In a series of panel discussions at the “Federal Innovation Series: Leading in the Era of AI” event, agency officials and technology experts from Microsoft touched on ways government agencies are harnessing AI to enhance mission support, ensure responsible innovation, and bolster cybersecurity. The event was presented by FedScoop and sponsored by Microsoft.

Candice Ling, senior vice president of Microsoft’s federal business, kicked off the conference with a call to action for government agencies to embark on a transformational journey through a process of co-innovation and collaboration to modernize government operations. Ling highlighted Microsoft’s commitment to responsible and ethical AI solutions to safeguard government systems. She stressed how the company’s principles for responsible AI — including accountability, inclusiveness, reliability, safety, fairness, transparency, and privacy and security — and Microsoft’s experience working with federal agencies can help agencies capitalize on AI to innovate faster and more effectively.

Eileen Vidrine, chief data and AI officer at the Department of Air Force, outlined the department’s goals to provide the necessary framework to “operationalize data and AI for decision advantage” and to be “AI-ready by 2025 and AI-competitive by 2027.” She also reiterated the importance of partnerships across the Air Force, the Defense Department, industry and academia to keep pace with AI’s potential.

Federal Reserve System Chief Innovation Officer Sunayna Tuteja spoke about the importance of problem-solving and the need for appropriate guardrails when designing AI solutions. She encouraged government leaders in the audience to understand but get comfortable with the risks of AI and embrace innovation’s inherent uncertainty. The public sector doesn’t spend enough time thinking about the risk of not doing something, she told the audience.

Chris DeRusha, Federal CISO at OMB, Ginny Badanes, senior director at Microsoft Democracy Forward, and Glen Johnson, chief technology officer at the Department of State, delved into AI’s role in revolutionizing government cybersecurity. AI dramatically expands the capacity of federal agencies to detect anomalies, analyze data, and automate responses to cyber threats, they said.

Pritha Mehra, CIO of the U.S. Postal Service, revealed how USPS is leveraging AI to provide “accurate predictions of where your package is, when it’s going to be delivered and within the exact time.” AI is also helping USPS to document and rewrite legacy code, automate customer calls concerning passport applications and increase its ability to detect fraud, she said.

Brian Abrahamson, associate laboratory director and chief digital officer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, urged attendees to educate themselves on the possibilities of AI. He emphasized the importance of pilot projects and shared examples of AI’s transformative applications.

Michael Pencina, chief data scientist at Duke Health and vice dean for data science at the Duke University School of Medicine, joined Jennifer Rostami, assistant commissioner at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services unit, to discuss the need for ground rules around AI. They underscored the importance of ensuring transparency, trustworthiness, and fairness in applying AI in government. Building trust through governance frameworks and developing blueprints for employees and partners are critical steps public sector leaders need to take, they said.

Also speaking at the event were Patricia O’Neill-Brown, senior advisor at the Defense Intelligence; Kimberly Sablon, principal director for trusted AI and autonomy at the Department of Defense; and James-Christian Blockwood, executive vice president at the Partnership for Public Service. Adding additional perspective from Microsoft were Corporate Vice President, U.S. Government Affairs Fred Humphries; Microsoft Federal General Manager Brian Keith; Director for AI Public Policy Danyelle Solomon; Federal Security CTO Steve Faehl; and Vice President Federal Civilian Heidi Kobylski.

The innovation summit came on the heels of a landmark executive order focused on artificial intelligence and new OMB guidance issued by the Biden administration earlier in the week.

Also noted during the event was a new research report, “Gauging the impact of Generative AI on Government,” released by FedScoop last month, which examined how federal agency leaders are preparing to adopt AI. Microsoft underwrote the report.

Learn more about how AI can support government services from Microsoft.

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Borkowski, in a Friday interview with FedScoop, said he believes change in leadership is important for bringing about new ideas and felt it was the right time to leave after the volatility of the pandemic has settled.

“I’ve been here too long, so it’s time to go,” Borkowski said.

His decision caps a roughly 17-year career at CBP and more than 40 years in government service. He will officially depart the office on June 30. CBP didn’t immediately have details on a successor.

Among the fresh ideas that Borkowski said people are looking into at CBP is a digital process for acquisition management and system engineering. He also pointed to an initial phase of a “futures lab” that aims to help people think like futurists to identify signals and trends and project what consequences those could have, particularly when comes to evolving threats that could affect CBP.

“​​That’s pretty advanced, modern, open-minded thinking that I’d like to think I could do, but I’m not so sure I’d be any good at it,” Borkowski said.

Prior to his roles at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Borkowski served more than 23 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 2004 as a colonel, and worked for NASA as the program executive for the Lunar Robotic Exploration Program, according to his biography on CBP’s website.

Speaking with FedScoop, Borkowski said that when he started at CBP in 2006, the agency was growing and realized that it couldn’t pull an agent out of the field to work on administrative functions. He said leadership brought him in to help fill that role as executive director of mission support, and he became the first person in the senior executive service at U.S. Border Patrol that wasn’t uniform.

He went on to lead the Secure Border Initiative at the agency and later became the assistant commissioner of the Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition. In June 2016, he became the leader of the Office of Acquisition, a newly established office. 

Borkowski said he returned to acquisition somewhat reluctantly when leadership at CBP approached him about the opportunity. He said he was enjoying working on border security at the time but eventually agreed to take on an acquisition role.

“The effect of that was that the leadership of Customs and Border Protection started to recognize that when you are doing what we call Big ‘A’ acquisition of complex programs, there’s actually a whole set of skills and competencies that are built by training and experience,” Borkowski said.

Among the things Borkowski said he’s proud of are the “world-class” people at CBP and having strengthened core competencies like system engineering. He also said he’s proud of a course he helped develop to train people in program management at CBP. That course is currently being instructed by the Federal Aviation Administration Academy.

“I’m really enjoying watching a lot of the rest of the organization say, woah, this program management thing is really important, and it helps us do our jobs better and we need to do more of it,” he said.

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Vescent Photonics has agreed to pay $402,621 to resolve allegations that it used contractors located outside the United States in research projects funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program.

The federal contractor, which manufactures and researches complex laser technology, had received SBIR awards from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States Air Force.

Under the Small Business Innovation Research program, federal government agencies make awards to small companies for domestic research and development (R&D), but the awards stipulate that all R&D must be carried out within the United States.

Commenting on the case, U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan said: “SBIR funds are intended to help support qualified small businesses in the United States, and to encourage domestic innovation and domestic technology development.”

“Diverting SBIR funds to foreign nationals located abroad undermines the purpose of this funding and violates the rules of the SBIR program,” he added.

Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at NASA’s Office of Inspector General Bob Steinau said: “The settlement agreement with Vescent Photonics is the result of a joint effort to protect SBIR contracts from fraud and abuse, and this case demonstrates the commitment of the NASA OIG and our law enforcement partners to work with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate and prosecute companies that defraud SBIR programs.”

The investigation was carried out jointly by NASA OIG, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations. It was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Zeyen Wu.

It is the latest False Claims Act settlement between a federal technology contractor and the U.S. government.

In June, rocket propulsion system manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne agreed to pay $9 million to settle allegations that it violated the FCA in its representation of compliance with cybersecurity requirements in certain government contracts. That was the second settlement between a contractor and the department to occur as part of the Civil-Cyber Fraud Initiative.

The False Claims Act was first enacted in 1863 in response to defense contractor fraud during the American Civil War. It was amended in 1986 to increase incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with allegations of fraud.

In an emailed statement to FedScoop, Vescent CEO Scott Davis said: “Vescent absolutely denies all the allegations of wrongdoing. Despite this, a settlement was significantly less expensive than full litigation.”

He added: “As a small company, we chose the less expensive, more expedient route to returning focus to our mission: US-based development and manufacturing of important laser technologies to enable scientific and field-deployed quantum applications.”

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After some colorful commentary to the unit equipment custodian, how do you convey this problem to command, so it doesn’t happen to another warfighter? GEARFIT, an Air Force app allows Air Force aircrew to submit direct feedback about their gear, better-informing decisions about critical flight equipment.

Or, imagine you are a Special Tactics operator in the Air Force Special Warfare Force (AFSPECWAR) and your team is tasked to rescue a downed pilot behind enemy lines in a dangerous and isolated location, where GPS navigation and connectivity have been jammed. Your team needs to work jointly with an Army Special Forces unit that is already on the ground to locate the pilot and complete the rescue.

To enable you to integrate operations effectively, your team and the Army unit are equipped with tactical mobile devices that allow you to receive and share data from a multitude of systems such as microsensors and small unmanned aircraft systems. This kit allows your team and the Army unit to successfully interoperate, navigate the GPS-denied environment and successfully rescue the pilot without any casualties.

You can credit part of the mission’s success to the Special Warfare Technical Integration Support Center (TISC). TISC is a joint solution in support of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) and United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) that allows TISC to remotely deliver tactical air-to-ground integration, conduct global access and support personnel recovery, precision strike, and battlefield surgery operations.

Finally, imagine you are a member of the USAF 341st Training Squadron, tasked with keeping track of the training, health, and welfare of over 1600 military working dogs worldwide. Military working dogs are treated by our troops as fellow warriors, deserving the same quality of care and medical attention as their human counterparts. The jobs that military working dogs do are both risky and physically demanding and the military needs to make sure they have state-of-the-art medical care when they need it.

To keep these fellow warriors healthy and happy, not only do you need to keep track of the approximately 900 dogs/puppies at Lackland AFB but you need to ensure that the health and welfare of all of the dogs that are stationed worldwide are closely tracked and monitored. To keep track of these working dogs worldwide, the 341st Training Squadron and by AF Security Forces use the Working Dog Management System (WDMS) a global system application serving all of the Armed Forces and the Department of Defense. The WMDS application contains over 7 million training and utilization records and enables the DOD to track training, vaccination, and medical records for our canine warriors.

What do these applications that enable mission delivery solutions have in common? Cloud One. These mission system applications, along with 97 other apps, are hosted on the Air Force’s cloud platform. Without Cloud One, these apps would not be as secure, scalable, and rapid. 

Cloud One was created in late 2017 (formerly called Cloud Computing Environment, or CCE) and is the Air Force’s state-of-the-art cloud secure computing platform for compute, storage, data management and networking. In five short years, Cloud One has changed the game and provided access to data across to globe to hundreds of thousands of Airman. Cloud One has been a cornerstone for how to do cloud computing and many other government agencies and allies have worked with Cloud One to bring the capability to their organization.  

Taking aim at the enemy — Securely

There is no room for error when it comes to security, making it the most important aspect of Cloud One. The team has a 100% success rate against a staggering 10 million adversarial attempts per year to penetrate the cloud. Security is critical to all apps in Cloud One, such as the Theater Integrated Combat Munitions Systems (TICMS).  TICMS is used to track all on and off aircraft actions for Air Force munitions assets and components across 210 worldwide locations. Since moving into Cloud One in 2020, TICMS has seen a tremendous improvement in uptime and a dramatic decrease in infrastructure-associated costs. Without Cloud One and its impeccable security, the warfighter would not have access to the right munitions at the right time.  

Bringing the fight to the enemy — Worldwide, 24/7

All Cloud One-hosted applications benefit from secure, accessible, and reliable cloud platform that provides 24/7 worldwide access and improved uptime performance. For example, WICKR RAM (Recall, Alert, & Messaging) is an end-to-end encrypted collaboration application built for the warfighter. The application empowers individual users, the DOD enterprise, and the federal government to securely communicate while mobile and disconnected from secure networks.  
“Using Cloud One allows our personnel and teams to collaborate securely both at the tactical edge and at the strategic level; both in-garrison and deployed,” said Todd Wieser, chief technology officer, U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command. “Cloud One’s ability to run on many different platforms and its feature set enables us to reduce security risks and operate successfully.”

The enemy threat changes – React Fast!

Cloud One already brings together industry and government to deliver best-of-breed technology to service members at the base, in the field, and at the tactical edge, providing unmatched security in even the harshest environments.  As Ms. Lauren Knausenberger, Air Force CIO said in a July 2022 FedScoop article: “The short story is we’re not waiting, we haven’t waited, we will continue to not wait for anybody else to come and provide us with capability. We’re moving forward, we’re moving out, we’re continuing to improve Cloud One.”

To find out more or join our Cloud One team in propelling the Air Force’s Digital  Transformation, go to  https://info.cloudone.af.mil/#/  or email the Cloud One Program Manager, Major Andrew Beckman at Andrew.Beckman.1@us.af.mil.

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The EITaaS program is meant to outsource basic IT services so that the Air Force can free up airmen for more specialized, cyber-focused network defense and mission assurance. Wave 1 serves as an upgrade with improved and consolidated service desks as well as a catalog for more than 700,000 users worldwide, according to the Air Force. It also the first effort to expand from the initial EITaaS risk reduction effort.  

Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger has said that with Wave 1, the department will for the first time have enterprise IT service management, one platform and one easy way to enter a trouble ticket, as well as a wider variety of end-user devices and an easier way to order them.  

The hope is that it will also allow for the use of analytics and other tools to identify issues in the enterprise and go after those proactively.

CACI NSS is the contractor team lead for EITaaS Wave 1 and will provide services with other team members, which include Bowhead Logistics Management, Cartridge Technologies, InSequence, Cask NX, CDIT, Vision Information Technology Consultants, Oneida Technical Solutions, Enhanced Veterans Solutions, and Expansia Group.

“Work will predominantly be performed in Chantilly, Virginia, with additional locations depending on individual BPA order requirements, and is expected to be completed by Aug. 29, 2032,” the DOD contract award announcement said. “This award is the result of a competitive acquisition with four quotations received.”

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center is the contracting activity.

As for Wave 2, the scope is still changing as the Air Force moves toward industry days and draft requests for proposals. However, it will include overhauling base infrastructure, and about 30 bases will be prioritized, Knausenberger said last month at a forum hosted by the Potomac Officers Club.

“I suspect that the money will come when one of our industry partners knocks it out of the park and shows us that that next-generation architecture makes a huge impact for unclassified and secret warfighting capabilities as well as a huge impact to our business capability, our ability to fight with our allies and our ability just to be more efficient in our day-to-day business,” she said.

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CIO Lauren Knausenberger announced the interim strategy Monday at the Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower 2022 event in Montgomery, Alabama, saying that she expects a final version will be approved “in the coming days.”

“This was our effort to publicly go to the next level of detail and say where are we throwing our money and our time and our focus and our effort, and where do we want industry and our community to also focus,” Knausenberger said during her opening keynote.

The strategy features six lines of effort, which Knausenberger called “pretty straightforward.” They are: accelerate cloud adoption; future of cybersecurity; workforce; IT portfolio management; excellence in core IT and mission-enabling services; and data and AI.

“These are the things we have to do to get after it. We’re no longer at a point where we have to necessarily grab new technology to solve our problems,” she said. “We’re at the point where we really have to execute and we have to block and tackle, and we have to be able to operate very, very effectively.”

To make sure the strategy doesn’t become “shelfware” — a play on the term in the software industry for something that an organization perceives is necessary but is never effectively used — Knausenberger said there are milestones the department and supporting community will work through to track progress on the lines of effort “so we know exactly where we are and we know exactly what was done.”

“We have too many things to do as a community,” she said. “So how do we ruthlessly prioritize to make sure that we are all focused on getting a couple of those things done so that we can see it across the finish line?”

The Air Force will need money to make progress on this strategy, Kanusenberger acknowledged, explaining it’s the biggest concern she hears about from stakeholders in the department. However, though she couldn’t reveal specifics on budget numbers that are forthcoming for the department’s IT spend, she said if things go as expected with the president’s budget and the Defense Department’s program objective memorandum (POM), there should be a “windfall,” particularly in fiscal 2024.

“We’re going to be putting our money where our mouth is,” Knausenberger said.

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Lockheed has been developing the system for the Air Force as part of a rapid prototyping program to give the service greater ability to destroy high-value, time-sensitive targets and heavily defended land targets. Following the completion of the booster test series last month, the program is about to move into what officials call “all-up-round testing.”

“We have more missiles to build and more flight tests to get through and complete than we’ve had at any other time in this program, with the goal of reaching the early operational capability in 2023. So, there’s just a lot going on and it’s an extremely aggressive schedule,” Brian Schappacher, Lockheed’s deputy program manager for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon, said during a Mitchell Institute podcast released on Saturday.

“That keeps me up at night, just making sure that we can — we can meet all of those commitments,” he said, adding that the flight test program has been structured so that each subsequent test is “a little harder” than the previous one.

The ARRW is a boost-glide system that relies on a rocket to propel the weapon to hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5. The most recent test series, which is now completed, was mainly focused on validating the performance of the booster, according to Schappacher.

“Now we’re moving into what we call the all-up-round test series … which is end to end,” Schappacher said. “We’re still going to focus on booster performance, of course, but we’re going to shift some focus onto the — some additional focus onto the glider performance.”

Hypersonic missiles are expected to fly at extremely high speeds with great maneuverability. The performance requirements create major challenges for weapons designers and engineers who must create a system that can survive in those extreme operating conditions.

Schappacher didn’t announce a start date for the all-up-round testing. In a press release July 13, the Air Force said it will begin “later this year.”

During the most recent booster test on July 12 off the coast of California, the platform reached hypersonic speeds after being launched form a B-52 bomber and “primary and secondary objectives were met,” according to the release.

“This was another important milestone for the Air Force’s first air-launched hypersonic weapon. The test successfully demonstrated booster performance expanding the operational envelope. We have now completed our booster test series and are ready to move forward to all-up-round testing later this year,” Air Force armament directorate program executive officer Brig. Gen. Heath Collins said in the release.

Despite the aggressive test schedule and the 2023 target date to achieve early operational capability, Schappacher said he’s “confident that we’re gonna be able to get there.”

However, questions remain about the ARRW’s future even if the all-up-round testing is successful.

“We haven’t made the decision on what do we do when the current demonstration program finishes,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Andrew Hunter told reporters July 16 at the Royal International Air Tattoo just days after the most recent successful flight test of the system, according to Breaking Defense.

“What we’re looking at is our weapons mix and our munitions mix for our highest priority operational problem sets which are tied to the pacing threat, and that’s what’s really driving decision-making,” Hunter said. “You obviously don’t wouldn’t buy something that doesn’t work. But even if it does work … it’s got to be the right contribution to the overall weapons mix.”

The Pentagon is pursuing several hypersonic weapons projects in addition to the ARRW. The Air Force has a Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) program that aims to use scramjet technology instead of a boost-glide system to achieve hypersonic flight. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been testing scramjet technology as part of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) initiative.

Meanwhile, the Army and Navy are pursuing their own platforms known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) and Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS), respectively. The Army is aiming to field the LRHW next year, while the Navy plans to field CPS systems on destroyers by 2025.

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Last month, under pressure from lawmakers for a decision, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tapped the Air Force to be the acquisition authority for homeland cruise missile defense.

During a pre-recorded event that aired Friday, MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill was asked how his agency will interface with the Air Force going forward as the Pentagon plans to conduct the tech demo.

“It’s a great question and it’s something that we’re gonna have to work through,” Hill said at the event hosted by Defense News.

“We’re going to still, as I understand it now, since the budget did fund us to go execute a National Capital Region demonstration — we want to make sure that there’s no misalignment with the assumptions that we’ve made on the architectures with what the Air Force wants to do in the future and where the department wants to go,” he said.

“No one has told us to stop [these efforts]. And I’ve been having conversations with the Air Force on how to proceed forward. Everything from the analysis that we’ve done to date, providing that to the Air Force, because they should … have that so they can assess it and make their decisions as the lead service. We’re going to pull them into that demo or turn that whole demo over to the Air Force for execution. So, it kind of depends on what they want to do,” he added.

Hill said his agency will “fully support” the Air Force with whatever it needs, as well as U.S. Northern Command — the combatant command responsible for defending the continental United States.

Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of Northcom, has been banging the drum about the need to bolster America’s defenses against air- and sea-launched cruise missiles that could be launched by Russia or China in particular.

“The threat exists today,” he told reporters at a Defense Writers Group meeting in April. “So the urgency is there in my mind. This is the decision space we’re ceding for our national leaders.”

VanHerck is calling on other organizations to think about a wide range of potential technology solutions.

“What I want in industry, what I want in Missile Defense Agency [and] the services to do is let their minds run wild on capabilities to accomplish this mission,” he said.

Such capabilities could include using the electromagnetic spectrum or other “non-kinetic means” — not just missiles that are designed to kill other missiles — to thwart attacks.

Officials have also highlighted the need for additional sensors.

“We have to have all domain awareness — that’s sensing capability,” Hill said on Friday. “And we need to have as much decision space as possible to protect the country. So whatever contribution we can make, we will, but we will honor the fact that the Air Force has lead.”

Acquiring and deploying new sensors, shooters and battle management capabilities for this mission on a large scale would likely require substantial additional investment by the Defense Department.

In a report last year, the Congressional Budget Office said developing and deploying an architecture that could cover the contiguous United States would be “feasible but expensive, with costs ranging from roughly $75 billion to $465 billion over 20 years.”

In a report published last month, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies proposed an architecture that they estimate would cost $32.7 billion over 20 years.

A key question that has yet to be answered but would greatly affect the scope of cruise missile defenses is how many potential targets the U.S. government would want to try to protect.

“As far as what we’re going to defend specifically, I think that’s a policy decision,” VanHerck said. “We’re working closely with DOD on policy on what to defend. I would say the most important things that you can think of, we already defend D. C. Certainly our continuity of our government, our key decision-makers that have a responsibility for nuclear command and control, our nuclear forces are key. Power projection capabilities, key defense industrial base, single points of failure in key critical infrastructure. It goes much beyond the Department of Defense.”

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ABMS is the Air Force’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept, which seeks to connect sensors and shooters, and provide battlefield commanders with the right information to make faster — and better — decisions.

While industry has developed sophisticated technical designs and solutions for what they believe the Air Force needs for ABMS, officials told FedScoop that demonstrations of these capabilities operated on either flawed or legacy models for how to conduct battle management, which could lead to commanders and troops making bad decisions, albeit on a faster timeline.

Instead, in order to get to the right technical solution, officials with the JADC2 cross-functional team on the Air Force Futures staff had to essentially reimagine what battle management should be to create the underbelly for technical solutions that use advanced algorithms.

“If we do not understand the process of which to make a decision, there is no technology that you’re going to develop that’s going to suddenly turn this tide,” Brig. Gen. Jeff Valenzia, JADC2 cross-functional team lead for Air Force Futures, told FedScoop in a recent interview.

Col. Jon “Beep” Zall, a member of Valenzia’s team who was at the forefront of developing the model, pointed to the need to introduce innovative technologies and do things differently. He quoted automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who said “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

“The idea that if all we [in the Air Force] do is just incremental improvements to the ‘as is’ we won’t necessarily meet our goals and objectives for advanced battle management or for JADC2 writ large,” Zall said.

Personnel involved in modeling and simulation discovered that when observing command and control at major commands, such as Pacific Air Forces and Air Forces in Europe–Air Forces Africa, they were able to characterize the process but they couldn’t determine if it was good.

“On acquisitions, when they’re thinking about the ABMS digital infrastructure, which will undergird many of the capabilities … as they develop the ‘to be,’ how do they know what the ‘to be’ ought to be?” Zall said. “What we realized through the demand for rigor from leadership [was] the need to understand the ‘as is’ from analysis and the ‘to be’ for acquisitions. What we postulate is there’s this third thing, I’ll just call it the ‘must do.’ That’s what our model represents.”

Using systems engineering, the team sought to look at what command and control should look like going forward.

Everyone has a different view of battle management, which is to be expected, but the model will hopefully bring some uniformity and common lexicon to the fore.

“What this model will hopefully do is it will converge our mental models of what battle management is, and then we have a common point of departure as we develop things,” Zall said. “We think one of the things that we hope to add value to the joint and mission partner conversation is a common mental model. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”

Officials told FedScoop that, in their view, joint command and control doesn’t really exist now. This new model would be the first instantiation and provide the building blocks to disaggregate the functions — allowing for a precise understanding for how to do it and how to implement technical solutions to aid it.

“What this [model] allows us to do is to understand what it means to battle manage, because ultimately, what it delivers is requirements that are going to drive [tactics, techniques and procedures] modernization, the non-materiel modernization, and the technical modernization,” Valenzia said.

Through their work, the team devised 13 sub-functions for battle management that units can organize and place in certain organizations as it best suits their missions.

The sub-functions, among others, include: parse orders and plans, facilitate coordination and collaboration, and improving situational understanding.

“Today, what we do is we don’t understand these 13 [sub-functions]. It’s a black box. We park them all over the place and we don’t even know how the black boxes interact with each other,” Valenzia said. “This is what we’re trying to remove that veil and put that level of precision on.”

He said this model introduces a new way to generate requirements translating into a digital exchange requirement design.

It also holds organizations and industry more accountable, Zall said. Instead of an organization interpreting how one wants to do battle management and developing a solution for it, now, with specific information exchange requirements for each function, they can point to exactly how that process should be done.

The officials noted that this model hasn’t been formally adopted yet. Using the systems engineering model, they plan to model and simulate against it. They’ll also be sending it to industry to kick the tires on it and come back with their ideas.

“Industry has been asking us questions that we haven’t been able to answer. This model lets us now answer those questions,” Valenzia said. “The goal is we create one disciplined approach that uses a common set of lexicon.”

Additionally, the model will be headed to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command soon to put it through its paces.

“We have to prove it still,” Valenzia said. “Our hypothesis is that what this model has become is the seed to create what we think will be the first instantiation of joint C2 … This is why we are partnered with the Navy initially, because the Indo-Pacom was our pacing theater” where Pentagon officials see China as the United States’ top military rival.

Air Force officials said they need buy-in from the other services and international partners. Already the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and Germany have said they’re interested in partnering with the model, the officials noted.

The plan is to brief what the team found to four-star officers at the Pentagon in January.

“We’re going to start writing an operational concept that then uses this model,” Valenzia said.

The vision is that this new model should be able to stand the test of time and be flexible with changes in doctrine.

“This model … also describes the battle management that people who aren’t even lieutenants yet will be executing in 2032 and beyond,” Zall said. “That’s our hypothesis.”

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The Defense Department’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept aims to connect and leverage all the sensors, shooters and associated assets in its enterprise — across land, sea, air, space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum — and apply data, cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities to help service members make more informed decisions much faster. Awards are being made on an ongoing basis to enable this new way of operating, but the concept is still in its infancy and the Pentagon has a lot to accomplish to make it happen.

“JADC2 — I think it keeps a lot of people up at night because it’s such a huge opportunity. We all see it. It’s almost as if we can taste it,” Kim Crider told FedScoop during an interview on Wednesday. “It would just give us such an advantage to be able to do this. We’ve made so many investments in all of these capabilities and we want to be able to maximize our ability to use them. So, everyone wants to do this. We’ve been talking about this for a long time.”

Now the managing director of AI innovation for national security and defense at Deloitte, Crider is a retired Air Force Major General and most recently served as the Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer, after previously serving as the Air Force’s chief data officer. Drawing from her varying experiences in and out of government, Crider shed light on multiple obstacles DOD must confront to enable JADC2, and why she thinks experiments should be at the forefront of the approach for all components involved.

“Overcoming the challenges both culturally and technically through experimentation is really the key. There are challenges on both sides,” she said. “So, let’s do experiments. Let’s work with these capabilities and let’s work through both sides of that problem.”

‘The technology has come so far to allow us to do this’

Crider has decades of experience dealing with many of the technologies and challenges that are related to today’s JADC2 efforts.

“I spent 35 years in uniform,” she said. “I really had no idea that I was going to stick around for 35 years, but one thing just led to another.”

Educated and trained as an engineer, Crider started her career on the Air Force’s large-scale systems acquisition and engineering team. Figuring out how to “bring people and technology together to create maximum effectiveness has certainly been a passion of mine,” she noted.

After about eight years, she transitioned into operational communications. There, she was “responsible for thinking about how to take these systems that are being delivered by somebody like me in my prior role, and actually operationalize them” out in the field, she explained. Crider served all over the world — in the Pacific, Europe and elsewhere. She said much of that service was focused on helping the military deploy secure communications and conduct cyber operations.

“So I happen to be at the ground floor, very fortunately, in that whole establishment of defensive and offensive cyber operations in the military. The Air Force [played] a leading role in that,” Crider said. 

From there, she went out of uniform as a reservist to help defense-aligned companies grasp those emerging cybersecurity approaches and conduct large-scale technology implementations.

Eventually, she moved from a cyber focus to honing in on data and analytics. 

“I was the Air Force chief data officer because I had experiences, again, from industry in how do you use data to help solve problems in environments that you’re trying to protect,” Crider said. “One thing led to another, and that then took me back to the space community, which was really the big new frontier, if you will.”

Space Force satellites, ground systems and other capabilities will be essential to making JADC2 a reality. 

“The technology has come so far to allow us to do this. The challenges that we have, in some ways, they’re technical,” Crider explained. “I mean, not all of our assets can talk to each other. That’s a fact.” 

DOD experts and industry partners are puzzling out how to make data translations, have more open interfaces between systems, and apply capabilities like AI and machine learning to better orchestrate and optimize the availability of certain assets to do certain tasks across a variety of domains. Still, at this point, “we don’t have complete interoperability,” Crider said.

She also pointed to funding challenges that will impact the realization of JADC2 if they remain unresolved. 

Currently, the military’s networks consist of a lot of legacy parts and outdated capabilities, she noted, and are “still very slow.” In her view, the government has not been able to make all the investments required for the advanced cloud-based infrastructure to support the envisioned, ultra high-speed networks and computing solutions that need to be integrated through all of the different domains. 

“We’ve got different networks on the ground, in the air and in space — and being able to pull all that together is going to take some investments. We’ve been investing a lot in phenomenal assets over the years, and we’ve got the best assets that money can buy. Now, we have to invest more in the infrastructure that it will take to pull all these assets together in a much more effective and efficient manner,” Crider said.

Serving in multiple military and industry roles, she also observed a number of structural obstacles associated with carrying out JADC2. The former Air Force and Space Force executive said DOD is “organized still as kind of service-level stovepipes,” where certain capabilities are purchased for the needs of specific military branches. Though there are some good reasons to function in this manner, much of the military’s technologies don’t seamlessly operate across all the services. 

“We need to work through some of those organizational challenges that will allow for more of that cross-domain integration, cross-domain capability to be available and useful for all,” Crider noted. “Those would be some of the biggest challenges, and I certainly think that there are ways to get through that. There are efforts underway to move in a positive direction.”

Still, she urged for more trial-and-error efforts to be conducted early and often by those involved in this complex push toward JADC2.  

“Experimentation is a big part of this, because another challenge is we’ve never really done this this way before,” Crider said. 

‘We’re learning’

The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) is a core element that underpins the Pentagon’s plans for an overarching network to move information across all the warfighting domains. The Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch are also contributing to the JADC2 effort.

“We saw, early on in the ABMS days, the value of experimentation,” Crider noted.

She reiterated that there is still a lot of work to do to allow for the seamless integration of ABMS across the Air Force and Space Force, as well as the other services. The initiative, though, provides a starting point for more engaged conversations between the services at the department level.

Officials involved in developing ABMS observed almost instant value in bringing Air Force and Space Force teams together to experiment with the architecture and its associated components in the initial development stages. Eventually, Army and maritime assets were also starting to be connected. Experimenting with all the different service partners and pairing their capabilities with emerging technologies like AI to enable some integration resulted in different courses of action presenting themselves. Joint commanders would therefore have increasing options to work through.

“The more we can do that through those kinds of experiments, the more we can look at what those opportunities are and what technologies give us the most bang for the buck,” Crider said.

In wars of past decades, the military services would fight jointly — but bring assets in separately and then figure out how to make them all work together. JADC2 is meant to pave the way for what Crider deemed “technical design and cultural integration” across the services, with interoperability baked in upfront. 

“How are we going to do, no kidding, command and control with a set of joint capabilities all the way through? We’re learning. We’ve certainly evolved. We’re certainly doing better than we’ve ever done — but we’ve got to continue to work through all of those challenges,” she said. “And we’ve got to keep experimenting.”

Crider is no stranger to overcoming weighty national security challenges. She reflected on some of the difficulties that accompanied establishing a new military service — the Space Force — for the first time in 70 years, to improve U.S. space capabilities and operations. 

“I told my folks that worked with me, ‘Look, guys, these are tough days. I know we’re all working an immense amount of hours here and it’s a lot of pressure. But every single day, we’re creating history. We are literally writing history — because what we’re doing today was not done yesterday … So, be proud of that. Be proud of the fact that every single day you’re putting a new step in the ladder of where this is heading,’” Crider said.

While the Pentagon has a long and rocky road ahead to implement its JADC2 vision, scale AI and prepare for the next generation of computing, among other technology priorities — Crider has “absolute confidence” that the U.S. “will prevail” in this endeavor.

“We will figure out how to do this and we’ll continue to be the best in the world, because we’ve got the people that are really committed and dedicated to the mission at hand and to the security of our country and the allies that are such an important part of making sure that we can maintain security around the world,” she said.

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