During a keynote presentation and sideline conversations with DefenseScoop at the AITalks conference on Thursday, Marine Corps AI lead Capt. Christopher Clark shared new details about the push to enhance the service’s technological infrastructure and spark a meaningful digital transformation over the next three years.

“We are, as a small service with a limited budget, very interested in ensuring that AI implementation is effective and that it is needed, and that we’re not just employing and deploying on top of AI solutions that are just flashy and expensive, right? So to do that, we have the AI implementation plan, which we are expecting to have released here very soon,” Clark said. 

A new pilot initiative to establish three (and possibly more) digital transformation teams, or DTXs, within Marine Corps organizations to more strategically pave the way for AI at scale marks a major early component of that new plan, he announced.

“We stood up the first digital transformation team at [II Marine Expeditionary Force] … at the end of March. And then we are looking at Marine Corps Logistics Command as the second one. They already have most of this in place, we are just bringing it under a common umbrella,” Clark told DefenseScoop after his keynote. 

That command, he noted, previously assembled its own data and analytics office, and has an AI cell in the works. The second DTX is “expected to be stood up in May-June timeframe — so very soon,” Clark noted.

“And then [Marine Corps Forces, Pacific] will be the last of the pilot — to be stood up by the end of this fiscal year,” he said. 

In executing the new implementation plan, the Marines will conduct an infrastructure assessment this summer to determine all of the cloud and associated assets needed to completely realize their vision of scaling AI and machine learning platforms. The service is also going to produce relevant governance materials and guidance to inform emerging and existing AI deployments.

Further, Clark’s team is exploring the creation of a new Center for Digital Transformation, which would focus on accelerating emerging tech — beginning with AI. If it comes to fruition, the hub would be a venue for Marines to partner with universities and other entities to confront the most crucial AI problems. 

First, however, the Corps needs to ensure it wouldn’t be duplicative and that there’d be proper resourcing to back it.

“There’s no intent to compete within our own service. The intent of the AI strategy and [forthcoming] implementation plan is aligning those [elements of the ecosystem] and then instituting the right change,” Clark told DefenseScoop.

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An Air Force spokesperson confirmed Thursday that Vidrine will be retiring “at the end of the month.” The spokesperson said they could not immediately provide any additional information about whether officials had identified someone to succeed her as CDAO, nor who would be managing those duties in the interim.

Vidrine has served as the department’s CDAO since January 2023, when she took over for Maj. Gen. John Olson. Prior to that, Vidrine was on detail to the White House Office of Management and Budget where she served as senior strategic adviser for data to the Federal CIO. She also previously served as the Air Force’s chief data officer, among many other roles she’s held in the defense and intelligence communities since she enlisted in the Army in 1986, according to her official bio.

As CDAO, Vidrine was tasked with developing and implementing enterprise data management, analytics and digital transformation strategies to improve performance and drive innovation across the Air and Space Forces. She was also responsible for promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence and related technologies across all mission areas, a critical task as the Department of the Air Force strives to become “AI-ready” by 2025 and “AI competitive” in operations by 2027.

One of her top priorities was upskilling the workforce with additional training and education in AI and data-centric knowledge areas, including through partnerships with industry and academia.

“It really comes down to your talent. We’re in a fierce competition for talent, we’re competing with all of our industry partners for great talent,” she said last year during a keynote at Microsoft’s Federal Innovation Series, hosted by FedScoop. “I like to say with the team, ‘Mission first, but people always.’ And really, to drive that forward we have to make sure that we’re making targeted investments that have great return on investment.”

Vidrine did not respond to a request for comment.

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“We’re refocusing on how we are achieving digital transformation. We’re taking a services-oriented methodology,” Pringle told reporters during a media roundtable at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium.

Formally approved and established on March 1, this new Digital Capabilities Directorate (DCD) is working to leverage best practices implemented by commercial companies to pave the way for more streamlined research processes and business operations, officials say.

The organization is fusing together formerly siloed elements of AFRL’s former Research Collaboration and Computing Directorate, as well as the lab’s former Business Process Reengineering Division and others. It also has roots that trace back to a temporary digital “war room” that was stood up to help drive innovation.

Much of the activities that were being conducted under those units will continue, Pringle confirmed. However, they’ll “be nested under this bigger capability that is more modern and aligned with how we operate in today’s world,” she said. 

AFRL officials involved in establishing the DCD are strategically working to help their colleagues “decouple” the data they rely on from the applications and tools they capture and model it in. 

“How do you think about that data as an asset of its own and manage it, so you can build that digital thread and know that you pick the same piece of data as the last person?” AFRL’s Chief Data Officer Andrea Mahaffey told reporters.

She noted that the lab is taking “very much an API-mindset approach,” referring to the term application programming interface — a software intermediary that essentially enables two different applications to communicate. 

“We don’t all need to be in the same tool, in the same platform or on the same network — we need the data to move across, and to get that data in the right hands of the right people,” Mahaffey said.

During the media briefing, AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate Director Michael Gregg and Chief Enterprise Architect James Sumpter said the lab is utilizing a model-based approach and is being deliberate about balancing alignment, autonomy, automation, and agility in its in-the-works and existing architectures.

Officials said they are taking an iterative approach to innovation.

“We’ve got a big focus on architecting and building out the future of [information technology] for AFRL — and we call it the labverse. It’s an integrated digital infrastructure for science and technology,” Sumpter explained.

That virtual environment will host sensitive government workloads at impact level 5, officials also confirmed. 

Although the directorate and labverse associated with it are still nascent, AFRL officials hope to extend this experiment across the broader Air Force in the future. 

“We want to expand this as much as possible. So, that’s why we deliberately focused on managing our data first,” Gregg said. 

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Iyer served as the first civilian CIO since the Army divided the chief information officer and deputy chief of staff, G6, roles.

“With the completion of my contract with the Army, it is now time for me to return to industry where I can take on the next big challenge,” he wrote.

During his time as CIO, Iyer unveiled the Army’s digital transformation strategy, which he described as “a new way of doing business for the Army.” The plan outlines a path for the service to harmonize and synchronize its technology efforts to succeed in future initiatives such as multi-domain battle and the Pentagon’s new way of war, Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

The Army’s IT apparatus was far behind industry standards prior.

“From my perspective from industry then, it was clear that we were ages behind the commercial sector but even quite a bit behind the rest of the DoD,” Iyer wrote on LinkedIn. “The Army was quickly falling behind on technology that had become commodity in the private sector — cloud was one example. The Army had established modernization as a priority to fight and win decisively in Multi Domain Operations, but outside of a few pockets within the Army, the rest of the Army continued to fall behind.”

As part of that strategy, the G6 outlined the unified network, which seeks to combine the enterprise and tactical networks to create a single global network.

Iyer also oversaw the Army’s updated cloud plan and data plan.

Additionally, he has discussed shifting the focus for how the Army uses and runs its classified network — known as Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) — and divesting parts of the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet).

He suggested leveraging more commercial solutions that will allow the Army to be more secure and flexible.

“Our strategy again here is to get to greater resiliency, with commercial transport, using dark fiber, a heck of a lot more encryption when it comes to secret … The need for us to have … physical separation of data and networks for SIPR, or SIPR to ride on NIPR, those days are gone,” Iyer said in June. “What we have been able to show if you have the right encryption in place that’s quantum-resistant and we were able to use solutions like commercial solutions for classified, and we have shown that today … and validated that. It really questions: what do we need a SIPRNet for? Why do we need a whole separate network, that we can actually do pretty damn well with encryption?”

On the NIPRNet side, Iyer explained that officials are looking to divest parts of it, due in part to the Defense Information Systems Agency sunsetting its Joint Regional Security Stacks, which were essentially routers and switches that existed at installations.

Replacing that with more infrastructure at the installation level will be time-consuming and expensive, Iyer said, arguing that’s not a viable path for the Army and suggesting the use of cloud systems.

In that same vein, Iyer oversaw the first use of Google Workspace for the Army as a way to provide internet access and collaboration services to troops that might have their credentials cut as a result of NIPRNet reductions.

Iyer wrote on LinkedIn that he will “start transitioning out” of his CIO role “over the next several weeks.” It is unclear who his successor will be.

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The creation of the position is “long overdue,” Program Executive Officer Ross Guckert said, adding that it’s necessary to align with digital transformation to manage and integrate initiatives in the office’s portfolio at the enterprise level. These include data, cyber, risk management framework reform, networking, data reference architectures and cloud strategy, he said Tuesday at AFCEA Belvoir’s Industry Days conference.

The new CIO position, which he said will come about in the next few months, will be EIS’s key interface with other offices executing the Army’s digital transformation vision such as the Army’s CIO, the G6, Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Data, Engineering and Software within ASAALT.

Army CIO Raj Iyer announced the digital transformation strategy last year. It aims to move the service away from outdated technologies and practices to a more 21^st century organization.

EIS is working on several modernization efforts for the Army such as improving defensive cyber operations tools as well as key initiatives associated with the unified network strategy — which envisions a singular global network that connects the enterprise and tactical environments and can be accessed by soldiers at any place, at any time.

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The U.S. military is considered the best in the world. With a budget larger than the next nine militaries combined, the Department of Defense (DOD) outspends, out-equips, and out-trains its competitors. It is also an industrial-age, hardware-centric organization that has the most, the biggest, and the best large capital investments: tanks, ships, aircraft, satellites, and everything in between. Unfortunately, in today’s world, hardware is “old-school” – low-margin, commodity products that are manufactured, stored, shipped, consumed, and discarded. The DOD accomplishes many incredible things, but it also shares with almost all other federal agencies the common trait of lagging woefully behind the commercial software industry’s state of the art in everything from automating back-office functions to providing digital warfighting services to its customers.

Fortunately, the DOD has a monopoly on the nation’s warfighting functions, which insulates it from the usual forms of market competition. Yet this very monopoly is also the root cause of many of the worst problems when it comes to the DOD’s failure to adopt new technologies, change its legacy workflows and processes, and design and experiment with new operating concepts. Within the U.S. government, the DOD does not experience the kind of brutal, capitalist, Darwinian journey by which incumbent organizations face off against hungry new start-ups and risk getting pushed to the side. Equally problematic, the massive DOD bureaucracy struggles with the kind of periodic “tech refresh” that has been instrumental to commercial industry success. While it is insulated from market competition within the U.S. economy, the DOD is not immune from the kind of revolutionary, secular, and wide-ranging technological changes happening outside the government. Nor is it immune from the threat of competition with other militaries around the world. Either the DOD will change itself, or its competitors will force it to change. After it might be too late.

For the United States military to retain its dominant position in the future – which is not a guaranteed outcome – the DOD needs a new design and architecture, based on technology, that will allow it to be far more flexible, scale on demand, and adapt dynamically to changing conditions. And it must do so at a dramatically lower cost. The DOD’s systems will need to support dramatically faster decision-making and execution speeds; allow for rapidly updating and modifying systems; lower the cost structure of building and deploying these systems; and upend the marginal cost and speed of delivering new functionality.

It is extremely important for DOD to begin the transition from an industrial-age, hardware-centric organization to a digital-age, software-centric one. To address the challenges of doing so, the two of us, one with over 26 years of experience in Silicon Valley and the other who served for 36 years in uniform, wrote “Software-Defined Warfare: Architecting the DOD’s Transition to the Digital Age.” In the computer industry, “software defined” is a broad architectural concept that drives different core design decisions. These design decisions turn a lot of disconnected hardware products into an integrated whole that can be operated and managed as a single platform. It also takes control and complexity, which is typically distributed all over the place, and centralizes it where it can be simplified, managed, and scaled. In military terms, this is a version of centralized direction and decentralized execution: the best of both worlds.

We describe how lessons and experience from the commercial tech industry’s journey can help inform breakthrough solutions to big problems in the DOD and other federal government organizations. The best principles and practices that emerged in commercial industry over the past few decades on how to design computer software and systems for squeezing out the maximum performance at lowest costs, are directly transferrable to the DOD. We outline nine concepts and present an overall architecture recommendation that we consider crucial for accelerating the transition to a software-centric future.
Our paper is not a so-called “recipe for success.” It is a framework, a blueprint for change at a crucial period in the Department’s history. We do not claim that hardware has become irrelevant. It is as important as ever. Yet the principles we outline are designed to make hardware far more effective, to allow much more agility and rapid adaptation during future crises and conflicts. We also do not claim that machines will displace people. The approach described in our report opens up incredible new opportunities for human-machine teamwork, in which the roles of humans and machines are optimized based upon what each does best.

War is the ultimate human endeavor. It is both art and science. The art side of the art-science equation remains as important as ever. With the proliferation of new technologies and a shift to a data-centric environment, the science part of the equation is becoming increasingly consequential. In future crises and conflicts, the side that adapts faster and demonstrates the greatest agility may well gain a significant tactical and operational advantage. As stated in the recently-published Strategic Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) report, titled Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness, “A military’s ability to deploy, employ, and update software, including AI models, faster than its adversaries, is likely to become one of the greatest determining factors in relative military strength.” That is a powerful and bold statement. We agree with it. The stockbroker’s warning that past performance is no guarantee of future results applies as much to warfighting as it does to investing. There is no time to waste for the DOD and the rest of the federal government to begin the transition to a digital age.

Nand Mulchandani was the first Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). He is now the CTO for the CIA. Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.) was the inaugural Director of Project Maven and the JAIC.

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The CDAO — a product of a major bureaucrat shakeup at the Pentagon that included the merger of several agencies — is tasked with scaling digital and Al-enabled capabilities across the massive Department of Defense enterprise. On June 1 the office announced that it had achieved full operating capability (FOC) as well as the appointment of nearly a dozen officials to fill out its leadership ranks.

“I do think it’s really important to empower the team there to first of all take a little time, as they’ve put themselves together in FOC to think through that problem set themselves and put some measures out that we can talk about. So I’m not going to get in front of that process,” Hicks said Wednesday at the DOD’s annual Digital and AI Symposium.

“What I will say is that we have to be able to deliver. We have to advance and advance quickly on the challenge set that the warfighter faces,” she continued. “The CDAO has to be seen a year in as delivering on that and that it is the go-to place for talent and technical expertise to get after that problem” of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and scaling artificial intelligence across the department, she added.

JADC2 is the Pentagon’s vision for better connecting the U.S. military’s sensors and shooters, and creating faster and more unified networks through the application of AI and other digital tools.

“What we want to be able to do is make sure we are leveraging the state of the art in order to increase accuracy, increase speed of decision-making, increase the quality of our ability to deliver effects,” Hicks explained.  “We need to be able to access the data that’s out there.”

The Pentagon also wants to leverage artificial intelligence and big data analytics for back office and “board room” functions — not just on battlefields, she noted. That includes applying the technology to logistics, sustainment and inventory management issues, among others.

The DOD is currently “under-gunned” when it comes to analytic capabilities, Hicks said.

To address these challenges, the Department of Defense needs the help of world-class AI talent. And talent management will be one of the challenges that CDAO must tackle.

The Pentagon wants to leverage such expertise in industry and academia.

However, “we do need, you know, folks inside the system able to help us conceptualize and build out the kind of … AI enterprise that we need,” Hicks said. “I’m very hopeful that CDAO will be right up there with ideas of how we get better at both recruiting talent, but up-skilling and re-skilling and then retaining some of that talent.”

Digital experts need to be able to rotate in and out of government, she suggested.

“Some talent we need to be really comfortable with it flowing in and out [of the department]. I think that model is completely appropriate,” she said. “We’re not comfortable with that typically. So we need to get more comfortable with it.”

The CDAO is also tasked with helping the Pentagon develop “responsible AI” systems that are effective on the battlefield but are also constrained by the ethical principles that the DOD applies to the technology. The Pentagon is currently rewriting its AI policy and rethinking its guidelines for autonomous weapon systems.

“We have been a leader in responsible AI, we have set this pace for allies and partners, and certainly for adversaries who have nothing like it. And I think we can be very effective in warfare, we can create an effective deterrent and [still] stick by our norms … That’s really important to me that we advance that through CDAO,” Hicks said.

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