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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submissions are due Sept. 6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Early iterations of the GIDE series launched around 2020 and were facilitated by the Northern American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command. But in 2022, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office with revamping the initiative to strategically test out and enable capabilities that could help realize the U.S. military’s nascent Joint All-Domain Command and Control warfighting construct. The plan was to conduct experiments every 90 days.

Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, the office’s division chief for JADC2 experimentation, has played a key role in the GIDE series throughout its evolution.

During a virtual panel hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Tuesday, Strohmeyer spotlighted some of the Defense Department’s progress and challenges that have been driven by GIDE to date — and particularly in the ninth iteration of the series, which concluded last week in conjunction with the Army’s latest Project Convergence activities. 

In an exclusive interview after the CSIS event, Strohmeyer briefed DefenseScoop on his team’s vision for the next three events in the pipeline over 2024 — dubbed GIDE 10, 11 and 12.

“We have three mission threads this year inside GIDE,” he told DefenseScoop. The first is what his team has dubbed “global integration.”

“This is trying to integrate the combatant commands and the Joint Staff — globally, digitally, and the decisions that we make — and really connect that to have better and faster decisions,” he explained.

The second mission thread is “joint kill chains.”

“We want to close kill chains better, faster and in a joint way — not in a service-specific way,” Strohmeyer said. 

“And then the third mission thread for us this year, which is new, is ‘allied and partner integration.’ We’d actually worked on that some last year, but it’s been kind of like a side effort. But it’s so critical to what we do that, we integrate all of our allies and our partners — not just like integrating [Microsoft] Word, or text. I’m talking about digitally integrating them with what we’re doing, which becomes so very difficult when it comes to these classified networks … Getting out after that in a real tangible way is a really important one,” he added.

The aim there is to deepen data- and AI-aligned cooperation with the United States’ Five Eyes partners — which include Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. — and others.

Although GIDE 9 just completed, the tenth iteration of the series is scheduled in about four weeks — notably sooner than the usual 90-day interlude between events.

“It just so happens that it overlaps on top of a couple of other big exercises, which is why it has to happen only four weeks later. But GIDE 10 is going to get after, actually, all three of those mission threads. So, it’s a really major event for us. It’s going to be partnered with the Joint Staff and the combatant commands to get after global integration at scale in a much bigger way,” Strohmeyer said. 

The upcoming experiments will include multiple participants from each of the 11 combatant commands. 

“GIDE 10 is happening across the globe at all the different combatant commands and the Pentagon,” Strohmeyer noted.

“It’s essentially taking the work that we did in the past GIDEs and starting to bring it to scale, which gets us to the point of — we’re not doing experimentation for the sake of experimentation, we’re doing it for the sake of actually fielding capability,” he added.

Beyond further refining the CDAO’s minimum viable capability for JADC2 that was generated over the past few events in the experimentation series, GIDE 10 will also involve what Strohmeyer referred to as “on the joint fires side, getting ready for GIDE 11.”

Scheduled for the June 2024 time frame, GIDE 11 will align with — and deliver capabilities for — Indo-Pacific Command’s next Valiant Shield exercise, where the military expects to conduct a real-time test of its Joint Fires Network prototype.

When asked about plans for GIDE 12, Strohmeyer said that’s to be determined. They’ll be shaped by what happens in the two events that come next.

“What we thought we were going to do at the beginning of last year did not look quite like what we did at the end of the year, because we learned as we went — so we’re going to be doing that same thing,” Strohmeyer explained. 

In that sense, his team is pretty confident that they have developed what he called “a methodology of rapid learning for the Department of Defense, by using this new approach.” 

“I can predict with probably about 80 to 90% accuracy what we’re going to do in GIDE 10, just four weeks away. But maybe it’s about 60% accuracy [to predict] what we’re going to do in GIDE 11, and like 40% accuracy what we’re going to do in GIDE 12 at the end of the year — because we’re just going to learn as we go. But it’s a little bit challenging for the department because we’re used to having very tightly codified requirements,” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

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Deputy CDAO Margaret Palmieri provided new details on Wednesday about the Pentagon’s achievements in GIDE 8 — and what’s to come in the next experiments in the series.

“We’re going to do an up-brief on GIDE 8, internal to the building, in a week or so. So, I’ll keep my comments a little bit more vague than if we had already briefed them out [to Defense Department leadership]. But we did” meet that aim to produce an MVC, Palmieri said at a Hudson Institute event.

In 2022, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the CDAO with relaunching and reinvigorating the GIDE series, which was previously facilitated by North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command.

For the newest GIDE projects, the CDAO was explicit in its intent to help test, optimize and integrate data systems with AI, to enable the realization of the Pentagon’s nascent CJADC2 construct for next-generation command and control.

“That minimum viable capability is largely a connection of existing capabilities that we have today that have shared data in new ways — and have brought together a combination of new applications and new data services, with users, to create better workflows,” Palmieri said.

“Now that we have done that in an experimentation environment, there are a couple of things that we need to consider as we bring them into operations. One is a full appropriation in [fiscal 2024], which is absolutely critical. We doubled-or-more our budget in the CDAO from [fiscal 2023 to 2024], and we don’t have any access to that funding right now to make minimum viable capability truly accessible and robust across the [enterprise]. And so we’re really excited about the potential for an appropriation,” she explained. 

That money can’t currently be tapped into because federal agencies are operating under a short-term continuing resolution.

Still, Palmieri noted that participants in the latest GIDE iterations have made new and informative connections inside of experimentation — where they deal with live data and live networks in real time — that can be adopted in their day-to-day processes moving forward.

“Absolutely, we have a new set of connections across multiple data fabrics and applications. In GIDE 9, we are going to align with a couple exercises the Army’s doing in Project Convergence 4 —  because we really want to see how the combatant commands and the joint task forces now take that down to a tactical level with a service,” Palmieri said.

That will happen in the March time frame, she confirmed.

After that, for GIDE 10, the CDAO plans to engage with Indo-Pacific Command’s Valiant Shield exercise series, which is a U.S.-only, biennial field training exercise that, historically, focuses on integrating joint training in relation to current operational plans.

“We’re really trying to take GIDE to align with existing activities and start to bring those data connections closer to stuff that people are already doing,” Palmieri told DefenseScoop.

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An overarching goal for CJADC2 is to connect the various sensors, shooters and data streams of the U.S. armed forces and their international partners, under a more unified network to enable better and faster decision-making. The Pentagon this year has conducted several Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) hosted by the Chief Digital and AI Office in partnership with the Joint Staff, to get after that. They included participation from all the service branches, key combatant commands and international allies. The latest iteration, known as GIDE 8, kicked off Dec. 4 and is scheduled to wrap up on Friday.

“Building on the success of the previous experiments, GIDE 8 aims to provide a Minimum Viable Capability (MVC) of Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to the Joint Force by the end of the year,” the Pentagon said in a press release.

According to Department of Defense Instruction 5000.87 on the operation of the Pentagon’s software acquisition pathway, a minimum viable capability release is the “initial set of features suitable to be fielded to an operational environment that provides value to the warfighter or end user in a rapid timeline.” It is analogous to a minimum marketable product in commercial industry.

The tools coming out of the recent GIDE events are expected to support global integration and joint fires.

“By the end of the year, the experiment aims to successfully iterate on CJADC2 concepts, wargame global crisis scenarios, develop new Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), and influence policy to move the Department’s CJADC2 efforts forward,” per the release.

GIDE 8 isn’t the end of the road for the series of experiments. They are expected to continue next year and expand.

Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control is a long-term endeavor. This week at the Association of Old Crows annual symposium, Rear Adm. Susan BryerJoyner said the Pentagon is looking at “bridging” solutions in the near term as it pushes ahead with a longer-term modernization effort.

“We need something today to close the gap or to smooth interoperability,” said BryerJoyner, the Joint Staff’s deputy director for command, control, communications and computer/cyber systems, J-6. “A bridging solution is something that’s good enough today but may not be the final solution … And so what we also do is to say, ‘Okay, for the long term, is there a specific vector that we think the bridging solution should kind of aim to bridge towards?’ And when there is, we try and marry the two. Sometimes there’s not, because the solution may still be in development and there’s nothing to bridge to.”

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