In separate discussions on the heels of a $13.2 million sole-source contract award underpinning the work, a Joint Staff spokesperson and two officials from the Virginia-based company briefed DefenseScoop on the near-term plans to enhance the Force Management Directorate (J-35)’s ORION Decision Support Platform, and ultimately offer a more complete, AI-enabled view of the U.S. military’s assets, missions and personnel.

“The DOD operates within a finite force pool, balancing responses to a wide range of global events — from humanitarian assistance to major military operations — often occurring simultaneously. The ORION Decision Support Platform provides a comprehensive view of force capabilities to support real-time decision-making,” a spokesperson from the Joint Staff told DefenseScoop on Tuesday.

Broadly, the J-35 directorate oversees the organizational structure, policies, and resources necessary for the U.S. military branches to collectively maintain readiness and integrate global operations, against a backdrop of complex and evolving threats.

Roots of the hub’s ORION DSP tool stem back more than a decade to the early 2010s. 

“Initially, ORION was developed as a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of a web-based platform that could provide a common operational picture, facilitate collaboration, and support decision-making for joint planning and execution,” the spokesperson noted.

At the time, it was designed to integrate certain data from various DOD sources and produce a comprehensive view of the operational environment.

“The significance of this [latest] news is that it represents a major step forward in the development of a more integrated and collaborative planning capability for the DOD,” the Joint Staff spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

In its current form, the ORION platform consolidates authoritative data from each of the armed services, provides visualization of forces and munitions globally, conducts contingency and crisis analyses, and allows course of action experimentation to inform advice that’s compiled for combatant command planners and other tactical and strategic decision-makers.

“The Joint Staff J-35 ORION is a cloud-based, containerized software suite with web and business intelligence applications. It continues to evolve in line with enterprise [global force management, or GFM] requirements,” said Ryan Legge, BigBear.ai’s president of national security.

Legge noted that BigBear.ai’s history supporting the DOD’s global force management initiative began more than 20 years ago, while its partnership with the J-35 for this effort is about 9 years old. 

“The Department of Defense identified the lack of a standardized, integrated system for global force visibility and feasibility assessments and chartered Project ORION. The challenge was managing multiple siloed data sources that required integration to support joint planning and execution,” he told DefenseScoop. 

The ORION platform, according to Legge, “is built explicitly for the JPEC” and applies agile methodologies for the continuous integration and delivery of advanced analytics and other software services.

This new contract was awarded via DOD’s Tradewinds Marketplace. 

“ORION integrates authoritative data sources identified by the Joint Staff and services, synthesizing information into a holistic global force management perspective. It focuses on warfighting and mission-support capabilities, readiness, availability, and current employment locations — collectively known as ‘CRAE’ data,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said. 

The platform is a major component of the Joint Planning and Execution Community’s operational architecture, as it supports the community’s overarching mission to plan, coordinate, and execute joint operations.

“BigBear.ai is not permitted to disclose the specifics of the ORION platform, but notes it generally provides a comprehensive view of force condition and quality,” Tommy Clarke, the company’s director for DOD programs, told DefenseScoop.

“The ORION DSP suite has numerous analytical dashboards and advanced user interfaces that offer both high-level strategic awareness and the capability for in-depth data exploration alongside collaborative risk mitigation capabilities,” he said.

Prior to having access to the ORION DSP, the Pentagon’s force management pursuits relied heavily on what Clarke referred to as a discombobulated and time-consuming process using antiquated systems and significant manpower.

“ORION integrates disparate GFM datasets into a user-friendly application suite, enabling greater efficiency in planning, refinement, and analysis of GFM actions. As a result, senior leaders can spend more time understanding data, rather than mining it,” he said.

Still, contemporary challenges associated with data fidelity continue to hinder joint planners’ capacity to rapidly develop reliable courses of action for future operations.

“The current planning process requires that planners spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering and processing data, leaving limited time for actual planning and decision-making. However, with ORION [and forthcoming updates], planners will be able to rapidly gather and synthesize relevant data, freeing them to focus on higher-level thinking and strategy development,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said.

“This will enable senior leaders to have more decision space, allowing them to make more informed, timely, and effective decisions,” they told DefenseScoop.

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In response to questions regarding a contract award unveiled Wednesday, a Defense Department spokesperson shared new details about how and why the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) is rapidly prototyping BigBear.ai’s Virtual Anticipation Network (VANE) to advance complex information operations across the military. 

“The machine learning tools and datasets within VANE could help identify the relationships between datasets over time, to inform senior leader decisions and provide key strategic context to DOD decisions,” the spokesperson said on Thursday.

The CDAO opted to leverage this platform to improve its internal capacity to identify key trends and topics related to potential foreign adversary areas of interest.

VANE was originally developed in partnership with the DOD’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate. In April 2024, the company received “awardable” status to offer the tool on the CDAO Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. 

“Any federal government entity can view, contact, and negotiate [and] enter into a procurement with the awardable vendors” on Tradewinds, the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

This new contract for CDAO-led pursuits “marks a successful transition from a research prototype to an operational prototype, providing critical insights to decision-makers,” company officials wrote in BigBear.ai’s press release.

The deal involves a transition plan, which will guide envisioned future deployments on the CDAO’s in-transition Advana environment and enable “a broader audience across the DOD’s Combatant Commands to access the advanced AI capability,” they noted.

Spokespersons from BigBear.ai did not respond to a request for comment.

In a recently published solutions brief, officials from the company wrote that “VANE is on track to provide data-driven assessments across multiple domains and echelons, including grey-zone warfare, operations at the strategic and operational levels, information warfare, and more.”

The DOD spokesperson did not directly respond to DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the price of this procurement or the platform’s functions and capabilities. 

A contracting record on the Federal Procurement Data System shows that in late September the CDAO entered into an other transaction agreement (OTA) with BigBear.ai for a “VANE Prototype.” 

The total contract value — including the base and all options — is listed as more than $1.3 million.

“The current prototyping effort is focused on exploring the utility of VANE in supporting CDAO’s customers,” the DOD spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

Without providing further details, they added that the office harnesses “the VANE platform to support data analytics related to strategic competition and other projects.”

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The new contract, which has a value of $7.8 million over nine months, is for prototyping the ATEC Integrated Mission Management System (AIMMS), which is intended to replace legacy platforms, some of which are decades old.

The command, which oversees developmental testing and independent operational tests and evaluations of military capabilities, supports Army Futures Command and other senior leaders as they make critical decisions for acquisition and force modernization.

However, the organization’s thousands of personnel and many installations are spread across the country, which creates challenges. AIMMS is intended to better connect its various elements through improved enterprise IT capabilities and enable its digital transformation with more comprehensive tools.

The command “cannot effectively execute its Test & Evaluation (T&E) mission as test officers/ evaluators … are unable to work across a geographically dispersed organization without a shared system,” according to Army slides for an industry day held in 2021.

The purpose of the AIMMS effort is to “replace the capabilities of several obsolete, siloed, legacy information systems, improve ATEC’s efficiency and effectiveness, and support Army goals to make T&E data more visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable, and secure,” per the slides.

The service expects the new technology to enable test officers and evaluators to initiate, plan, manage, analyze and report on all test-and-evaluation projects; facilitate monitoring and oversight of the command’s various efforts; permit internal and external stakeholders to easily search, discover, access and analyze T&E-related information; and provide a cloud-based application compatible with other Army business systems.

The new system will support more than 3,000 users, according to an Army release last year.

The Project Management Module, ATEC Decision Support System and the VISIOM Digital Library System are some of the older systems slated be replaced by AIMMS.

BigBear.ai, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, has been selected as the single-source vendor for the final phase of the prototyping effort, which is expected to lead to production if all goes well.

The company “is taking a ‘clean sheet’ approach, leveraging a leading commercial off-the-shelf automation workflow platform, advanced analytics, and AI/ML technologies such as robotic process automation and federated search, in order to drive a higher form of decision intelligence for decision makers,” Ryan Legge, president of integrated defense solutions at BigBear.ai, said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

According to a release, the company will provide the Army with a “modern no-code/low-code solution” for ease of use. It will be a cloud-based, “API-centric” platform combining project and portfolio management, enterprise content management, workflow management, application integration, business intelligence and data analytics capabilities.

“The solution is scalable and secure, and can fully integrate and automate existing and future T&E processes,” according to the firm.

“Our solution will provide ATEC access to essential data, saving time and resources needed to centralize and distribute data,” Legge said in the release.

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