Now led by the nascent Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), the GIDE projects are broadly intended to test, optimize and integrate the department’s data systems with artificial intelligence. The overall goal is to support the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiatives, which aim to connect all of the services’ sensors, shooters and data under a single network.

After looking at generative AI models and other technology in GIDE 6, the next iteration of wargames will be “very focused on Indo-Pacom and the joint fires network … and that will also have an allies components to it, with folks like the Australians, the Japanese and so on,” Greg Little, the CDAO’s deputy officer, said Wednesday at the annual JADC2 Warfare Symposium hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association. 

Little noted that GIDE 7 — slated to occur within the next three months — will also support the upcoming Bold Quest 2023. The joint force event is a capability demonstration and assessment of digital interoperability across the Pentagon, as well as with allies and partners, in support of JADC2.

Indo-Pacific Command previously has already participated in GIDE 6 with a focus on leveraging datasets and AI to address adversary activity in the region. But comments from Little and other leaders at the CDAO have hinted that the combatant command will be taking a more central role in future experiments.

The Defense Department has begun putting additional emphasis on integrating its allies and partners into its command-and-control modernization efforts and now often refers to it as CJADC2, with the C standing for “combined” and representing an international coalition.

As part of GIDE 7, Little said the CDAO wants to tackle data-sharing challenges between the United States and its allies and partners, as well as any associated bureaucratic barriers.

“So, if there’s a policy issue with sharing data with the Five Eyes [alliance members], how do we actually measure how quickly we can resolve the policy issue?” he said. The goal is to obtain “muscle memory” of the process so that, in the event of a real-life military operation, data sharing across borders would be seamless, he added.

Little pointed to a recent distinguished visitors day with allies and partners, where they were able to have operators leveraging various intelligence and operational data on a single screen. He underscored the value of being able to cross reference data — noting that operators were able to deconflict and augment their capabilities for more effective responses to events.

The GIDE wargames are already taking a “very globally integrated” approach to digitizing workflows and parsing out how the Defense Department should link capabilities at the strategic operational level with the services at the tactical level, Little said. The CDAO wants to take the capabilities experimented with during GIDE and deploy them to warfighters every 90 days, he noted.

Capability from GIDE 6 has been left behind for continued for use, according to Little, who is departing from his role at the end of July for Palantir.

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“Confirmed — Greg Little is leaving at the end of July and will go to work for Palantir after his departure,” a Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) spokesperson said in an email on Monday.

Little was one the first officials tapped to lead the Defense Department’s nascent CDAO before it reached full operating capability in June 2022. There, he’s made a mark steering the development of a new approach and underlying digital tool — called Pulse — that applies real-world data to modernize the Pentagon’s performance measurement processes and create sharper accountability across the sprawling enterprise. 

Before becoming deputy CDAO, Little defined the first financial management data analytics vision and strategy for the DOD and led the largest Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Release 12 Technical Upgrade in North America, among other activities during his time at the Pentagon, according to his bio.

His impending exit comes as CDAO leadership is urgently moving to improve the morale of the office, following an internal review that demonstrated employees’ dissatisfaction with management.

It’s not yet clear what Little’s role will be at Palantir. The AI and big data analytics company works extensively with DOD and other federal agencies.

Little did not respond to multiple requests for comment from DefenseScoop on Monday.

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Under a recent direction from Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, a team within the nascent Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) developed the platform in four-and-a-half months.

“With the data that Pulse feeds to the executive analytic dashboard, the secretary and I will gain a far better view into the implementation of the [National Defense Strategy] than our predecessors were ever afforded. This dashboard approach will give us data-driven insights into what’s working, and what’s stuck, and what we can do about it,” Hicks said at a recent event.

In her view, Pulse should “set the pace for defense reform moving forward” to ultimately enable the department to build enduring advantages. 

“We’ve already seen some progress, and it is being used more and more to actually be a pretty valuable management tool,” said Greg Little, deputy CDAO for enterprise platforms and business optimization.

During a recent interview, Little and Hillary Jett, who manages the CDAO’s Pulse executive performance analytics portfolio, briefed DefenseScoop on the intent via this platform to help officials apply data to better understand how they are making progress against the department’s strategic priorities, and the broad vision for its future.

‘The world has changed’

For decades now, federal agencies have been mandated through the Government Performance and Results Act to conduct tasks like evaluating their functions, setting goals, measuring results and reporting progress.

The Defense Department has observed some successes over the years, as well as certain areas for improvement that persist — “so this concept is really not new,” Little noted. Now though, he said multiple drivers could make this year the one in which the agency can drive some radical, technology-enabled reform. 

“One, we really have a leadership commitment — you heard it from Deputy Secretary Hicks,” Little said. He pointed to several of her recent moves to modernize the Pentagon, including the establishment of the CDAO, in which he now serves. 

Secondly, Little noted, “we’re in a really interesting technology time for this.”

With Pulse in its current form, his team is essentially “looking at a couple hundred metrics from a couple hundred data sources” to generate fresh performance insights. And to be able to bring that data together in a really automated way, and display it all in a very visually simple view that allows people to make decisions quickly, more modern technologies — which are now really coming into fruition — are needed.

“And the third point is, as we think about what’s occurred over the last three years with COVID-19, with the Afghan [withdrawal], with the Russia-Ukraine war and with our near-peer adversaries — the world has changed. And so I think there’s an understanding [in the Pentagon] that we need to change how we manage the department, and we want to do that in a much more data-driven way,” Little explained. 

He and his team built the new performance-gauging mechanism, but they consider Pulse to be much more than just a digital capability.

“It’s a cultural shift to look at data and metrics in a more outcome-based way” on a regular basis — as well as an application to visualize and display data to make sense of various Pentagon components’ maturation, according to Little. “It’s also a way for our teams to come together and look at how we’re doing on the performance of not only the strategic priorities laid out in the National Defense Strategy, but how do we understand just the overall health of the” DOD, he said.

The tool is meant to hone in on a wide range of metrics across the department’s portfolios, like customer wait times at military depots, audit-aligned progress to be made, or contract acquisition assessments.

Beyond the CDAO, other Defense Department components, including the policy hub and performance improvement office, supported the making of Pulse as both a platform and concept.

Jett, who helps lead the Pulse project within the CDAO, noted that officials leveraged established DOD governance structures in the development of the novel tool. 

“We’re not trying to create new processes or new workflows in the department. We’re leveraging those that already exist and introducing data analytics into those conversations to derive better outcomes from those meetings that are already taking place,” Jett said.

Creating a common schema

The CDAO officials each described a number of elements to help evoke what Pulse looks like to end users.  

“We have the different categories of priorities that the secretary and we’re working on,” which involves wireframes that can be iterated to visualize what officials would like to see, Little noted.

Areas where there has been progress, and those where there’s room for more, are color-coded. Officials can then drill down into deeper metrics and data layers to observe potentially helpful nuances. “So you might see that this area is red, and then you can click down into the actual metrics and the data itself to be able to see where we’re having the issue,” Little noted.

Information is also displayed in pie charts, heat maps and via other visualization options, and data comes from logistics, personnel, maintenance supply and financial systems, as well as other sources that span the Pentagon and military. 

DOD’s Advana tool is recognized as an enabler for Pulse, in that it is the channel through which officials conduct underpinning data modeling.

“Let’s use the metric ‘time-to-hire,” Little said. Officials will set a definition and standards for the metric and pinpoint all the data sources associated with it. “We then go to those databases, and we automatically pull the data into Advana,” Little said, to facilitate modeling and visualization techniques. 

To Jett, “there are so many different” metrics for Pulse, currently. Many are related to DOD’s installations for climate change, supply chain resiliency and around cultivating a talented workforce. 

“From a Pulse perspective, and what we’re doing within the CDAO is we’re creating that sort of that common schema for metrics, so that it doesn’t matter what level the metrics are elevating to. We have the flexibility as those priorities change, or as the audience changes, to all reach from the same pool of data and analytics to be able to customize what exactly it is and what level of importance of analytics, depending on the audience,” she said.

Historically, Pentagon officials would have to resort to spending “many, many man-hours” in Powerpoint to review different elements of the department’s performance, Little also said. Now, though, in his view the CDAO is helping components harness technology and data “in a way of scale and automation that just wasn’t there before.”

At the beginning of producing Pulse, “almost about 70% of our metrics were more activity-based,” he added, noting, “we’ve actually shifted that to be 70% output-based metrics. So, we were really trying to shift from looking at this only from a compliance lens, more to an outcome lens.” 

Where it’s headed

“Now that we’ve provided performance goals and measures, we’re setting up the capabilities, such as Pulse. Our next step is to implement all those tools across the department,” Hicks confirmed during her recent speech.

In the interview, both Little and Jett referred to growing momentum within and beyond the walls of the Pentagon that could accelerate that.

“There’s a lot of excitement at varying echelons of leadership” at DOD, according to Jett. 

“I get calls from the chief data officers and the performance leaders in the military. They’re like, ‘We want to support this, and we want to integrate.’ So it’s something that I think people have been looking forward to for a long time, and we’re kind of now beginning to provide that foundation to have cross-functional and cross-department conversations about big, hard, complex issues that we haven’t been able to have before,” she said.

Next, she and the CDAO’s Pulse team will focus on the operationalization of their evolving tool, and pushing the broader cultural movement to revamp metrics. While much of the work so far has concentrated on efforts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, near-term engagements could include what officials deemed “data-lucrative” organizations, like the Defense Logistics Agency.

“We’re creating a picture that right now the use case has been around OSD — but it’s expanding into the [military departments], the [combatant commands] and the Joint Staff over the next year or so. I would say that is probably where we’re headed,” Jett said.

Looking to the future, Little also noted that the overarching goal for the CDAO and Hicks, is to institutionalize Pulse as a capability. The notion is that DOD’s strategic priorities may change and adjust down the line, but the guiding structure of Pulse will remain.

“No one’s going to argue with wanting to have a capability that allows them to see how we’re doing in terms of priorities and operational health. Our job is to be able to make the tools available to make this as easy as possible,” Little said.

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Multiple Defense Department components recently merged together to form the CDAO and ultimately help accelerate the adoption and widespread integration of data- and AI-driven capabilities across the enterprise. As they hash out their path forward as one unit, officials involved are also jointly applying what their teams learned deploying technologies to address national security challenges over the last few years — namely in the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia-Ukraine conflict — to help the government better prepare for future catastrophes.

“At the CDAO, I think we have a real opportunity to be able to support our warfighters in crises and we’re really uniquely positioned to do that. We have the ability to connect data dots across the department, whether that’s looking at logistics, financials, personnel operations or intelligence,” Deputy CDAO for Enterprise Capabilities Greg Little said last week.

Little joined Deputy CDAO for Warfighter Support Joe Larson, Deputy CDAO for Digital Services Katie Olson and TRANSCOM Operational Delivery Team Lead Jeff Clark for a virtual panel during DOD’s annual digital and AI symposium. 

“I think one of the important lessons that I learned in undertaking crises and deploying teams in times of crisis is not to sacrifice user-design, and sometimes you have to go slow in order to go fast,” Olson noted during the discussion.

Olson served as the Defense Digital Sevice’s acting director before the office was restructured under the CDAO. During that time and early into the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the State Department asked DDS to very quickly identify two decades’ worth of Afghan allies who had worked for America, digitize that information and make it available to State to process visas of those requesting asylum status. 

Government tech officials building tools to support rapidly shifting and tense situations should be deliberate about “putting the users first” and completely thinking through the core of what must be solved, Olson said.

“So in that instance, what we did is we said, ‘OK, who is the single source of truth for whether or not someone worked for us in Afghanistan?’ Well, it’s the employers. It’s the people that the U.S. government contracted with to do work for us in Afghanistan. So, what if we found a way for the employers to be the people providing verification?” Olson explained. “We reached out to companies that we’ve contracted with in Afghanistan, and we built a portal so that as people applied to the State Department would automatically ping employers who had employed our Afghan allies and partners over the past 20 years.”

Among other topics, TRANSCOM’s Clark also highlighted how data access, quality and processes are typically compromised during fast-moving crises. 

During the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, his team supported the evacuation of 124,000 people from the Middle Eastern nation in 70 days. To do so, Clark noted, officials involved “made shortcuts into the underlying systems to track that information, so the data was in fact slower than the operation was going on.” He’d get calls notifying him that “fixes” were made to tracking processes at certain times just to move people safely, which “led to shortcomings of the data on the other side.”

Clark mentioned other examples where officials “did the right thing to expedite the process,” but ultimately introduced data quality-related issues that caused the misinterpretation of real events happening on the ground — including one that recently left a four-star general disoriented over complex flight patterns. 

“That’s all informed the Ukraine process,” he noted. 

The Pentagon officials agreed that looking forward, the DOD must be strategic about implementing a more robust data-centered infrastructure that it can turn to for immediate interoperability and insights right when any sort of crises occur, as opposed to in their aftermath.

“We’re working on a federated data catalog to be able to just understand where our data is, what the meaning of that data is and what is the type of data that we have that will be able to answer the type of question,” Little noted. 

Though he didn’t provide many details, Little said the CDAO is also partnering with companies to pinpoint better application programming interface capabilities to enable deeper data-sharing across new and legacy architectures — and, separately producing an ontology associated with data quality. 

“We need to have the right infrastructure and tooling in the first place, so that in times of crisis we’re not getting sloppy with the data that we’re collecting and managing and using, but we’re feeding clean data into usable formats that are easily consumed and so that we can get the job done that we need to — whether that’s rectifying flight manifests or ensuring the quality of the vaccine data, for example,” Olson said. 

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This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.

“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson.

New hires include: 

• Chief Digital and AI Officer – Craig Martell
• Deputy CDAO – Margaret Palmieri
• DCDAO for Acquisition – Sharothi Pikar
• DCDAO for Policy, Strategy and Governance – Clark Cully
• DCDAO for Enterprise Platforms and Business Optimization – Greg Little
• DCDAO for Algorithmic Warfare – Joe Larson
• DCDAO for Digital Services – Katie (Olson) Savage
• Chief Operating Officer – Dan Folliard
• Chief Technology Officer – Bill Streilein
• Chief of AI Assurance – Jane Pinelis

Diane Staheli was also recently tapped to lead the CDAO’s Responsible AI (RAI) Division.

Several of these officials have already made waves within DOD, including founder and former director of the Navy’s digital warfare office Margaret Palmieri, and Joe Larson, who previously served as deputy chief for the Pentagon’s Project Maven.

In these new roles at the CDAO, the officials will help steer the Pentagon’s strategy development and policy formulation for associated solutions; enable data access and AI adoption within appropriate institutional processes; establish a strong digital infrastructure and services to support military and department components’ AI- and digital-driven deployments, and more.

The CDAO is targeting October 1 for the full administrative alignment of personnel and resources, the spokesperson told FedScoop.

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