The Defense Department made a lot of buzz around hiring Martell in early 2022, when he opted to resign from his role as head of machine learning for Silicon Valley rideshare company Lyft to take the helm as the CDAO’s first chief.

According to several current and former DOD officials who spoke to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity, Martell’s planned exit from the CDAO is “imminent” — and he and the rest of the leadership team are currently getting set for a period of transition.  

A CDAO spokesperson later told DefenseScoop that Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Dr. Radha Plumb will serve as the office’s new permanent chief.

Four predecessor organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were combined to form the CDAO, which was announced in late 2021 and reached full operating capability in 2022.

The office falls under the direct purview of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who ultimately steered its launch to centralize oversight and expedite the adoption and implementation of the department’s data and AI initiatives.

On the heels of a long and deliberate hiring process, Martell was tapped to lead the CDAO in April 2022. 

Beyond his experience in executive roles at Lyft, Martell also previously held machine learning and AI positions at Dropbox and Linkedin and as a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specializing in natural language processing.

Though his tenure leading the CDAO did not unfold without some controversy, Martell also helped the organization make significant progress in its earliest years — including by attempting to deepen U.S. tech ties with international partners, develop the DOD’s latest AI and data adoption guidance, and produce the department’s first minimum viable capability for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

On top of those and other pursuits, Martell also spent a lot of time working to establish an overarching model to broadly guide the office’s approach to AI priorities and operations moving forward, which he coined as the CDAO’s “hierarchy of needs.”

“In order to deliver analytical and AI capabilities, we really have to get our data right. So, the major wins that we have delivered to the Department of Defense involve thinking about data as a product in a database. And I think it’s important not to automatically jump to the top of the hierarchy to see value. If we only deliver AI, then what we’ll be delivering is a stovepipe solution. Seriously if we only deliver AI — and the data is not ready, and the talent isn’t ready yet, and the governance isn’t ready and the staffing isn’t ready — then what does that mean? We will continue to deliver stovepipe solutions,” Martell told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable in February.

In a statement provided to DefenseScoop Thursday morning, Martell said: “The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Dr. Kathleen Hicks, brought me on board two years ago to stand up the CDAO. We agreed early on that to ‘stand up’ meant developing a strategy for the organization and the DoD as a whole, developing the right roadmaps to deliver on that strategy, and creating the right organizational structure to support those roadmaps. With the release of the Department’s Data, Analytics, and AI Strategy in November 2023, the roadmap work that each of the CDAO Directorates have done, and the organizational changes we have put in place over the last few years, these were achieved. We brought together four distinct organizations into one, and we accomplished so much in such a short time. I’m incredibly proud of the team that made this happen.”

Plumb “has been right alongside me for the past year at many key senior leader meetings and working groups, and she will seamlessly step into the role,” Martell added.

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“This is a self-initiated evaluation that the DOD [Office of Inspector General] identified as part of our ongoing series of oversight projects on DOD’s implementation of artificial intelligence,” Pentagon OIG spokeswoman Mollie Halpern told DefenseScoop this week. 

Employees from four legacy organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were repositioned to collectively form the new CDAO in late 2021. In a memo announcing its launch, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks wrote that the move was needed to synchronize, integrate and strengthen data, AI and associated digital solutions across all department and military components.

The office’s first-ever chief, Craig Martell, left his post as Lyft’s head of machine learning in 2022 to steer CDAO, which reached full operating capability that year.

Some of its notable early outputs since then include the online “Tradewind Solution Marketplace,” the production of the Pentagon’s latest Data, Analytics, and AI Adoption Strategy, and the military’s highly anticipated minimum viable capability for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

That progress, however, has not come without some controversy.   

For instance, questions continue to swirl about the office’s role as a new portfolio owner for what was formerly known as Project Maven — now Maven — the evolving, computer vision work within the Defense Department. A recent Government Accountability Office report also found that the CDAO must complete “the additional steps necessary to fully define and identify DOD’s AI workforce.”

Separately, in May 2023, DefenseScoop obtained slides that suggested an internal CDAO review had revealed that certain personnel were deeply dissatisfied with how senior leaders were running the office. 

“We are trying very hard to make pretty large mind-shift changes. As we make these mind-shift changes, it will create some discomfort,” Martell told DefenseScoop when asked about that during a media roundtable at the Advantage summit last month. 

In their announcement about the unfolding evaluation, Defense Department OIG officials wrote that the overarching objective “is to assess the effectiveness of the [CDAO’s] development of [AI] strategy and policy for the DOD, and the CDAO’s acquisition and development of AI products and services.”

They also confirmed that those aims may be revised based on learnings as the evaluation is conducted.

“To protect the integrity of the evaluation process, we do not preemptively release any findings before the evaluation is complete. We have no timeline for results as the length of the investigation depends on many variables,” Halpern said. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Wednesday, a CDAO spokesperson noted that the office routinely works with the Pentagon’s OIG on evaluations of their core processes and capabilities. 

“As a new organization, only about two years in existence, we are particularly interested in how we can continually improve and make our efforts more effective and efficient. We welcome this evaluation and look forward to their recommendations,” the spokesperson said.

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“It’s this agile process that we’re trying really hard to bring to the [Defense Department], which is: how do I get something in front of the warfighter quickly, but do it in such a way that we can sustain it and make it grow and make it change as it needs to be changed,” CDAO’s chief Craig Martell told reporters Thursday. 

Broadly, CJADC2 refers to the Pentagon’s evolving construct to achieve next-generation command and control — and ultimately connect and coordinate all military personnel and assets across all warfighting domains via one network to ensure competitive advantages in future conflicts. 

Citing wide-ranging security precautions, senior officials have been pretty discreet about how all the intricate elements needed for CJADC2 are coming to fruition across the services. However, each of the department’s major components has its own responsibilities to enable it, including the CDAO. 

In particular, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the data and AI office in 2022 with relaunching and reinvigorating the Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series as a means to help enable the full realization of the complex concept. In the summer of 2023, Hicks further directed the CDAO to deliver a minimum viable capability for CJADC2 through GIDE by the end of that year.

“The minimum viable capability for CJADC2 is real and ready now. It’s low latency and extremely reliable,” Hicks announced during her keynote Wednesday at the CDAO’s Advantage Defense and Data Symposium. 

“For security reasons, I can’t say where or what that capability is for, but I can tell you it was no easy task — especially in six months. But with a lot of hard work across many teams — pairing operators across multiple commands with engineers from DOD and industry — they delivered, on time and on target, combining software applications, live data integration, real-world networks, new cross-domain operational concepts, and warfighters around the world to provide even better decision advantage for DOD and our military commanders,” Hicks said.

On the final day of last week’s summit, senior CDAO officials hosted a media briefing during which they shed more light on features of this new minimum viable capability and how they plan to advance it in the near term. 

“Our job is to make the data flow to the right people at the right time so that particular commanders can build the tools that they need,” Martell said.

“My goal is to have this ‘data mesh’ in place — with the right data, at the right place, for the right person. How do I drive that forward? Since I work in the Pentagon, I find the right use cases that are going to bring the most value as quickly as possible. The MVC is the set of use cases that we tackled first. It’s not all of them by a longshot,” he explained.

Martell and his colleagues participating in the media briefing declined to discuss specific applications of the new capability or point to locations or regions where it may currently be in use.

“We really focused for this first year on global integration and the ability of the U.S. combatant commands and the joint staff to be able to see globally and act globally to create those deterrent effects — and that capability is what we really delivered via this new minimum viable capability,” said Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, the CDAO’s GIDE mission commander.

“I think it’s clear, even in the last couple weeks, that we live in an increasingly complex strategic environment — whether it’s the actions that we see in [Indo-Pacific Command], whether it’s actions that we see in the cyber domain, whether it’s actions that we see and rumors and things happening in the space domain — we need to be able to understand what’s going on across all domains. At the same time, we need to be able to understand what’s going on by our potential competitors or adversaries, not just regionally, but globally,” Strohmeyer noted.

Notably, he acknowledged that — because the federal government is currently operating under a continuing resolution — his team is “not able to deliver [the MVC] at the level of the scope and scale” that they’d like, at the moment.

“But it is being used right now with U.S. combatant commands and the Joint Staff in current real-world operations,” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop during the briefing. 

The iterative, to-be-improved-upon capability will also be unleashed at the tactical level with a military service for the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 4 ‘in-the-dirt’ experiments, which are unfolding Feb. 23-March 20.

“That’s a key partnership that GIDE is going to have, where we’re really hoping to learn — at the joint level — what the services need and what data can be provided, so that as we continue to bring together combined joint all-domain command and control, that ‘joint’ aspect is even better informed by both service requirements and service data that they’ve got,” Strohmeyer said.

“[This] should show that the department is making a paradigm shift into changes at scale and at speed that is rivaling any potential competitor that we could have,” he added.

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In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Wednesday, a CDAO spokesperson confirmed for the first time publicly that Pikar “has been hand-selected by the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Hon. Radha Plumb to serve as her Senior Advisor and lead a strategic review of [Department of Defense-wide] acquisition policy and framework gaps.” 

“[Pikar’s] new role with A&S begins tomorrow, Feb. 1,” the spokesperson said.

A Pentagon spokesperson later suggested that Pikar wasn’t tapped to lead an acquisition review.

“The CDAO submitted a statement that did not accurately describe the role in which Ms. Pikar will transition to at A&S. While the details of her role and portfolio will evolve in the coming months, she was hired to serve as a senior advisor where she will support strategic initiatives identified by DUSD Plumb,” Cmdr. Tim Gorman told DefenseScoop in an email.

The Pentagon’s CDAO chief Craig Martell and his team have identified Bonnie Evangelista, a procurement expert and the office’s Tradewinds execution lead, to serve as the acting DCDAO for acquisitions upon Pikar’s departure.

“In the coming weeks, we will actively engage in the search for [Pikar’s] successor for the Acquisition Directorate. Our commitment is to identify a candidate who possesses the right blend of skills, experience, and leadership qualities to seamlessly continue the essential work that has been initiated,” the CDAO spokesperson said.

“We understand the significance of this transition and its impact on our mission. Our goal is to ensure a smooth and effective handover, minimizing disruptions and maintaining the positive momentum we have built together,” they added — also noting that Evangelista’s “work on Tradewinds has set a foundation for acquisition innovation in the DOD.”

A member of the Senior Executive Service (SES), Pikar was among nearly a dozen leaders who joined the CDAO around the time it achieved full operating capability in the summer of 2022. 

Since then, she’s overseen all the nascent office’s procurement of data, analytics, and AI-related capabilities. She also operated as the “decision and approval authority for all CDAO research, development, and acquisition activities,” according to her official bio.

“Over the last five years, Sharothi served as the inaugural acquisition executive for the U.S. Cyber Command and then the same for CDAO. In CDAO, [Pikar] built an incredible acquisition team, established essential program oversight, provided acquisition guidance and direction on high impact programs, increased transparency, and partnerships with industry, and executed more agile and rapid contracting approaches,” the spokesperson said.

Pikar’s departure follows a slew of other CDAO deputies who opted to leave in recent months, including digital services guru Katie Savage and algorithmic warfare expert Joe Larson.

Her move comes as the office’s leaders prepare to host a massive AI summit next month and continue to work to bolster workplace morale after an internal review revealed that employees are deeply dissatisfied with how the CDAO is being run.

In response to DefenseScoop’s questions, the CDAO spokesperson also stated that upon Pikar’s exit, the office now “has three SES billets that are currently vacant, which we are looking to fill soon.”  

That means Martell and Deputy CDAO Margaret Palmieri are currently the only two officials within the hub with SES status.

“We continue to focus on the essential work in the CDAO to ensure we deliver vital capabilities to the joint force,” the spokesperson said. 

Updated on Feb. 6, 2024, at 5:35 PM: This story has been updated to include comment from Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Tim Gorman, who said in a Feb. 6 email that a CDAO statement provided to DefenseScoop inaccurately described the role that Sharothi Pikar is transitioning to in the A&S office.

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The 2023 Department of Defense Data, Analytics, and AI Adoption Strategy was produced by the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) and unveiled by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks at a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.

“Increasingly over the last dozen years, advances in machine learning have heralded and accelerated new generations of AI breakthroughs — with much of the innovation happening outside of the DOD and government. And so our task in DOD is to adopt these innovations wherever they can add the most military value,” she told reporters.

Senior CDAO officials, including its chief Craig Martell, have been teasing this newly launched strategy — which was slated for publication by the end of the summer — repeatedly in recent months. 

It follows two foundational guiding documents meant to drive AI use across the DOD. The first enterprise-wide AI strategy was launched in 2018, and Pentagon officials disseminated the first revised version in 2021.

This new 26-page AI adoption strategy “not only builds on DOD’s prior AI and data strategies — but also includes updates to account for recent industry advances in federated environments, decentralized data management, generative AI and more,” Hicks said.  

She confirmed the department’s hope that this updated guidance will help all components and services speedily realize critical unfolding AI-aligned efforts, including those related to Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the new Replicator initiative, which aims to counter China by fielding thousands of autonomous systems in multiple domains within the next 2 years.

The strategy includes sections spotlighting new key outcomes the department is eyeing to enable with AI, the associated goals officials will pursue and the high-priority areas where they plan to fully embrace these rapidly evolving technologies. Specific goals listed involve removing policy barriers, investing in interoperable and federated infrastructure, improving data management and growing AI talent, among others. 

“The state of AI in DOD is not a short story, nor is it static. We must keep doing more — safely and swiftly — given the nature of strategic competition with the [People’s Republic of China], our pacing challenge. At the same time, we benefit from a national position of strength. And our own uses grow stronger every day, and we will be keeping up the momentum ensuring we make the best possible use of AI technology responsibly and at speed,” Hicks said.

During a call with reporters following Hicks’ briefing, Martell also echoed this intention of Pentagon leadership to keep a flexible and fluid approach when it comes to unleashing AI and machine learning for the military in the coming years. 

“Technologies evolve. Things are going to change next week, next year, next decade — and what wins today might not win tomorrow. Rather than identify a handful of AI-enabled warfighting capabilities that will beat our adversaries, our strategy outlines the approach to strengthening the organizational environment within which people can continuously deploy data analytics capabilities for enduring decision advantage,” Martell explained.

He and other officials on the call told reporters that the CDAO team is crafting new “iterative” implementation guidance that will accompany the strategy. They expect to release it in the next few months. 

That plan will look a bit different from traditional implementation guides, Martell said, because “each of the services have wildly different needs, they’re at wildly different points in their journey and they have wildly different infrastructure.” 

Notably, this refreshed strategy also comes as DOD leadership is heeding warnings from top technology and national security experts about the dire need for the U.S. military to be “AI-ready” by 2025.

During the Pentagon press briefing, Hicks told DefenseScoop that the 2023 AI adoption strategy marks “a key piece of how we get there.”

Another major contributing element to DOD becoming AI-ready to match its adversaries in that time frame, in her view, is on-time congressional appropriations and predictable resourcing to advance ongoing work.

“Absent any predictability in our funding streams, it’s very hard for us to be able to project [DOD’s AI readiness] with accuracy,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.

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“I would say that the way that we’re trying to overcome paralysis is by analysis of the risk — and by being an organization that is setting the culture to experiment,” Jinyoung Englund, CDAO’s chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare, said at the Google Public Sector Forum hosted by Scoop News Group. 

Personnel from four legacy Defense Department components — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were realigned to form the CDAO in late 2021. Englund previously held leadership roles across DDS, including as its acting director, before she was tapped to serve as the CDAO’s first-ever chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare.

That office reached full operating capability in 2022, the same year that Lyft’s former head of machine learning Craig Martell departed from his post at the ride-sharing service to lead it.

“[Martell] served in industry — and he’s not afraid to take risks. Why? Because as a scientist, he knows that risk can be measured and managed. And so the way that we as an organization within DOD are trying to accelerate adoption is by spreading a culture of learning by doing,” Englund said at the conference.

Offering a few examples, she pointed to Task Force Lima, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks recently formed under the CDAO to expedite the U.S. military’s grasp and deployment of emerging generative AI capabilities. That field essentially involves large language models that generate software code and media content based on human prompts. 

“Task Force Lima is led by mostly active-duty military, whose sole focus is to take the user-centered design and a human-centric approach to identifying what are the ways that generative AI can best assist our service members and our military counterparts in terms of how we implement that new technology within our bureaucracy,” Englund said.

“Already we’ve collected over 200 use cases” associated with the effort, she added, noting that the unit recently released a request for information to gain feedback regarding novel ways in which generative AI could be hacked, and the ways in which products can be built to deliver services to free service members from rote work.

The CDAO’s unfolding Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) mark another area where the office is “moving forward and spreading this culture of learning by doing,” she noted.

Englund explained that through this series of exercises — the fourth of which is currently being conducted — the CDAO partners with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get nascent technologies in the hands of warfighters to see “how they actually work in theater”— and determine if associated policies or requirements need to be rewritten to enable their use. 

In her view, the CDAO is in a unique position where it has the capacity to prototype new technologies, as well as rulemaking and acquisition authorities. 

“Let’s just be frank: there’s risk everywhere. Whether you’re a private sector business or a government agency, there’s risk. And risk can be and should be measured and managed. And if you can figure out a framework for doing that, then it really should not be so scary adopting the technology,” Englund said.

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Defense Department leaders launched Task Force Lima within the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s (CDAO) Algorithmic Warfare Directorate back in August to accelerate the enterprise’s understanding, assessment and deployment of generative AI. That nascent, buzzy realm broadly encompasses technology associated with large language models that produce (convincing but not always correct) software code and media based on prompts. And experts warn it’s rife with promising opportunities and serious challenges that are far from fully realized. 

In a recent interview, Navy Capt. M. Xavier Lugo, the CDAO’s new Task Force Lima mission commander, briefed DefenseScoop about how this first industry day and the other in-the-works events and elements fit into his team’s overarching, ambitious vision to rapidly navigate the uncertain and transformative power generative AI presents across the defense landscape, and to ultimately support the department’s ethical adoption of the tech.

“The mission from a task force perspective is really to develop, evaluate, recommend and monitor generative AI capabilities for the whole DOD and to responsibly ensure that the department capitalizes on their mission impact while integrating these technologies at scale. That sounds like a lot. So, what we did is we broke it into phases, with the first phase being learning everything that’s out there as much as we can,” Lugo explained. 

Lugo is a 28-year Navy officer with extensive experience in the Supply Corps. A mechanical engineer by degree, he’s been a coder since high school and is also an operations research graduate from the Naval Postgraduate School. In his previous assignment, he worked to modernize logistics-aligned information technologies for the entire Navy.

“I am very familiar with how [AI technology] actually works, and how it utilizes data,” he told DefenseScoop.

In his current capacity leading the new task force, Lugo meets with DOD’s Chief Digital and AI Officer Craig Martell very frequently. He and Martell — the former head of machine learning at Lyft — have “some geek sessions here and there” too, Lugo noted. They “don’t always agree on some of the theoretical stuff,” he added. 

But to both, encouraging diverse viewpoints in tech-driving pursuits is a good thing.

“From our perspective, because the use cases are military-related and because the workflows are all based on operational pieces, you do want military officers involved at some level. I have been lucky that I was involved from the sense of being the commander of it. But we bring that practical flavor to the research and technical pieces of AI. And also, just to be clear, CDAO as a whole is not a research entity. We’re not here to build models. We’re here to operationalize them. And that’s where a task force like Task Force Lima and the military officers in this command come in: We operationalize this technology,” Lugo told DefenseScoop.

DOD is a sprawling, distributed enterprise — “so getting to all the generative AI efforts out there is not an easy task,” the task force chief also noted.

So far though, his team has had “very good collaboration” from the services, combatant commands, and all DOD agencies. They are beginning to hone in on the categories where large language models, specifically as part of the generative AI-capable tools, are being considered for performance across the department.

Lugo’s team also has a short-term task to populate interim guidance on generative AI for the Pentagon.

“That has also been sort of coordinated. What I mean with ‘sort of’ is that it’s not not being coordinated, but that in parallel all the services and federal agencies have also provided guidance. So, what we did was, we’ve taken all of those multiple guidances and also included what we have learned so far, and we’re going to populate that soon. That’s one of the first steps so that everybody knows what their ‘left and right limits’ are with this technology, and so that we can all be at least in the same field as to what we are thinking of utilizing the tech,” Lugo said.

Task Force Lima, he added, has multiple “touch points” to carry out its mission.

“We have a battle rhythm of weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings,” he said.

And earlier this month, the cadre hosted its first government-only kickoff to engage internal stakeholders on their in-the-making plans and approach. Between 200 and 300 officials attended virtually and in person.

That “gives you a scale of the level of interest — and every single service was represented, plus the Coast Guard, plus multiple agencies, all the [Principal Staff Assistants]. I mean, it was very well covered from the perspective of which agencies and personnel were in it,” Lugo noted.

The team also recently released a new request for information via which it has invited the public to help the DOD “further understand and explore the risks and benefits of development, acquisition, and integration” of generative AI. 

Responses to that RFI are due by Oct. 8. 

“That is based on what we’ve learned so far. There are some gaps that we have noticed in the technology. And what that challenge is about is to tell [industry and academia] we are interested: ‘You’ve done a great job on the development and on the delivery of this technology but there’s some pieces that we need some help from you, because if you fix these gaps, we have more potential use of this technology,’” Lugo explained.

One example of such gaps is referred to as “hallucinations” — a phenomenon where a large language model essentially makes up untrue information or false facts that aren’t rooted in actual real data or events.

“So, how do we get around that? How do we measure it? How do we protect against it? What are some solutions out there — whether it is a single solution from a model per se, or whether it is a system with a system solution, or whether it is a mitigation process? Any of those or all of those, right, for that just one challenge. Come in and tell us your ideas on how we’re going to do that,” Lugo said.

Potential collaborators are learning more about this and other issues that need addressing at the industry day unfolding Wednesday. The task force will accept white papers — and then ultimately aim to work with partners through its Tradewinds initiative.

“While building the plane after we’re flying it — this is one of those pieces that has to be built over,” Lugo said.

Ultimately, Task Force Lima is deeply involved in both the Pentagon’s actual research and deployment of large language models, and in informing its creation of guidance, frameworks, workflows and policies to govern their evolving use.  

While publicly accessible models made by Open AI, Google, Microsoft and others already exist, the Pentagon has urged components not to enter government information into them for reasons it says are associated with operational security.

“We are not building at this moment in time and we have not decided whether we’re going to build DOD-specific models. However, what is happening is that models that are already built are being utilized in a containerized fashion — so disconnected from the wild, if you want to put it that way,” Lugo noted.

Multiple times in the interview, he emphasized that there are still many unknowns regarding if, in what ways, and for what purposes generative AI might be eventually deployed at scale by the military and DOD.

“Our mind is not necessarily made up yet — without doing the experimentation — as to whether we’re going to go ahead and say, ‘Yes, for sure, we’re going to implement this technology.’ That’s exactly where we are right now and that’s part of the reason we were stood up. This is new, this is out there with a lot of emphasis from industry — and so, how should we and how can we utilize this technology? Those are the two main questions,” Lugo said.

Ambitiously, Task Force Lima’s initial timeline to figure that out is only 18 months.

“Now, let me caveat that the reason we have a short timeline is because of the immediate nature of the technology,” Lugo noted.

Still, before his team stands down after that year-and-a-half passes, the plan is to provide a transition strategy with deliverables including a list of all the players and assets needed to carry on this generative AI-driving work. 

“This is extremely, extremely new technology — and we’ve got to have the humans on top of it all the time,” Lugo told DefenseScoop.

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The CDAO delegation visited those partners between Aug. 20 and 25 — notably in the week after President Biden hosted leaders from Japan and South Korea at Camp David for a summit where the countries agreed to work together on missile defense and military technology development.

In responses to questions via email on Thursday, a CDAO spokesperson would not comment on whether Martell and his team met with some of the same officials that attended the president’s summit. Still, the office did share new details regarding who the CDAO officials met with abroad, and some of the key topics they deliberated on in those engagements. 

“These were high-level introductory meetings intended to strengthen the bilateral relationship between CDAO and Dr. Martell’s counterparts in each country,” the spokesperson wrote. 

No formal agreements were signed as a result of the meetings, and the official did not confirm any next steps between the international partners. 

“They discussed responsible AI, data management, and organizational culture, and talent management supporting data, analytics, and AI in defense. Dialogue also included emerging data and analytics needs, and ways to strengthen ties and collaboration bilaterally and multilaterally,” the spokesperson said.

In Singapore, Martell met with various senior leaders from the Ministry of Defence, according to the CDAO official — “including Permanent Secretary (Defence Development) Mr. Melvyn Ong, Deputy Secretary (Technology) Mr. Chad-Son Ng, Chief Defence Scientist Mr. Peng Yam Tan, and Chief Executive of the Defence Science and Technology Agency Mr. Mervyn Tan.”

Martell also engaged with experts from Singapore’s Defence Technology Community, the Defense Science and Technology Agency, the Counter-Terrorism Information Facility, and Smart Nation Digital Government Office.

In Korea, Martell and his team attended a “Defense Data AI Cooperation Meeting” and connected directly with leadership and broader teams from the ROK Ministry of National Defense Planning and Coordination Office, the Data Policy Division, the Defense Data Analysis Center, and the Defense AI Center Promotion Team. 

“While in Seoul, he also visited the United States Forces Korea,” the CDAO spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

In Tokyo, Martell met with “key interlocutors focusing on data and AI in the Japanese Ministry of Defense Internal Bureau,” they further noted. 

With those officials — including Japan’s Chief Information Officer, Deputy CIO and Joint Staff — the CDAO discussed areas of future data and AI-related collaboration. 

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Called Task Force Lima, the new organization will be led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s (CDAO) Algorithmic Warfare Directorate and will “assess, synchronize, and employ” generative AI technologies throughout the Pentagon, according to a DOD press release.

A key objective for Task Force Lima will be to minimize redundancy in its generative AI efforts across the Pentagon while mitigating potential risks the technology may pose.

“The establishment of Task Force Lima underlines the Department of Defense’s unwavering commitment to leading the charge in AI innovation,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, who directed the organization’s creation, said in a statement. “As we navigate the transformative power of generative AI, our focus remains steadfast on ensuring national security, minimizing risks, and responsibly integrating these technologies. The future of defense is not just about adopting cutting-edge technologies, but doing so with foresight, responsibility, and a deep understanding of the broader implications for our nation.”

Generative AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence that generates content — such as text, audio, code, images, videos and other types of media — based on prompts and data they are trained on.

While viral generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have gone viral in 2023, the Defense Department has been cautious about the viability of commercially available technology that has been known to “hallucinate” and provide inaccurate information.

“The DoD has an imperative to responsibly pursue the adoption of generative AI models while identifying proper protective measures and mitigating national security risks that may result from issues such as poorly managed training data,” Pentagon CDAO Craig Martell said in a statement. “We must also consider the extent to which our adversaries will employ this technology and seek to disrupt our own use of AI-based solutions.”

According to an Aug. 10 memo from Hicks, some of the organization’s goals will be to identify ongoing efforts related to generative AI at the Pentagon; analyze potential mission areas, workflows and use cases for large language models and generative AI; support the development of and oversee the integration of the technology throughout the department; recommend a long-term government plan for generative AI; and many others.

The memo also lists immediate and future deliverables Task Force Lima will be responsible for — from interim guidance to the department on “current risks, challenges, and best practices for the use of [large language models] and generative AI” that is due within 45 days of the memo’s publication to a Pentagon-wide environment dedicated to rapid large language model and generative AI and iteration scheduled for fiscal 2024.

Task Force Lima will be responsible for providing guidance and recommendations to policy-making bodies related to generative AI, according to Hicks’ memo. The organization will report its lessons learned to the Defense Department’s Responsible AI Working Council, it stated.

“These capabilities unlock new opportunities, just as they pose significant new risks,” Hicks said in the memo. “The DoD faces an imperative to explore the use of this technology and the potential of these models’ scale, speed, and interactive capabilities to improve the Department’s mission effectiveness while simultaneously identifying proper protection measures and mitigating a variety of related risks.”

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GIDE events are designed to test how artificial intelligence and other capabilities can enable better data integration across the U.S. military as the Pentagon pursues its Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept to better link its many sensors, shooters and networks.

The latest iteration of the wargames, which began June 5, is the sixth so far in a series that began a couple years ago. The first four were led by U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, but the Pentagon’s new Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) has since taken charge of the effort in partnership with the Joint Staff.

Discussing a previous GIDE exercise at a Defense Writers Group meeting in 2021, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of Northcom and NORAD, told reporters: “It’s a global scenario about a competitor or a potential adversary … that actually had another peer competitor try to take advantage of the [simulated] ongoing crisis situation. So we looked across the globe — let your mind run wild on who the peers are out there — that would provide us a scenario that would challenge us from a global perspective and all-domain perspective.”

The Pentagon considers China and Russia to be its only peer or near-peer competitors.

“What we were looking to do was show the incredible value of information and how information can be used today. Especially if we … share that data from all domains — from undersea, space, cyberspace, air, land, ground, you name it — and share it through machine learning, artificial intelligence as well to make this data and information more readily available in a timely manner to produce decision space for decision-makers,” VanHerck said at the time.

The fifth global information dominance exercise, GIDE V, was conducted earlier this year under the leadership of the Chief Digital and AI Office. A total of four such experiments were slated to take place in 2023.

“We are already learning how we can evolve the systems, capabilities, and our data to better enable Joint Force C2 and decision-making. We plan to share experiment outputs and progression in experiment development as we move through the four GIDE iterations this year,” mission commander Col. Matthew Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop while GIDE V was ongoing.

“Through increasingly complex demonstrations throughout the progression of the 2023 GIDE series, events will focus on scaled combatant command collaboration and machine-supported joint force kill chains through both commercial and government-provided tools and systems.  They will leverage cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning to integrate data from military sources and deliver information to warfighters and senior leaders so they can make better and faster decisions than our adversaries in times of conflict,” he said.

For GIDE VI, participants are convening in-person and virtually from the Pentagon and field offices across multiple combatant commands, according to a DOD release. The U.S. military is also looking to integrate foreign forces into these initiatives.

“Strengthening industry integration and collaboration domestically, and with our allies and partners abroad, we aim to showcase the transformative power of data, analytics, and AI for our warfighters,” CDAO chief Craig Martell said in a statement.

Notably, the latest experiment, which is scheduled to conclude July 26, will last nearly two months, whereas previous iterations have lasted just a few days.

“GIDE 6 will leverage our insights from GIDE 5 metrics to further test our capabilities by replicating real-world operational scenarios that enable us to learn and adapt in a controlled experimentation environment,” Strohmeyer said in a statement. “We aim to push the boundaries of our current systems and processes in this iteration, leveraging longer experiment duration and expanding collaboration to enhance the success of this and future experiments.”

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