Such a task, he said Dec. 13 at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Texas, has become his main charge some eight months into leading the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

“What is our job at the CDAO? We originally thought our job at the CDAO was to produce tools for those in the government to do modeling. We no longer think that’s the case,” he said. “We say that we want to build the scaffolding that goes around the model. We want to help folks build and use that model.”

Established in December 2021, the CDAO hit its first full strides in June. It subsumed what were the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service, the Advana auditing platform and the chief data officer’s role.

In sum, the office is considered an overseer and expeditor of data analytics and AI at the Pentagon, where they are increasingly the focus of spending, experimentation and implementation.

“I am firmly convinced that what most people ask for when they say they want AI is actually a really good dashboard that just tells them where their stuff is,” Martell said. “And so we believe our job is to get the data right, and then provide a very strong data analytics layer.”

More than 685 AI projects, including several tied to major weapons systems, were underway at the Defense Department as of early 2021, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in February.

Mass amounts of trustworthy data and training is what fuels AI capabilities; the digital lifeblood allows AI to aid navigation and target recognition — as is expected aboard the Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle — as well as with maintenance predictions and supply logistics. Not all data, however, is created equal, complicating the job of Martell and his colleagues.

“First of all, we have massive amounts of data. We have massive amounts of data distributed all over the world,” he said at the conference. “Some portion of that data is going to be really effective for decision making at scale. And other parts of that data is going to be totally ineffective for decision making. So, a large part of our job is figuring out the ways to manage that data, so that the data that’s effective for decision making is front and center for decision makers when they need it.”

Martell was named chief digital and AI officer in April, succeeding John Sherman, who took on the role in an acting capacity and remains the Pentagon’s chief information officer. Martell previously worked at Dropbox, where he was head of machine learning, and LinkedIn, where he led a number of AI teams and initiatives.

At a previous event, Martell said he took the government gig because of the gravity of the situation.

“There are not a lot of folks who have the intersection of AI and a government background,” Martell said in June. “So when the deputy secretary of defense calls you up and says, ‘We would like you to take this job,’ you have to think really hard about why you wouldn’t take the job, and not the other way around. And I think getting this mission right is extremely important.”

Courtney Albon contributed to this report.

“The leaders of the intelligence community about a year ago got together and we – for the first time I can recall – got together and established a common vision for ourselves called IC 2025,” Sue Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence, said Aug. 15 at the DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska.

The vision, she said, explains what the community needs to fulfill the IC’s mission and how the community must work together. Gordon had previously discussed these priorities during a presentation at the GEOINT symposium in April.

The priorities include:

Relying on Automated Intelligence using Machines, or AIM. The IC is establishing an AIM center – in concert with the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center – to help the community harness the power of technology.

Gordon said she prefers the “AIM” lexicon because she is interested in outcomes, not technology. One such outcome is the commitment that no U.S. or allied service member will ever be at a disadvantage on the battlefield because and adversary can make better use of data, she said in Omaha.

Developing the right workforce. Gordon said in April that if the intel community is going to harness the power of machines to use more of the data productively, then they have to invest more in humans.

Developing a comprehensive cyber strategy. Cyber is not a thing, it is a vehicle by which so many imperatives are addressed, Gordon said in April, adding that it includes cyber protection.

“If you hear about it in public it’s who’s in charge. I think that is a total misnomer,” she said. “We really have to address the cyber attack and the cyber posturing that is happening to us every day and help this administration figure out the response we need.”

Creating a modern data management infrastructure. Pursing data without a purpose, Gordon said at the GEOINT symposium, is probably not going to get the community there but not understanding that data management is the key to any of the elements of success they portend will not put efforts in the right area.

Increasing and leveraging partnerships with the private sector. This is an area most all leaders in the defense and intelligence space acknowledge is necessary for success.

Improving acquisition agility. Part of this comes from security clearance reform, she said in April, describing security clearance reform at DoDIIS as one of the existential threats within the IC.

While not naming and states by name, Brig. Gen. Patrick Cobb, speaking August 15 at the DoDIIS conference, said these events have involved “basic blocking and tackling.”

“Are your patches up to speed, are you using an outdated router that we know that has holes in it that’s been there for a couple of decades,” he said, stressing that they don’t look at or access voter personal information. “What are those basic things we can help the states and their election official tighten up where they’re at right now?”

Cobb also outlined what cyber protection capabilities the National Guard can bring to bear to defend the election process from growing cyber threats. All the states have some level of cyber defense capability within their joint force headquarters, he said, but some have cyber protection teams part of the cyber mission force and cyber intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance units making them “much better situated.

The Air Force, in building out the 39 cyber mission force teams it owes to U.S. Cyber Command, decided to take a total force approach using Guard and Reserve units to count toward the 39 teams. The Air Force has two cyber protection teams and a national mission team that are being sourced from Guard and Reserve units.

The Army, for its part, is also standing up 21 Reserve component cyber teams breaking down with 11 in the National Guard and 10 in the Reserve. These are not being counted toward the Army’s 41 teams it owes Cyber Command.

Cobb also said the National Guard Bureau can tie into Cyber Command and the Department of Homeland Security if officials are asking for help.

“We’ve seen some really good benefits from our cyber teams going out and assisting the state, the governments when called upon,” he said.

Today, the Army is creating a common operating environment that allows soldiers from the command post to the vehicle to dismounted patrol to access the same information, a move leaders say will improve mission command.

“What we’re trying to solve is distributed mission command from home station into the tactical edge … to improve rapid decision making in a very lethal, high tempo fight,” said Maj. Gen. David Bassett, the program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical.

C4ISRNET spoke recently about the Army’s move toward the tactical cloud with Louis Pacheco, director of engineering at NexTech Solutions, a technology partner for Rubrik.

C4ISRNET: What obstacles do Department of Defense officials face with battlefield computing?

Louis Pacheco: The primary problem has always been getting services that are provided from the headquarters to the edge. Getting domain authentication services, getting Sharepoint services, getting all these different types of services that are normally located at point-of-presence, and then delivering those services efficiently at the edge.

Size, weight and power is always very important. If you can make it smaller, faster and more efficient, that’s a big deal. And security, not only on the hardware security, but also on the software side.

C4ISRNET: When you talk about getting services on the edge, what can DOD do to help get those services to the soldiers and troops who need them? What are some of the technical solutions?

Pacheco: It could be, for example, an active directory server where you can have one deployed locally, but overall, it functions like a repeater. It just receives the updates from higher headquarters. Sometimes, because of the slow connectivity, that’s a big challenge.

Another one is Sharepoint. Sharepoint could be deployed in a local instance. You’re reaching out to the services locally, but basically, it would be very hard. Because of the amount of bandwidth that’s reserved locally, reserved from the tactical edge toward the data center, it is very hard for a customer to constantly be reaching back to get those services. Bringing that solution to the edge and with the approach that we’ve been taking has been successful because we’re able to keep the services locally but also have them host it. It gives you the best of both worlds.

C4ISRNET: What do you see in the next six to 12 months that makes you believe that DOD gets it and is trying to solve the right problems?

Pacheco: They’re looking to start exploring the capabilities cloud and automation. That’s a big topic nowadays and I think that they’re heading into the right direction with what their strategies are for those fields.

Another field that we brought up, and it’s still in the infancy stages, but I think that collectively it’s going to be beneficial for DOD, is the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Let’s say someone builds or decides to build a server locally on site, but you have this kit that have these different types of servers and someone forgets to add the server to their Rubik policy. We have an automation logic in there that says when you’re building a new server, it’ll automatically add it to the policy and automatically add it to be able to be replicated without having to worry about the overall implementation.

Automating services as in creating domain accounts, creating email accounts, being able to just one click and gracefully shut down all the servers and all your devices, those are things that we provide nowadays.

The Modernized Intelligence Database, or MIDB, was built 20 years ago to house intelligence data globally for the defense intelligence enterprise. Given the proliferation of data today, both in the open and commercial world as well as from the numerous sensors and classified avenues available to the Department of Defense, MIDB is insufficient, top defense leaders said this week at the DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska.

The new system, Machine-Assisted Analysis Rapid-Repository System or MARS, will take advantage of modern technologies in storage, cloud computing and machine learning to allow analysts to interact with data and information in a more dynamic fashion rather than static.

Imagine each column on a spreadsheet is a factory, Terry Busch, MARS program manager at the Defense Intelligence Agency told C4ISRNET. This is the current way of doing business, he said. Factories don’t just sit there static, he continued, there are people coming and going, things being produced and that information is available.

MARS will allow the analyst to shift their understanding from merely being aware the factory exists on paper to asking questions such as “Why isn’t the factory making anything right now? Why hasn’t it made anything in six months? What’s changed?”

Put simply, MARS “will enable us to provide strategic indications of warnings and produce intelligence needed to support targeted acquisition decisions,” Jack Gumtow, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s CIO, said. “Once deployed, MARS will allow analysts and operators to absorb and process large amounts of data, capture new sources of data that provide a deeper understanding of adversary technological developments, provide the ability to track both static and mobile military forces, enable an exponential increase of data being ingested and leverage commercial best practices and industry’s technological advances.”

Empowering analysts

Busch said for the end user, their lives will be made easier because instead of having to use several applications to get the information they need, the data will be infused into one collaborative environment.

Moreover, MARS will be tailor-able to the mission set and the particular analyst. A cloud environment will enable the data to be ready for use by machine learning and algorithms, however, Busch said it’s not his job to create the algorithms, just to make the data usable by them.

“We don’t necessary want to be the end-all be-all of every algorithm in the world,” he said. “That’s really on the analyst user side of the world. We want to make sure that data is ready to ask any question they need at whatever scale they want.”

Timeline

Officials noted the program is still in the early stages. An initial request for information went out to industry recently, and the proposal is slated to go out sometime later this year.

Busch explained they still have to get congressional approval to begin the processes, noting there haven’t been cost estimates for the program.

In the interim, DIA leaders are asking industry for their thoughts on what they can provide based on interactions with a model DIA created.

DIA’s director, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, told reporters that the key to going fast on this program will be to leverage what already exists in the commercial space and that DoD shouldn’t build this from scratch.

“There’s probably an 80 percent solution out there that you can pull in in real time and say ‘where’s the 20 percent that I need to close that gets to my unique problem,” he said.

Gumtow and Ashley described a continually iterative process in the future in which the project is never done.

Similar to other IT efforts being undertaken by the military, leaders are beginning to recognize that the old way of doing business – charting a desired capability with a defined end state for a large monolithic program with one or few contractors working it over several years – is not sufficient in an era when technology changes so rapidly.

“We need to make sure the system grows and changes so that it doesn’t get stuck into 2018 because by 2038 we don’t know what that is going to be,” Busch said.

Despite the fact that the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — the network used to share and discuss top secret information — is one of the best information tools the military and intelligence community have, it is being used far beyond its original intent.

Officials speaking at the DoDIIS conference Aug. 13 articulated that the JWICS was originally just for analysis and intelligence production by the IC.

Today, “it’s found its way into every element of our operations,” Gen. John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, said. “In my command it’s a critical tool because it’s the conduit for intel assessments and reports that come to every decision the command [makes] … A lot of our command-and-control functions go through JWICS.”

Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told reporters during the conference that a lot of people don’t realize the breadth of the JWICS and the importance of it, adding combatant commanders say it’s their most reliable network.

For Hyten, a combatant commander, he said it allows him to look at different IC estimates of adversaries’ capabilities and intentions and collaborate with the office of the secretary of defense, Joint Staff, combatant commands and services.

“It’s the primary system my battle staff uses in time of crisis,” he said, noting that’s not what it was originally built for and thus there has to be a secure and reliable system that can continue to do this in the future.

Ashley said it is absolutely critical for the JWICS to be secure and functioning, describing the challenge ahead is figuring out what the system needs to look like and do in the next 10 years given it has grown beyond its original intent.

“That’s a big move we’re taking on and we’re having that conversation with the combatant commanders to understand what is it that we initially provisioned to the IC and what do you need it to be able to do for you,” he said. “Then we’ll talk about how do we provision that and who has that responsibility and what does that look like in the future.”

Like many top defense leaders giving presentations nowadays, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashely, speaking Aug. 13 at the DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska, stressed the need for industry’s help going forward to solve DIA’s tough problems.

However, solutions must not work just in the lab, but also in the operating environment military and intelligence leaders believe forces will be conducting operations in the future.

“Through my career I’ve seen too many times the technology looks great in the lab … but it doesn’t scale to the battlefield,” he said.

Members of industry must understand how their technologies will be used, who will be using it, at what echelon will it be used, how does it support operations in peace time, and how does it support operations in major combat between great powers.

Moreover, solutions and technology must be interoperable with coalition partners as they are “integral to what we do,” Ashley said.

These systems must also be exercised during peace time to create the muscle memory so “when we go to war it’s not a pick-up game,” he added. The technologies and systems have to be integrated ahead of time.

The IC IT Enterprise, or IC ITE, was first conceived of several years ago with the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001, in mind: The IC must better coordinate and share data.

With the change in leadership at the top of the IC, which came with a new administration, IC CIO John Sherman described various initiatives aimed at building on the initial phases and successes of IC ITE in what he is calling IC ITE’s “second epoch.”

Sherman, speaking Aug. 14 at the DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska, outlined six main thrusts of this second epoch “to ensure that we are able to keep up the progress as we get ready to move into the next decade.”

The first is to stay focused on mission-drivers and use cases for new capabilities. New tools, applications and systems must fit users’ needs and enable the workforce to operate more effectively than previously, he said, adding leadership will always be mindful of user feedback.

Second, Sherman announced a change to the Desktop Environment, or DTE, which has previously been described as essentially the foundation and starting point of IC ITE. DTE serves as the user-interface with industry-grade desktop features to users and is led by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Acknowledging the DTE idea was well-grounded when conceived in 2013, Sherman said the community has come to the realization that it no longer makes sense to deliver a standard capability to every agency and user given the differing architectures, security requirements and mission needs.

The IC must be able to develop and promulgate reference architectures allowing agencies to build their own compliant solutions, he said.

In order to reach the outcomes DTE initially sought to achieve, Sherman described the creation of the Collaboration Reference Architecture, or CRA, which will provide the standards for these services such as chat and email. Agencies can deploy solutions that fit their needs provided they comply with the CRA.

Third, the second epoch will take aim at the secret classification sphere. The first epoch, by necessity, focused on the top-secret space. But, Sherman said, the community realized many intelligence partners such as the military, Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement live in other domains.

Fourth and fifth, Sherman described two elements not directly related to the ongoing IC ITE effort itself, but ideas that fit where IC ITE and the IC are going in the future; enhancing cybersecurity and working with allies and partners.

Cybersecurity, while not new, is now a necessity, Sherman said, and must be front and center within the community’s priorities.

Other priorities in the cybersecurity space beyond just physical security of systems and networks include sharing threat information across the community to make sure everyone is on the “same sheet of music about cyber threats.”

Regarding allies and partners, Sherman noted that the U.S. lives in a coalition environment and IC leaders are going to keep pressing for new capabilities to allow for greater collaboration.

Last, Sherman described that he is looking to focus more tightly on the partnership with the Department of Defense and the defense intelligence enterprise.

Pointing to a real-world example of this partnership, he highlighted how colleagues within the undersecretary of defense for intelligence helped to bring Air Force intelligence staff into a discussion with the CIA CIO about leveraging the commercial cloud service, or C2S, for an Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance requirement.

“This is exactly the sort of integration that was always in the spirt of IC ITE,” he said.

One member of Congress who retired as a one-star general in the electronic warfare field has even said the U.S. is now just bringing up the rear of the top three EW powers in the world.

“In the 1990s, when I was a captain and an electronic warfare officer, it was clear we had the No. 1 electronic warfare program in the world, period,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said Aug. 13 via a prerecorded video message at the annual DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska.

“Today I would say you could arguably say we’re the third best in this domain and I don’t think we can afford to be third best in electronic warfare.”

Nations such as Russia and China have made significant gains against the U.S. in this space after watching U.S. operations for nearly 25 years and seeing a divestment of advanced jamming equipment by the U.S. after the Cold War.

However, one top general still believes the U.S. is the top dog in this game, it’s just a matter of practice.

“I believe we’re still No. 1, but we don’t practice it enough. We don’t get out and do what we have to do. If you want to be good at anything you better practice it each and every day,” Gen. John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, said at the DoDIIS conference.

“We have to do that with electronic warfare.”

Bacon was highlighting provisions of the annual defense policy bill, signed into law by the president on Aug. 13, he included to help the U.S. regain its EW prowess.

Among the final lengthy provision in the law are several requirements to help address the issue. DoD must establish processes and procedures to develop, integrate and enhance electronic warfare, all of which will be overseen by an appointee of the secretary of defense. There must be the establishment of a cross-functional team for electronic warfare that will identify gaps in electronic warfare and joint electromagnetic spectrum operations within the Department of Defense. And a comprehensive assessment of the electronic warfare capabilities of Russia and China must be conducted in consultation with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, DIA’s director, declined to offer specifics in terms of U.S. vulnerabilities versus adversaries in the EW space when asked during a reporter roundtable at the same conference, but he did say that assessing these types of capabilities is central to what his agency has to be able to do.

Tracking “potential game changers” in emerging technologies before they’re fielded is one of the critical tasks his agency conducts, he said. The goal, he said, is “to be able to understand what that is and then what’s the reverse engineering behind it … what is the defeat mechanism you have to put in place.”

Responsible for a diverse set of missions, STRATCOM has been structured in stovepipes: the nuclear triad (itself three stovepipes), space, conventional global strike and missile defense. Yet Gen. John Hyten, speaking Aug. 13 at the annual DoDIIS conference in Omaha, Nebraska (STRATCOM’s home), envisions a future in which the command is one innovative war-fighting team that deters conflict and delivers decisive capabilities from, in and through all domains, wherever and whenever needed.

Adversaries such as China have begun to integrate their disparate, yet related capabilities. With the Strategic Support Force, established in 2015, China has organized space, counter space, cyber, offensive, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in the same command, Hyten said, because they understand the need to integrate information.

The U.S. now has Cyber Command, a fully unified combatant command for generating cyber effects around the world, as well as STRATCOM, Specials Operations Command and Transportation Command. Soon there will be also be a unified command for space, and all of these operate separately.

Hyten noted that success in the future — not just for STRATCOM, but also for the other similar commands that coordinate capabilities for other combatant commanders — will be achieved when capabilities are applied through whatever domain necessary with whatever means available.

“We don’t care where it comes from, where it goes to, as long as it dominates the adversary,” he said.

“Our challenge is how do we integrate that effectively so that we seamlessly share information in real-time across the board,” he said of these combatant commands — currently called functional, rather than geographic combatant commands, as they are not restricted to a region.

“And, oh, by the way, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have those separate commands focused on those areas. The key is how do we integrate them?”

SOCOM and STRATCOM in July underwent the first war-fighter exercise between functional combatant commands as a means of figuring out how to eliminate redundancies, gain greater efficiencies and establish better integrated command relations.

Change to unified command plan

Both Hyten and Gen. Raymond Thomas, commander of SOCOM, outlined potential changes to the unified command plan, which defines scopes and authorities of the geographic and functional combatant commands and investments in manpower.

The commanders would like to change first the perception and then the applications of their “functional” commands, because “that’s not the way I talk about my command and that’s not the way Gen. Thomas talks about his command,” Hyten said.

“We are global war-fighting commands. We have global capabilities that deliver lethal capabilities around this planet,” Hyten added.

Thomas said during the same conference that there is a change pending to list these commands as global combatant commands, “and it matters.”

“We are really keen and excited you might say on offering blended global solutions to the Department of Defense as we go forward,” Thomas added.