“We’re 61 days into a major ground combat operation in Europe. It gives us a really unique opportunity to see how ground combat could be fought in the future based on what we’re seeing today,” said Director of Intelligence and Security at Army Futures Command Ed Mornston at the GEOINT Symposium in Denver on April 25. “But it’s really early – in my mind – to say that we have learned anything that we are going to 100% export into future concepts or change the trajectory of our technology investments.”

“We’re learning a lot,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve slapped the table on anything and say this is what we have ultimately learned.”

AFC, a public-private initiative that runs modernization projects for the Army, is taking notes on what it needs, what it’s doing right and how the service has to move forward to fight on the future battlefield.

Tactical imagery

The conflict in Ukraine is a showcase for what commercial satellite imagery and sensing can bring to the table. Commercial providers supply satellite imagery to the military and the public, documenting the invasion in real time. That’s as companies including Hawkeye 360 detected GPS interference in the region leading up to the conflict.

For Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology Willie Nelson, there’s still a ways to go to turn those commercial systems into an effective military capability for the U.S.

The Army needs more persistence from commercial providers, allowing them to revisit a specified area rapidly to take images of an evolving situation, he said, adding that those sensors also need to be better integrated with Army systems, to the point that satellite data can be downlinked directly to the battlefield.

“I’m your biggest fan, we need everything we can get,” Nelson said to commercial providers at the event. “But if you can’t get that down to a tactical user in the field in a format that they can rapidly use, then you’ve got a lot of persistence but no real warfighting capability.”

The Army is making progress toward that end through agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to foster rapid prototyping, as well as a memorandum of understanding with the Space Force, he said.

Need for speed

The conflict has also shown the need for faster development of software and technologies, as well as flexible systems that can adapt and continue working in an adversarial environment.

“The situation is extremely dynamic. The intelligence demands are changing and evolving as we watch this conflict,” said Mark Kitz, chief engineer within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, and Sensors. “We have got to build our systems that can adapt in a dynamic way as the threat elapse[s], as our data demands adapt, as different sensors enter and exit the environment.”

The Army needs an infrastructure that can do those things in an open and adaptable way, so that troops on the ground aren’t waiting three months to a year for new software or a new antenna built for that environment, he said.

Russia’s shortcomings

There are also lessons to be learned from the ways Russia’s efforts have fallen short of the expectations of its government and of outside observers.

“You can really see where they are. Are they really ten feet tall? Sometimes we tend to paint our adversaries as 10 feet tall when maybe they aren’t,” said Major General John Rafferty, director of AFC’s Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team.

For AFC officials, Russia’s failure to deliver in the conflict validates the U.S. Army’s entire approach to modernization and training, from doctrine to facilities to combined arms training to leader development.

“It’s a complete validation – at least, in my opinion – of the Army Futures Command and largely the Army’s approach to this, Rafferty said. “The second thing for me it validates is our approach to training and combined arms training. It’s hard. It’s expensive. But you can see what the shortcom[ings] are if you don’t invest in that.”

And for Brigadier General Stephanie Ahern, director of concepts at AFC, the conflict is also a validation that the Army needs to continue developing its multi-domain operations doctrine.

“It also reminds us that countries have very unique ways of approaching warfare, and that our future warfare must remain American to its core,” she said. “But those who we are fighting against probably won’t pursue the same approach and so the ability to have information that we can share very quickly across communities, across countries, across allies is absolutely essential.”

Project Maven is the Department of Defense’s most visible artificial intelligence tool, designed to process imagery and full-motion video from drones and automatically detect potential targets.

At the GEOINT Symposium in Denver, Colorado, NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp announced that his agency would take over operational control of Project Maven’s GEOINT AI services from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security under President Biden’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2023.

“That includes responsibility for labeled data, AI algorithms, test and evaluation capabilities, and the platform,” said Sharp. “From the NGA perspective, we very much appreciate his [Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie] confidence, and this tremendous opportunity.”

The NGA is commonly understood as the intelligence agency in charge of processing and analyzing satellite imagery, but it also leads the intelligence community’s efforts to map the Earth and process other types of overhead imagery.

The agency has been heavily involved with Project Maven since it launched in 2017.

“It really started with this idea that commercial industry – Silicon Valley – had come up with techniques going back to, you know, 2008, 2009, when the sort of deep-learning kind of revolution happened,” NGA’s Deputy Director of Data and Digital Innovation Mark Munsell told reporters at the GEOINT Symposium. “The idea was, let’s bring in industry, let’s sort of translate what you’re doing in commercial. We want to give you some military scenarios to see how well you can do that.”

“It’s really DevOps in terms of bringing in a company, develop a model, test the model to learn from [it], see what the customers like about that particular AI model and then do it all over again and also get a sort of broad breadth of companies and capabilities to bring in,” he added.

The Department of Defense has worked to test Project Maven capabilities in demonstrations, including at Project Convergence, an annual U.S. Army exercise in the Arizona desert where the service tests its advanced battlefield technology. The Army equipped an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone with a Maven Smart System and Algorithmic Inference Platform created through Project Maven. The system was one of several automatic or aided target recognition solutions tested in the desert.

NGA was a big part of Project Maven from the start, said Munsell, feeding data to companies to help them develop AI algorithms. Most of the lines of effort within Project Maven entail geospatial intelligence, he said.

“It made a lot of sense to take what they’ve learned and take the infrastructure they’ve built and the experience they’ve learned from the companies and find a GEOINT home for it,” said Munsell.

There will not be a pause in development when the agency takes over Project Maven, said Munsell, but it will bring in its own subject matters to assess the effort and better integrate it with the NGA’s other AI and computer vision initiatives.

The NGA has long worked to harness AI for its own missions in an attempt to manage the massive torrent of data flowing into the agency from government and commercial sources. Officials say there is too much data for human analysts to process, banking on AI to flag patterns that need further scrutiny from human operators. This concept of human-machine teaming is an important part of how the agency wants to operate moving forward.

“We already have ongoing efforts to leverage AI, and apply machine-learning algorithms to enable GEOINT analysis at scale,” said Sharp. “This move brings together two major DoD AI and ML [machine learning] efforts under one roof. And we’re proud that our close partnership with the OSD staff is actually what created Maven in the first place.”

“We’ve been able to be a key part of the how the West has helped Ukraine prevent Russia from overrunning Kiev, and installing a puppet government subservient to Russian control,” said Vice Adm. Robert Sharp said at the GEOINT Conference in Denver April 25. “Today, on the 61st day of the war, Ukraine is bravely and impressively fighting on. Partnerships are critical to the ongoing success.”

The agency is engaged in supporting partners with geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, throughout the conflict. The NGA is also sharing commercial imagery and encouraging U.S. companies to assist NATO.

“As far as what U.S. imagery companies are providing to assist NATO and the West in this situation, is NGA OK with all that, even encouraging it? Absolutely. Heck yeah! No restrictions,” said Sharp in prepared remarks. “Publicly available imagery of Ukraine is now providing unprecedented public insight that until recently would’ve been only available through government agencies and officials. And it’s helping a democratic country fight for its survival, and preserve its independence. We support and applaud those efforts 100 percent.”

Sharp said that many of the ways the NGA is providing support is classified, but he shared one example of how the agency is taking action.

In March, the agency sent personnel to the U.S. European Command Area of Operations to train some military partners on the Aerial Reconnaissance Tactical Edge Mapping Imagery System, or ARTEMIS. ARTEMIS is a small unmanned system used to provide overhead imagery when conditions are not ideal for satellite collection, explained Sharp.

“Due to this initiative, we now have military forces in Europe who can use ARTEMIS for high-resolution imagery, creating their own GEOINT at the tactical edge that can be easily shared at the unclassified level with international partners, and with no restrictions,” he said.

The Navy is seeking $195 million for the effort in fiscal year 2023, a 167% increase over the $73 million the service received for the effort in fiscal 2022.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s implementation of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a Department of Defense-wide effort to connect sensors and shooters across the services and generally improve networking and data capabilities. Although the Joint Staff has worked to establish a strategy for JADC2 implementation, the services have largely been tasked with developing their own approaches. In addition to the Navy’s Project Overmatch, the Army is pursuing its Project Convergence and the Air Force is advancing its Advanced Battle Management Systems.

Project Overmatch is the most secretive of the three major JADC2 efforts by far. Details on Project Overmatch development have been scant, with spending classified by the Navy. While Army and Air Force officials have invited reporters to JADC2 demonstrations and documented spending in budget requests, Navy officials have been tight-lipped about their efforts.

“We’ve been very deliberate about keeping a low profile and not a huge internet presence on ‘here’s all your facts on Project Overmatch,’” said Rear Adm. Doug Small, commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command at the WEST 2022 conference earlier this year.

Small insisted the Navy is making progress, even though there aren’t public milestones and spending to help keep the program accountable.

“We have been working at a fever pitch to deliver on those goals, and I won’t go into any of the specifics on those things, but in general what we’re doing is bringing the best of world-class commercial technologies, how the best companies in the world deliver capability to their users, and we’re just bringing that into the Navy and doing it at speed and scale,” added Small.

While the release of a top line budget for Project Overmatch offers a new level of insight into spending on the effort, the Navy didn’t offer any context on the year-over-year increase in the fiscal 2023 budget request. The Navy did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Part of the increase could reflect the Navy’s decision to shift network and IT authorities to Project Overmatch in 2021. That move was part of the Navy’s effort to unify its network modernization efforts under a single office. For fiscal 2022, the Navy asked for $1.2 billion for enterprise networks.

The Navy’s budget overview shows boosted funding requests for a number of information warfare efforts related to Project Overmatch capabilities. The service is seeking $1 billion for cybersecurity, a 26% increase over what it received for fiscal 2022; $651 million for satellite communications, a 17% increase; and $610 million for command and control systems, a 5% increase.

The Information Warfare Training and Research Initiative Detachment is a hybrid wing-level organization designed to connect airmen from multiple locations as they accelerate readiness. It is a subordinate unit of the 55th Wing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The wing provides intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, communications, and nuclear command and control.

The new detachment, also known as Detachment 1, will conduct training and research events to help prepare the Air Force for operations in the information environment and electromagnetic spectrum. It will also operate out of the 67th Cyberspace Wing at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas.

The detachment is the result of three years of experimenting by Air Combat Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Secretary of the Air Force Concepts, Development and Management office, and academic groups to improve the service’s approach to information warfare training and research. Those teams collaborated to conduct 22 information warfare events all over the world, helping them develop its new model.

“We’ve adapted a ‘build, learn, correct, repeat’ model,” Col. Christopher Budde, chief of ACC’s information warfare division, said in a statement. “We are experimenting with sustainable processes and events in quick succession to scale conceptual ideas, operationally test them, then integrate these processes across the larger federated enterprise.”

The new model allows the Air Force to conduct training events more often while integrating personnel from all over the globe. The group’s most recent event saw airmen from 34 organizations spread across 23 locations collaborating on an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission.

“The distributed nature of the events means they can be conducted more frequently, can be ongoing, and members can participate in multiple iterations,” Budde said. “If a unit is unable to participate in an event, they can jump back into a future iteration when available, but the challenges in the information environment continue, and the teams have to respond with the capabilities available.”

“The addition of BISim to the BAE Systems team expands our modeling and simulation capabilities and solidifies our systems integration strategy,” said Tom Arseneault, who heads BAE’s U.S. business, in a March 7 statement. “With this acquisition, we are even better positioned to meet our customers’ evolving needs in the rapidly growing market for global military training, and deliver next-generation virtual systems to help our U.S. military and its allies effectively prepare for future scenarios.”

In an interview with C4ISRNET BISim, President Arthur Alexion said the business is “a 350-person company coming into an 80-90,000 person company [with] enormous deep customer relationships which we can tap into and an enormous amount of technology, knowledge and intellectual property which we’re going to be digging into.”

Bohemia Interactive Simulations works with 60 different militaries around the world and 300 integrators serving those militaries, said Alexion. BISim, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of BAE Systems Inc. — the American subsidiary of London-based BAE Systems — and will join the company’s intelligence and security sector.

Prior to the acquisition, the two companies had worked together. They partnered in 2019 on the U.S. Marine Corps War Gaming and Analysis Center contract, and BISim also contributed to BAE Systems’ Joint All Domain Operations System of Systems research and development project.

In its statement, BAE Systems said it expects the global market for military training and simulation to eventually surpass $11 billion annually.

“The fullest extent is a long way away. There’s opportunity after opportunity specifically in training,” said Alexion.

“Live training is muddy and dirty, difficult to arrange. You can’t practice in different weather; You can only practice in the weather that exists. You can’t practice at different times of day and night; you can only practice at the time when you’re there,” Alexion continued. “Virtual training for many types of training is a logistically better way to train.”

And technology advances are constantly improving the quality of virtual training. Faster processors enable higher fidelity simulations, so while past simulations may apply probabilistic algorithms to see which group would win in a combat and estimate casualties and damage at a top level, today’s simulations provide a far more granular environment meant to recreate combat at the individual level.

“We are the most high fidelity version of the metaverse — if you like — the virtual world which the military wants to be able to operate in,” said Alexion. “The concept of a soldier kneeling, going prone, rolling over, hiding behind a bush, hiding behind a wall — all of those things are represented properly. Bullets actually fly. The trajectory of every bullet, of every round, is actually modeled. It’s the highest fidelity that you can get.”

“The more realistic it is, the more you can immerse trainees into the environment,” he added, noting soldiers using their systems actually have physical reactions to the simulations, such as increased heartbeats and pupil dilation.

Other technologies are also improving the simulation training experience. Cloud technologies allow people in different locations to train together online, while cheap sensors enable companies like BISim to take enormous amounts of terrain data and incorporate it into the virtual world for a more realistic environment.

Peder Jungck, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems Modeling & Simulation Solutions, told C4ISRNET BAE will be able to help BISim with incorporating digital modeling into their environments, creating a pipeline from digital engineering to training.

The U.S. Space Force in particular has been vocal about wanting to be able to design new systems with digital engineering and then being able to use the digital models for training and simulation. But gaming simulations typically haven’t followed a digital engineering approach, said Jungck.

Alexion said military leadership is becoming increasingly comfortable using virtual options for training, partly due to a generational shift and partly due to successful demonstrations.

The military watched commercial space company SpaceX launch its first Starlink satellites in 2018, promising the low-latency connectivity of consumer broadband delivered to any point on the planet using a proliferated constellation of hundreds, or even thousands, of small satellites in low Earth orbit. These systems promise to make faster connections, bring space-based sensors thousands of miles closer to their targets and cut costs.

The U.S. military is already experimenting with those commercial networks for connectivity at its most hard to reach bases, such as in the Arctic. But Pentagon leadership also wanted a government owned space-based low-latency internet made of dozens of small satellites connecting sensors and weapons all over the globe, completely dedicated to military missions.

It was a potentially revolutionary concept, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s organization devoted to solving the military’s most challenging technological issues — decided to take a stab at it. What emerged was Project Blackjack, an experiment of about 20 small satellites that could demonstrate the utility of a proliferated constellation to the military.

Since then, however, the situation has rapidly changed. Without waiting to see DARPA’s demonstration, the Defense Department bought into the proliferated LEO concept and established the Space Development Agency to set one up. And the newly minted U.S. Space Force has touted the need for a hybrid network, with capabilities spread out across multiple orbits — including LEO.

Project Blackjack’s first launch has now been pushed beyond the Space Development Agency’s first launch. While DARPA hoped to get its first satellites on orbit by the end of 2021, it’s now targeting October 2022. The Space Development Agency will launch its first satellites a month earlier.

It seems like the Pentagon has already adopted DARPA’s revolutionary concept and left its demonstration in the dust. Faced with duplication and delays, is Project Blackjack still relevant?

“That’s a question we wrestle with everyday, right? We always are evaluating — are we still relevant? — just like at every DARPA program. Are we hitting our technical milestones? Are the technical milestones still making an impact?” DARPA Project Manager Stephen Forbes said. “I think honestly the answer is ‘yes.’ ”

Project Blackjack may not have a direct impact on the first few batches of satellites launched by the Space Development Agency, but Forbes is confident his program will inform the military’s future proliferated LEO efforts. In the near-term, the agency’s risk reduction experiments have demonstrated critical technologies needed for an orbital mesh network, while its efforts to work through a contracted supply chain will help those who come after, said Forbes. And thanks to the SDA’s spiral development approach, the lessons learned from Project Blackjack could be incorporated in later tranches of satellites.

DARPA and the Space Development Agency

Like all DARPA projects, Blackjack was never supposed to be an operational platform. Rather, it’s an effort to develop and demonstrate new technologies for use by another agency or an armed service. Technology from successful DARPA programs can be used to launch or contribute to a program of record.

The path to an operational program for Project Blackjack, however, is muddied. The most obvious operational successor will be the Space Development Agency’s National Defense Space Architecture. But the timeline is inverted: The SDA will launch its first tranche of satellites before DARPA.

Project Blackjack will not directly affect that first batch of SDA satellites, but it could impact subsequent generations. That’s because SDA is using a spiral development approach, bolstering its constellation with new launches every two years. DARPA’s experiment could yield fruit for later tranches of satellites, likely those going into orbit in 2026 and 2028.

“We’re not directly changing what SDA is doing on tranche 0 or tranche 1, but as they move into their operational tranches, the lessons learned from Blackjack on command and control, data management, data processing at the edge, adding high-performance computing at the edge, all naturally allow them to roll in,” Forbes said.

Learning from experiments

More immediately, DARPA has partnered with the SDA and others to launch a handful of experimental satellites to reduce risk for Project Blackjack and other proliferated LEO constellations. Those satellites are testing out some of the core technologies needed to make an on-orbit mesh network work.

The first of these experiments — dubbed Mandrake I — launched in January 2021. That cubesat has already lived out its expectedly short life span, demonstrating high-end computing on orbit.

“That was very, very successful. It was something on the order of less than nine months from contracting to satellite on orbit. So a really accelerated turnaround, and all chips that were flown worked really, really well — far better than anticipated on orbit,” Forbes said. “We basically hit every one of our objectives that we wanted to with the vehicle.”

That risk-reduction experiment gave DARPA and its partners more confidence that they could depend on those chips for missions. Another experiment — Mandrake II — was supposed to go up simultaneously, but it was delayed six months due to an accident at the facility where it was to be integrated with the rocket. It eventually launched in June, placing the microsatellite in orbit where DARPA is using it to test out its optical laser communications concept that will enable the on-orbit mesh network.

“We’re still working through a lot of the issues on the laser platforms, and it’s fundamentally proving out that trying to start them early has burned down a lot of risk on the program,” Forbes said.

The Mandrake II experiment has experienced its share of issues, some of which Forbes blamed on the decision to rely on commercial off-the-shelf parts. The use of COTS parts was expected to lower the cost of the satellites and allow the government to build them faster.

“When you’re working with COTS, things will glitch and you have to fix them,” Forbes said.

The experiments were held back by the agency’s limited ability to downlink data, he added. It’s common to have a limited connection with an experiment like this, but it’s just one more factor dragging out the project’s timeline. For example, it may take only two hours to run an experiment on the satellites, said Forbes, but it may take a week to download all the data from that experiment.

“Now instead of running four tests a week, you’re running four tests a month,” he explained.

Despite the delays, the risk-reduction experiments have improved the main satellites, said Forbes. Based on lessons learned from Mandrake I, DARPA switched out the primary high-performance computing chips for ones better suited for the long-term space environment. DARPA also learned from other investments in radiation testing that some of the supporting electronics were unlikely to survive for a full two years on orbit, so those were also switched out.

The agency also changed out its laser acquisition software and made mechanical changes to the optical head based on lessons learned from Mandrake II. Smaller issues, such as the location of certain mounts on the bus, were not a huge impediment to launching a couple satellites, but would have become a bigger headache as the agency scaled up to its full constellation, said Forbes.

Supply chain shortages

One goal of Project Blackjack was to build the satellites with COTS parts, reducing costs and enabling faster builds by leveraging the commercial world. However, the COVID-19 pandemic harmed the supply chain in such a way that rendered many of the promised benefits moot.

“I’m not seeing the advantage I expected, but it’s not because of the choice. It’s because the supply chain has eliminated our ability to normally make the changes the commercial world would make. It doesn’t matter who you are; if you can only get one part, then you have to use that one part,” Forbes said.

For example, if one resistor supplier is facing a shortage, DARPA should be able to turn to another supplier. However, many resistor suppliers rely on a few common locations for parts. If one of those areas undergoes a four-week lockdown due to COVID-19, for example, that ripples through all of the suppliers, Forbes noted.

“A lot of that flexibility went out the window when the supply chain squeezed, and we ended up designing a lot to the supply chain — more so than we normally would,” he said, adding that the pandemic has stressed the supply chain for important subcomponents in very unique ways.

So instead of being able to fully focus on the technical aspects of Project Blackjack, Forbes’ team has to devote significant time and effort to getting necessary materials.

“I am so frustrated that I’m tracking capacitors and resistors and things like that,” said Forbes, adding that commodity items he could normally “buy by the reel for a penny a pop” are now difficult to obtain, which slows progress.

And with limited replacement options, not every hardware replacement is a like-for-like substitution that can be plugged into the end product.

The consequence? Software designed for a specific piece of hardware may not be perfectly compatible with a substitute, forcing software designers to scrap huge chunks of code and start over, said Forbes.

He said he hopes the current supply chain woes are temporary and that relying on COTS parts will prove beneficial. “It’s an opportunity that’s still waiting to be explored” once the supply chain normalizes.

Next steps

As DARPA finishes experimenting on its risk-reduction satellites, it’s preparing to launch the first completed satellites of Project Blackjack.

“We’re in the throes of building hardware for our buses and our payloads,” Forbes said.

The first batch of satellites to go up in October will further prove out the on-orbit connections that are at the core of Project Blackjack and other orbital networks. DARPA will use those initial satellites to work through the bugs and kinks of its constellation, ensuring the second batch launched six months later will operate seamlessly.

And in April, the second batch of satellites will be delivered into orbit. Dropped off at 500 to 550 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, they’ll then climb to about 1,000 kilometers. That will take months.

“But once we’re there, we really want to demonstrate the ability of the satellites to share the data across them, work collaboratively along the missions, because that’s really what you have to do at LEO to provide the same sort of always-on capability that one would get from a [geostationary] satellite,” Forbes said.

“If we’re able to successfully do that, then we will be a very, very successful program and really help [Space Systems Command], SDA, [the Missile Defense Agency], whoever else wants to use proliferated LEO for their missions — really give them a solid foundation on which to build.”

The first-of-its-kind app, aCTknowledge, gives federal and military personnel a “onestop shop for counterterroism analysis,” the center said. That includes unclassified reports, breaking alerts, analysis and training resources. The National Counterterrorism Center designed the new app to help deliver the latest intelligence directly to first responders and law enforcement officers.

“With the release of aCTknowledge, NCTC is delivering on our mission to innovate how we share intelligence products with our partners. The app empowers its users with the information they need to protect their communities from potential threats,” NCTC Director Christy Abizaid said in a Feb. 7 statement.

The new app is currently available in the Apple App Store and is coming soon to the Google Play Store. While access to the app is limited to the federal government and military, the center said it will be expanded to state, local, tribal and territorial partners in the near future.

Established in 2004 at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, the organization was placed under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The National Counterterrorism Center is the intelligence community’s lead integrator of counterterrorism intelligence.

“The success of NROL-87 was the result of multiple partnerships and the innovation of our people,” said NRO Director Chris Scolese in a statement. “Technology is ever changing. The relationships we build enable us to recognize solutions faster to ensure we field the latest capabilities. Our people continue to prove they are our greatest asset, solving the most complex problems in new and innovative ways.”

The satellite took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Following the launch, the first stage safely returned to Earth for a picture perfect landing on the launch pad.

The launch is the first time the NRO has used a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket procured under the National Security Space Launch program. The agency plans to reuse the booster in a future mission.

“Today was our first National Security Space Launch SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base and it was a true team effort,” said Col. Robert Bongiovi, director of the Space Systems Command’s Launch Enterprise, in a statement. “The Launch Enterprise teams’ relentless pursuit of innovation drives us to partner with industry to assure access to space, meet mission objectives, and lower costs. Each launch is unique and culminates a campaign of activity that ensures successful placement of the space vehicle into orbit.”

The rocket’s sole passenger was a payload designed and built by the NRO, the intelligence agency charged with developing and maintaining the nation’s spy satellites. The agency declined to provide any specific information on the payload’s mission or capability, saying that information is classified.

“NROL-87 enhances NRO’s overall mission of providing critical information to more than a half-million government users to include every member of the Intelligence Community, two dozen domestic agencies, our nation’s military, lawmakers, and decision makers,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement.

The NRO expects to conduct more than six additional launches in 2022 to send more than a dozen payloads into orbit.

This article was updated with statements from the NRO and Space Force.

DoD Chief Information Officer John Sherman will serve as the acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, or CDAO, a newly created office designed to oversee the Defense Digital Service, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the CIO office he was already leading. The new office was established to better align a number of data, analytics, digital solutions and AI efforts across the DoD. Previously, all three of those offices reported directly to the deputy defense secretary.

Sherman will serve as DoD CIO and CDAO as the Pentagon continues to look for a director.

“I’m honored to be able to help get this organization stood up, again, while performing my chief information officer duties and also serving as the acting CDAO,” Sherman said. “In addition to getting CDAO up and ready for [full operational capability], rest assured we’ll remain laser focused on our CIO duties of cybersecurity, digital modernization, C3 [command, control and communication], and other areas that the department relies on.”

Sherman has a long history working on national security and information issues. After serving a three-year stint as the chief information officer of the intelligence community, Sherman joined the DoD as the principal deputy chief information officer. Just over a year ago, he was named acting chief information officer by the incoming Biden administration.

The CDAO was established Dec. 8 and achieved initial operating capability Feb. 1, the Pentagon noted. Full operating capability is expected by June 1, and the Pentagon wants a leader selected for the position by then. Once that is accomplished, the Pentagon will submit proposals to Congress to adjust authorities and reporting lines accordingly. The department expects about 200-300 people to be combined under the new office with an approximately $500 million budget.

The Pentagon also issued a memo clarifying how the new CDAO position differs from other high-level positions within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

For example, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering will lead data, analytics and Al policy related to basic research through prototyping, while the CDAO will carry those efforts from prototyping to operations. The CIO will continue to lead on core infrastructure — such as cybersecurity, cloud, data transport and networks — while the CDAO will set requirements for that core infrastructure and provide policy and guidance for the data, analytics and AI that interact with it.