO Michael Frank said in an interview. “It’s going to be a mix of … traditional defense vendors, traditional primes. But you know, we are really focused on getting some new entrants in, right? So, expanding the defense industrial base, getting some new players on the field. And this is a signal to them. This memo is meant to be a signal to them and what we’re focused on, what our priorities areas are, so they can better make decisions … If you’re an entrepreneur in this area or if you’re a VC who’s looking to invest, you know these are the general areas that we’re looking at.”

The Navy is looking to cast a wide net for new capabilities.

“We’re going to be looking at emerging tech from anybody and everyone who is operating in these areas and developing things in these areas, to include the other players in the defense innovation ecosystem. So, you know, looking at what DIU is doing, partnering with In-Q-Tel and what they are doing, because we want to make sure that we have awareness of all the various efforts across government to reduce waste, to reduce redundant spend, reduce redundant efforts, given the fact that we are operating in a resource-constrained environment, both with money and with people and time and effort and all of that,” Frank said.

The CTO’s office is aiming to accelerate the transition of key capabilities to the Navy and Marine Corps.

“We are absolutely more interested in higher [technology readiness levels],” Frank said. “We are more focused on things that we can start testing, validating and transitioning to the warfighter now.”

The list of priority technology areas is meant to be updated over time, he noted.

“This is a living list, it’s an evolving list. You know these technology areas are not going to be static. I mean, Level 1 will probably not change for a while, but the Level 2 and Level 3 … will and should be regularly updated in order for it to be useful to industry partners,” Frank said.

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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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The memo — signed by the Navy’s Acting Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli on Thursday, but not yet publicly released — lays out a clear pathway for officials to pinpoint, assess and eliminate redundant IT platforms.

Specifically, this new structured divestment approach builds on and marks “the execution of Navy’s Operation Cattle Drive,” the memo states.

Cattle Drive was launched in 2020 as a strategic effort to facilitate more rapid IT consolidation. By 2022, the sea service confirmed it had saved roughly $150 million from that effort.

A senior defense official who spoke to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity to discuss the new memo suggested that it’s meant to build on that past momentum, but also help the Navy become more lean and impactful in how it drives tech disinvestments to free up funds that could be invested in more advanced assets.

The memo details the process Navy officials should use to determine if they should retire an IT system, and if needed, fully decommission it. 

This refresh and double-down on Cattle Drive is also part of a broader initiative within the service to expand digital transformation-enabling practices that are presently garnering small-scale wins in different components, which leadership has deemed agile centered design concepts (ACDC). The new memo includes elements that articulate how it connects with some of those concepts, including World Class Alignment metrics, and structured piloting.

The Department of the Navy chief information officer in coordination with the assistant secretary of the Navy financial management and comptroller, will be “the lead champion for Cattle Drive across all mission areas,” the memo states.

The directive also lists a variety of “implementation best practices” for Navy personnel.

Among them, officials are told to submit their results to specific Microsoft Teams channels, and also “leverage and incorporate the expertise” of relevant Naval deputy CIOs, as well as “U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. TENTH Fleet or Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command when executing activities under Cattle Drive.”

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This new Structured Challenges Approach for Innovating and Optimizing is part of a broader initiative to promote and grow existing digital transformation-enabling practices — called agile centered design concepts — that are already resulting in small-scale wins in different Navy components, the department’s acting CTO Justin Fanelli told DefenseScoop after signing the May 24 memo, which was publicly released on Thursday.

Generally, structured challenges and hackathons refer to multi-day, high-intensity events at which many people are incentivized to come together to collectively and competitively write, engineer or improve computer programs and other assets at an accelerated pace.

According to Fanelli, such engagements are already changing warfare and how the military “fights” with data and software, by expediting adaptation to weapons systems and effects through leveraging tools like prizes and social benefits, and bringing the necessary people together to build and innovate.

In the new memo, the CTO points to a Navy command that recently “held an Innovation Olympics that challenged people to show how they were using Power BI, Power Apps, or Power Automation to innovate and improve everyday.” Those software products are developed by Microsoft.

Outside the Defense Department, allies like Ukraine and adversaries associated with Russia’s Wagner Group, and separately China, are hosting hackathons and prize competitions to accelerate tech innovations to enable their agendas, Fanelli told DefenseScoop.

The new five-page memo lays out the Navy’s overarching plan to foster and implement this “structured challenges approach.”

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Last fall, the Pentagon released a far-reaching zero-trust strategy to direct how its components move to protect their networks and information architectures against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Broadly, zero trust is a cybersecurity concept and framework that assumes networks are compromised from the get-go — and it demands non-stop monitoring and constant authentication to secure critical national security information. The Department of Defense aims to deploy and be operating on such as an architecture by 2027. Its strategy lays out “target” and “advanced” levels of achieving zero trust. The target level marks the minimum set of 91 capability outcomes that must be met by components to ensure they fully secure and continuously protect data. 

According to the Department of the Navy’s Acting Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli, the Navy recently met all 91 of those outputs to fulfill DOD’s “target level” zero trust on its Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) — which underpins many of its most innovative pursuits.

“We’ve been working with the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office and recently — just recently — we believe we have satisfied all of the zero-trust objective state criteria. So, we believe that we have the first zero-trust objective state offering out there. That means that we can innovate — and we have — on that, three times faster than if we’re having to go through the process for every different new capability,” Fanelli said Thursday at CyberTalks, hosted by Scoop News Group.

After the event, Fanelli told DefenseScoop that “the secret sauce” to meeting this goal so early was support from department leadership enabling a focused team to accelerate internal technology improvements.

“When a handful of professionals can become unleashed, then we can lay new groundwork for everybody else to innovate on top of that,” he said.

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A memo formally establishing the organization was signed off in June by Ruth Youngs Lew, the program executive officer for digital and enterprise services. Neptune will be part of PEO Digital.

Within the department, the new cloud management office will have two components: one for the Navy and another for the Marine Corps. The Navy component is expected to start operations “at or around the start of” fiscal 2024, Louis Koplin, leader of the platform application services portfolio at PEO Digital, said in an email to DefenseScoop on Tuesday. The Marine Corps component is already operational.

Neptune is intended to serve as “the single point of entry” for the acquisition and delivery of cloud services across the Department of the Navy and facilitate the “digital transformation to cloud-native and zero-trust enterprise services,” according to Lew’s memo, which was obtained by DefenseScoop.

Notably, the office is expected to play a major role in the department’s accessing the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract vehicle, the Pentagon’s $9 billion enterprise cloud effort that replaced the ill-fated Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the contract last year and will each compete for task orders.

“Neptune cloud management office will guide and assist Marine Corps and Navy mission owners to appropriately leverage JWCC, to eventually include centralized and automated ordering from the cloud portal on the Naval Digital Marketplace,” officials involved in the effort said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

Justin Fanelli, acting chief technology officer of the Navy, told DefenseScoop: “If we do this very right with our new partners and existing strong partnerships within DOD, the best way will also be the easiest way. Our service to our warfighters will be measured by drastically reduced friction and improved mission outcomes.”

Neptune has been tasked with establishing enterprise capabilities in coordination with the sea services’ deputy CIOs, Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command and U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/Commander, U.S. 10th Fleet. It is also expected to improve the “customer service experience” for components seeking to consume cloud services, automate repetitive work and eliminate duplicative work, according to Lew’s memo.

The creation of the new office comes as the Defense Department is embracing the cloud as a key component of its IT modernization plans.

Policy guidance signed out in 2020 by the Navy CIO and assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition stated that the Department of the Navy “shall maintain its global strategic advantage by harnessing the power of data and information systems through cloud computing. Cloud computing is the primary approach to transforming how the DON delivers, protects, and manages access to data and applications across all mission areas. Cloud computing … shall be adopted and consumed in such a way as to maximize its inherent characteristics and advantages,”

Per Lew’s memo, the new Neptune office is tasked with maintaining the portfolio of available and authorized cloud service offerings on the Naval Digital Marketplace and managing the department’s consumption across that portfolio via an integrated cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) capability. It will also deliver a cloud solutions “guidebook” that tells people who buy and build information systems how to best employ the Navy’s cloud portfolio.

The organization is expected to “describe, automate, and enhance the customer journey for those seeking to consume cloud services from the DON Cloud Portfolio, following IT service management (ITSM) best practices” for the cloud when it comes to engaging, procuring, provisioning, migrating, operating, defending and decommissioning. It will also establish “additional plans and/or process(es) to execute those Cloud ITSM phases” as necessary, according to Lew’s memo.

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