The Pentagon proposed a fiscal 2025 budget of $849.8 billion, about 1% higher than this year’s budget request. The top line figure aligns with the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed last year, which sets limits on defense and non-defense discretionary spending. Defense officials said the 1% increase would not be enough to cover inflation.

“Overall, [fiscal 2024] was a good budget. As we pivot toward this year, I think it’s a much more difficult budget, we’re gonna see some very difficult trade-offs. I’m not sure if we’re going to see as positive outcomes as all communities might want see,” Matt Borron, the Association of Defense Communities executive director, said during the Defense Communities National Summit on Tuesday.

2024 being an election year adds complexity to negotiating and passing the 2025 defense budget. Members of Congress will go back to their districts in July and return sometime in the fall to pass a continuing resolution to temporarily fund the federal government. After that, they won’t be back until after the presidential election.

“I think every year we seem to find new ways to make this hard. And yet, we generally still manage to get it across the line. But this year does feel particularly difficult. And election years can play either way. You can have folks willing to make a deal to get things done before they go home and try to keep their jobs. But it doesn’t feel that way right now. So I think it is going to be rough,” Jeanine Womble, the House Armed Services Committee staff lead, said. 

Passing the 2025 NDAA

Borron said while there were some contentious issues during the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act negotiations, they weren’t “as contentious as they might have come across in some of the debates.”

“That’s why I think you got a relatively quick passage of the NDAA certainly, as compared to the appropriations bill,” said Borron.

The same social issues, such as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion spending, will most likely come up during this year’s NDAA negotiations. But the resolution of those contentious issues will hinge on the results of this year’s election.

“I think you’re gonna see those same social issues come up for discussion. I don’t see necessarily a different outcome this year,” said Borron.

“All of that is really dependent on the election. I think they can resolve many of those issues, but the more contentious ones are going to have to wait until we know who’s in charge of the White House, who’s running the Senate, who’s running the House. I think in general, there’s a desire to make members as happy as possible. But I don’t think those contentious issues have really changed. The needle hasn’t shifted. We’ll see a rehash of it. And the outcome will be dependent on the elections.”

Womble believes that despite the contentious issues that will come up during this year’s round of debates, the NDAA will ultimately pass.

“I can’t give you a certain date when it will pass, but I believe it will,” said Womble.

“Maybe not quite before October 1, but in the neighborhood. I truly believe that Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and the members of [the House Armed Services Committee] very much want to get it done every year. There are contentious issues every year, there are things that go to the very end. In a bipartisan way, the committee finds a way.”

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The Air Force seeks to override governors’ authority over their National Guard personnel in some states and move Air National Guard units with space missions to the Space Force.

Air Force officials are proposing legislation to bypass existing law requiring them to obtain a governor’s consent before making changes to a National Guard unit and to transfer 14 Air National Guard space units across seven states into the Space Force.

The draft legislation titled “Transfer to The Space Force of covered space functions of the Air National Guard of the United States,” which was reviewed by Federal News Network, would allow the Air Force Secretary to take one of three courses of action if National Guard space units end up being removed from their states:

• change the status of the unit so that it’s a Space Force unit rather than an Air National Guard unit;
• deactivate the unit after revoking its federal recognition;
• or assign the unit a new federal mission.

If passed, the legislation would waive section 104(c) of Title 32, which says that “no change in the branch, organization or allotment of a unit located entirely within a state may be made without the approval of its governor;” and section 18238 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which states that “a unit of the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard may not be relocated or withdrawn under this chapter without the consent of the governor of the state.

Upon the transfer, the Space Force end strength would increase by that number of personnel billets and the Air National Guard end strength would decrease by the same amount. There are approximately 1,000 Air Guard space professionals serving full- and part-time in New York, Florida, Hawaii, Colorado, Alaska, California and Ohio, according to the National Guard Association of the United States (NGAUS). 

The proposed legislation is already facing criticism from state governors and advocate groups. 

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote, “I oppose this legislation in the strongest possible terms.”

“Each servicemember signed a contract to serve in the Colorado Air National Guard and swore an oath to serve both the United States of America and the State of Colorado. As their Commander-in-Chief, I cannot stand idly by as the servicemembers I am charged with leading are faced with the decision to either leave military service or serve in a manner that they did not originally agree to. We know that a significant majority of Air National Guard space operators will not transfer to the U.S. Space Force, putting both their military career and national security at risk,” Gov. Polis wrote.

Removing the requirement to obtain a governor’s consent before making changes to the unit structure would also set a “dangerous precedent.” 

“It’s a terrible precedent. If they do this now and they are successful — what’s next? They’re going to be taking a C-130 wing out of a state and putting it into the active component or they are going to be taking a brigade combat team out of the Army and putting that into the active components. This is a very, very dangerous precedent,” Retired Maj. Gen. Frank McGinn, NGAUS president, told Federal News Network.

As of now, Guardians doesn’t have an option to serve part-time. As part of the 2024 defense bill, the Space Force Personnel Management Act, however, will allow the Air Force to have a system where Air Force reservists and Guardians can choose to serve part- or full-time in some instances. But the Act doesn’t apply to the Air Force National Guard personnel issue. 

According to NGAUS, surveys show that over 90% of airmen have said they don’t want to leave the National Guard.

“If it goes through in an attempt to take the Air National Guard space units and personnel, most of them are not going to go. So It’s going to create a huge void and capability at a time when we really can’t afford to do that,” said McGinn.

“It would take about nine years to rebuild that infrastructure in that capacity. You’d also be losing decades of experience from our citizen guardsmen, which is almost irreplaceable.”

The Air Force didn’t comment on the proposed legislation.

Creating a Space National Guard

At the same time, some lawmakers are making another push to create a national guard component for the Space Force — an effort that has been in limbo for several years now. 

Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a bipartisan group of 11 senators reintroduced the Space National Guard Establishment Act of 2024 on Jan. 31. The bill was first introduced in 2022, but the passing of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) delayed the effort. 

The 2024 defense bill requires the Pentagon to assess the feasibility and advisability of transferring all Air National Guard space functions to the Space Force. 

“For me personally, I’ve been very clear in my congressional testimony when asked for my best military advice. I believe the establishment of the Space National Guard is the best use of our folks that have been doing this mission in many cases for over 25 years,” Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters in February.

The White House and much of Congress have opposed the idea of a separate Space Guard, citing that the move would create unnecessary bureaucracy and have a high price tag.

NGAUS, however, estimated that it would only cost $250,000 to create a Space National Guard.

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The agency has also completed the contracting process to support the Coast Guard’s efforts to strengthen its networks.

“We just completed the contracting effort to get underway with the Coast Guard work. There are some site surveys and things that need to be done, but that will be additive work on top of the planned work,” Brian Hermann, DISA’s director of the cybersecurity and analytics directorate, told Federal News Network. 

The Southern Command, the European Command, and the Africa Command are also considering working with the service provider. This will help the commands get off of the legacy Joint Regional Security Stacks, a widely criticized program that once promised to improve the Pentagon’s network security posture. The Pentagon is rushing to sunset JRSS by 2027 as it’s working to achieve the target level of zero trust by the same year. 

The agency plans to bring the Thunderdome zero trust architecture to 14 more sites in the coming year. 

Hermann said the agency will first focus on organizations that are already part of DoDNet, which currently supports users from DISA, the Defense Technical Information Center and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the Defense Technical Information Center on the unclassified and classified sides. The goal is to get those sites up to the required zero trust standards. 

Once more agencies migrate to DoDNet, they will have the Thunderdome zero trust architecture in place to enhance security of their networks.

“Over time, as they come on board to DoDNet, they will get the Thunderdome architecture as a basic part of their commodity IT. That’s helpful for them and it’s helpful for the department because then we know that those organizations will have achieved certain elements of zero trust target state, which we’re all required to achieve by the end of fiscal 2027. So we expect there will be more organizations that come on board Thunderdome,” said Hermann.

Key components of Thunderdome

The Thunderdome project comprises four key components, including customer security stacks and software-defined wide area networking — those were combined into one function that sits at the edge of the network enclave. 

Thunderdome also provides secure access service edge capability, which replaces traditional virtual private networks. And the final component the agency deploys under Thunderdome is application security stacks to provide protections and segmentation functions and prevent unauthorized movement.

“That’s a complicated effort for the department because we have at least four different commercial cloud providers that work with the department — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle. And then we have legacy on-prem data centers, which include some elements of cloud even in those areas. It was really important to us that we looked and found a way to secure applications in those spaces that didn’t have to be different for every cloud environment that we find ourselves in,” said Hermann.

Before rolling out the program to 15 sites last year, the agency tested out those capabilities at three sites. It then brought in the Joint Interoperability Test Command to evaluate whether the technologies were meeting zero trust goals. 

“Once that was proven out, that’s when we embarked on the 15 deployments and now expanding,” said Hermann. 

Hermann said the agency uses the Thunderdome moniker for all things related to zero trust, including identity, credential and access management (ICAM) capabilities, and capabilities the DoD has received as part of its Microsoft 365 E5 licensing, such as Microsoft Defender.

Security orchestration to provide automation

As the agency rolls out the Thunderdome architecture, the service provider is honing in on a key part of the effort — making sure the cybersecurity tools are linked up so they can share information rather than being stovepiped and adding automation to help operators manage large volumes of security data.

“We know that the proliferation of multiple tools and mountains of data make work hard for them. And so part of this is where that AI kind of capability plays in. Let’s take a look at those mundane activities that we know how to respond to and if that solves for 75% or 80% of their workload, then we can have those same people using their minds on the higher end fight. This is really important to us to get after that automation, and AI definitely plays a part in what we’re doing,” said Hermann. 

To get after automation, the agency is evaluating a capability called Perceptor, an AI/ML platform operated by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, that will be part of the Thunderdome architecture.

“We are working that in the background between our Thunderdome team and our analytics and data team in cybersecurity in the program executive office for cybersecurity here at DISA. We’re actually doing that now. It’s live. It hasn’t necessarily become yet the standard way that our defensive cyber operators work. That’s partly because we need to prove it out. And we need to have the tools to build the rules so that we can automate those things and be confident that we’re getting what we need out of that,” said Hermann. “There is ongoing work there. It has been implemented, we’re doing it in secure commercial cloud.”

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“There are a good number of support systems that support those weapon systems and are essentially IT systems just like our normal networks and computers. We do believe that those should be covered because they’re part of the NIPR and SIPR landscape,” David McKeown, DoD’s chief information security officer, said during the DoD Zero Trust Symposium Wednesday.

“The actual weapon system platform — we’re going to continue to work on how we might employ that. But all the support systems related to weapon systems —which are also sometimes referred to as part of the weapon system or weapon system themselves, if they are network-based, application-based — yes, they should get covered by the mandate.”

Retrofitting zero trust into some weapon systems that have already been built is nearly impossible, but the Defense Department’s chief information officer’s office will work to get the IT infrastructure for functions such as command and control or logistics and maintenance to the zero trust target level by 2027.

“As we go forward, we’re going to keep looking at other areas too. Zero trust on weapons systems is going to be a heavy lift. We’re going have to figure out how to do that. It’s one thing to do this on networks — another thing is to do it on a weapons system or weapon platform, operational technology and so on,” DoD CIO John Sherman said.

In 2018, the Government Accountability Office reported that the DoD was “routinely” finding cyber vulnerabilities in its weapons systems late in the development process. The department made some progress by 2021, but it was failing to incorporate cybersecurity requirements into contracts. The watchdog agency said some contracts didn’t have language for cybersecurity requirements at all.

Including OT, weapons systems cybersecurity from the beginning

Daryl Haegley, Air Force technical director of control systems cyber resilience, said it’s critical that the DoD includes operational technology into all the planning processes as it moves forward with zero trust implementation.

“Just one of the biggest things I’d really like to see is including OT in all those planning processes to ensure that as we talk about how we’re going to integrate a solution — that we’re considering the full gamut from the OT to the IT. We still have yet to find an IT system that can operate without OT. Yet, we still continue to not apply cyber to OT,” Haegley said.

Last year, Haegley’s team conducted a zero trust pilot at Spangdahlem Air Base located in Germany. The team sent to the base was able to target 38 out of 91 activities to protect five water systems and two wastewater systems.

The Zero-Trust Portfolio Management Office funded the pilot, which became operational in December. While the project showed promising results when it comes to securing OT using zero trust principles, gaps in coordination, among other challenges, persist amid DoD’s efforts to apply zero trust not only to networks but operational technology systems as well.

“It was great to see that there’s a lot of innovation out there and vendors have [zero trust] solutions that can be applied to OT. What we learned from that process, though there just wasn’t that coordination with the rest of the Department of the Air Force,” Haegley said.

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It took 35 full-time staff and nearly four months to review those plans, provide tailored feedback and receive final versions with all recommendations incorporated.

Randy Resnick, the director of the Zero Trust Architecture Program Management Office in the DoD CIO’s office said the lesson they learned about the process is that they can’t repeat it again.

“It was a tremendous effort. We really can’t repeat this process, it is untenable. 35 people across almost four months full time, you start adding up the resource costs of that and that’s not something that we could do on an annual basis. So it became apparent to us that we need to automate this process. We need to put it in electronic form where we could actually apply AI tools to actually ask questions and to achieve answers based on the submissions. That’s where our head is going right now,” Resnick said during the DoD Zero Trust Symposium Tuesday.

The DoD CIO’s office mandated all defense components to submit an updated version of their zero trust implementation plans every October, laying out a detailed approach to achieve the target zero trust architecture by 2027. 

The goal is to streamline this year’s review of zero trust implementation plans so it is not such a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. 

“Suffice to say, we will be automating our implementation plans and we will be explaining exactly how to do that with all the components. The plans that we may get in October will be much more streamlined, automated and with the goal of ensuring that we do not need anymore 35 people full-time for three and a half months,” said Resnick.

Accelerating zero trust pilots

The DoD CIO’s office’s plans this year include accelerating zero trust pilot development. The office is lining up about 15 pilots that span across the first course of action, which is adding tools to the existing infrastructure; the second course of action, which relies on commercial providers to develop zero trust compliant cloud; and the third course of action, which is an on-prem, private cloud.

“We want to do examples of proof of concepts across all three at both levels of target and advanced. If we’re able to achieve target or advanced zero trust within these examples, they would be examples that the components could look at and reduce their anxiety level that it’s impossible to implement zero trust and before the end of 2027,” said Resnick.

If the office is able to come up with potential solutions that are independently assessed and proven to hit the target level, it will demonstrate that a particular combination of vendors or products put together in a specific configuration can get the services to their zero trust destination.

Lack of appropriations stalled the effort but now that Congress passed the 2024 defense budget, Resnick’s team will be able to move forward with the pilots with the goal to complete those by the end of 2024. 

Updates to strategy’s activities

While the strategy to guide DoD’s cybersecurity priorities will not be modified, Resnick said his team will introduce minor changes to the activities portion of the strategy.

There will be a slight update to the activities chart, but the number of activities will remain the same. Resnick said the updated version will be public by the end of summer.

“The strategy is sound, what will be modified is the activities descriptions. We found spelling errors, inconsistencies, unclear language in some of the descriptors for certain activities,” said Resnick.

No plans to update reference architecture

Resnick said there is no plan to update the zero trust reference architecture, which is currently at version 2.0, this year.

But concerns around the existing reference architecture being too DoD-focused have surfaced in the past several weeks. 

Resnick said he is open to the idea of assembling a working group to help them with updating the current document.

“If there’s a consensus of folks out there that want to help us update the reference architecture, I’d be happy to entertain a working group that would go about doing that,” said Resnick. “We could set something up and update the reference architecture appropriately to version 3.0. So I’m open to that.”

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The Pentagon is building out infrastructure to facilitate the implementation of AI technologies in a secure and sustainable way, and Alpha-1, a new portfolio of services, will be central to the effort.

Alpha-1 is not merely a platform but rather a set of capabilities and tools that the armed services and other DoD agencies can use to accelerate the development of AI technologies. 

“Alpha-1 is the one that is starting to get momentum to enable AI and ML scaffolding,” Navy Capt. Xavier Lugo, who leads the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s Task Force Lima, said during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event Tuesday.

By ‘scaffolding,’ Lugo means laying out the foundational structure for the development of AI. Scaffolding includes data labeling as a service, federated model catalogs and test and evaluation capabilities, among other components. 

The first service Alpha-1 made available to the DoD was data labeling. 

“Data labeling was found to be a huge gap across the department. The program offices that were very mature — they already had their own data labeling services, but that came with constraints and caveats. For example, the data was not necessarily owned, wasn’t necessarily shared,” said Lugo.

Three programs — the Navy’s Project Harbinger, the Coast Guard’s maritime object detection, and the Marine Corps’ Smart Sensor — are now using the data labeling services CDAO’s Alpha-1 provides. 

“Now the program offices, what they need to be worried about is building models and integrating those models into the weapons systems,” said Lugo.

Lugo said there is plenty of agility in the process. Suppose a program office estimated it needed a certain amount of data labeling services, but in reality, it needed more or less of those services. In that case, his office has the ability to “level load the capacity.” 

“We’re not prescribing any particular technology, we’re not prescribing any particular standard. All we ask is that your data is available for everybody and you’re interoperable, so don’t come up with a customized way, then it won’t fit into the Alpha-1 program,” said Lugo.

Alpha-1 and its autonomy line of effort

Alpha-1 will support various autonomy projects across the DoD, including the Replicator initiative, or the DoD’s effort to field low-cost AI-powered drones.

The CDAO is in the midst of establishing a data and AI hub to support the Replicator initiative and Alpha-1 is tasked with setting up infrastructure of components of the hub.

Under the autonomy line of effort, Alpha-1 will make modeling and simulation capabilities available to the services. Lugo’s team is also looking to leverage the similarities of autonomy across weapon systems, specifically when it comes to data. 

“If I got data for an aircraft A, the Navy aircraft will probably benefit from the same data set,” he said.

“We are enabling autonomy, specifically perception autonomy. I have to be very specific about that. Because there’s two pieces. There’s multiple pieces to autonomy. Perception autonomy is the closest to taking a sensor and using AI to determine what that sensor saw. There’s another piece of autonomy, which is C2 autonomy, command and control of a particular vehicle — that is still left at the program offices to develop. That is not what we’re enabling at this time.”

Last week, Congress approved the final set of 2024 spending bills, giving the CDAO $10 million for projects focused on autonomy. Lawmakers also want the Pentagon to provide a report to House and Senate Defense committees within the next two months that identifies collaborative objectives for for each service, combatant command and defense agency participating in Alpha-1 in 2024.

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“There are some things that we are doing. A lot of it is on the backs of young guardians that are Supra Coders, but we need to go beyond that,” Lt. Gen. Doug Shiess, commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space, said during the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Security Forum Wednesday.

The 18th and 19th space defense squadrons, for example, monitor the Space Surveillance Network, which tracks objects orbiting Earth. This involves analyzing vast amounts of data to predict potential collisions of objects in space, such as satellites or debris, and taking preventive actions to avoid accidents. The process still involves a significant amount of manual effort from the guardians.

“If we could have AI to be able to do that in a much faster perspective, we could have those guardians do other things,” Shiess said. “They are getting after that. They are getting tools to be able to do that. But we’ve got to get better at that. It’s something that we have to continue to prioritize and put to the top of the list.”

Brig. Gen. James Smith, assistant deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, said that while a lot of conversation around AI has been about understanding adversarial behavior, the technology can also help the service improve operational readiness.

The service is currently building operational tests and training infrastructure, which will offer live, virtual, and constructive environments for guardians to train, test out capabilities and improve readiness. Now, the service is implementing tools to measure readiness.

“We’ve kicked off a pilot where there’s a team that has taken AI and machine learning to take all that data that comes in from a readiness aspect and identify trends. Where are your most significant deficiencies? What levers could you pull that would have the most impact on readiness? And then, hopefully, we can invest the next dollar against those levers,” said Smith.

“Our readiness has to be assessed in terms of the infrastructure that we rely on in order to execute our mission. There’s some great opportunity for AI, both automation in terms of reporting the status of our systems, as well as finding the trends.”

Avoiding “operational surprise” is part of Saltzman’s “Competitive Endurance” theory of space operations. The first step to building endurance in the domain is having “actionable” awareness, which will be powered by various capabilities, including artificial intelligence.

Saltzman said the service is focused on investing in domain awareness capabilities this year due to the growing complexity of the space environment.

“We see an incredibly sophisticated array of threats, from the traditional SATCOM and GPS jammers, to more destabilizing direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons across almost every orbital regime, to on-orbit grapplers, optical dazzlers, directed energy weapons, and increasing cyberattacks both to our ground stations and the satellites themselves,” Saltzman said.

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The department spent a total of $44,791.20 on transportation and lodging expenses for service members seeking reproductive healthcare services such as abortion, in vitro fertilization services and egg retrieval.

“This could entail a service member traveling from their home station in one state or overseas location to a state where they can access non-covered reproductive healthcare services, and then returning home to that home station,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters during a press briefing Tuesday.

The department doesn’t collect data on the types of healthcare services that troops travel to receive. A service member or their family member can use the travel policy more than once to receive reproductive care that the department doesn’t pay for or that is not available in their state.

“These policies ensure that service members and their families are afforded the time and flexibility to make private healthcare decisions, as well as supporting access to non-covered reproductive healthcare, regardless of where they are stationed,” said Singh.

The Pentagon introduced the travel policy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, as some of the largest military installations are located in states with restrictive access to reproductive health care services.

In February 2023, the Pentagon announced that the travel policy would take effect the following month. Around the same time, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) put a hold on hundreds of military nominations that lasted for nearly a year.

Tuberville insisted that the Pentagon’s travel policy would result in thousands of service members leaving their state to seek abortion.  He repeatedly said the the travel policy would increase a number of abortions by as much as 4,100 per year. The number referenced came from a 2022 Rand Corp. report that estimates a number of active-duty service women seeking abortion annually. Authors of the report said that few women would likely use the Pentagon’s travel policy to seek reproductive care.

He also insisted that the blanket hold of military promotions  would strictly impact the top military leaders. Defense officials, lawmakers and military organizations, however, tell a different story.

The Government Accountability Office is now conducting a comprehensive review of short- and long-term effects of the senator’s 10-month hold on military readiness, national security and military families.

“We’ve normalized chaos within the military family, and that just contributes to dissatisfaction with serving in uniform. When you don’t fund the government, when you use the military as political pawns, that has an adverse impact on our national security, and it will ultimately cause military families to rethink whether or not they continue in their service and whether or not they will recommend service to their family and friends,” Tom Porter, the vice president of government affairs at Blue Star Families, told Federal News Network.

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At the end of 2023, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office delivered a minimum viable capability for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control via a series of global experiments known as GIDE. In 2024, the office wants to make the data collected during GIDE exercises available to those developing the next round of AI models.

This year’s GIDE 9, which was wrapped up last week, successfully demonstrated a “completely vendor-agnostic” data integration layer for the first time, making data extensible across various operational systems. This data can now be fed into the DoD’s development pipeline.

“Now it is ready to start piping over into the development pipeline into Alpha-1 and other capabilities so that we can start learning at scale as an enterprise. That’s one of the things we really want to get after this year is to start making that pipeline permanent, persistent and real so we can start training those models,” said Air Force Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, who leads the GIDE series, during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event Tuesday.

Last month, CDAO’s chief Craig Martell said his goal is to have data mesh in place, which will allow information to flow in a secure manner.

At the strategic level, the GIDE series is testing data mesh services that will ultimately allow combatant commands and the Joint Staff to have data they are able to exchange, giving information advantage on the global scale.

“The data mesh services that we are trying to bring to bear allow us to be able to have data in common between the combatant commands so that one command doesn’t have their kind of program of record that they’re working with that has data in a stovepipe. They may have, for example, some logistics data or munitions data that is relative to that force that they have,” said Strohmeyer.

“In the past, that data wasn’t viewable by another combatant command. But now, because we’re trying to truly globally integrate everything we do, a data mesh service allows us to have that piece of data shared by all the combatant commands. And not just shared via email. It’s shared live.”

At the same time, the data mesh services look different at the tactical level when the services conduct joint fire missions. When it comes to the strategic level, for example, it’s primarily enterprise-level data that is available in the cloud. For tactical-level decisions, data has to be extremely resilient as it needs to withstand operating in environments that will be contested.

During GIDE 9, the team was able to test out data mesh services for the joint operating system.

“We had a true data mesh deployed where all of the data that was used for those warfighting fires decisions existed on every node and the nodes were intelligently routing the data across this kind of mesh network so that if a piece of that mesh went down, it didn’t matter that the data would resiliently repopulate across the mesh and be able to get that information wherever it needed to go and at whatever time,” said Strohmeyer.

Strohmeyer said that while his office is working on integrating the data collected at the strategic and tactical levels into the development phase, which will allow the development of the next round of AI models, they have a “long way to go.”

On the experimentation side, multiple combatant commands conducted a blind test of an AI capability for logistics-related tasks. An example scenario is analyzing the logistics of moving sustainment capability from one location to another. Some of the participants had access to generative AI tools to quickly come up with a recommended path, while some of the participants were coming up with recommendations without generative AI tools.

“The difference was that this wasn’t research organizations that were actual warfighters that were doing this and seeing what worked and what didn’t work as they went through the process,” said Strohmeyer.

This test is one example of how the GIDE series provides Task Force Lima, the CDAO’s initiative to integrate generative AI tools across the DoD, a venue to experiment with large language models.

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Military and civilian agencies have long struggled to make the jump to cloud computing. Deciding on the right cloud approach and strategy that best aligns with their mission needs for today and tomorrow is no easy task. But more important, agencies continue to struggle with modernization efforts amid concerns about potential security gaps and vulnerabilities the cloud introduces. 

“It’s a tricky balance. The reason why it’s tricky is because organizations rely on various IT and security architecture applications and legacy systems implemented for their specific mission support. Another challenge is that many agencies struggle with having so many tools, having an influx of data coming in from various logs across all these disparate legacy systems  — and they don’t integrate well. They don’t talk to one another,” said LaLisha Hurt,  public sector industry advisor at Splunk.

Cloud security concerns persist for most federal agencies for a reason, Hurt said during Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2024.

In its 2023 CISO Report, for example, Splunk found that chief information security officers identified that cloud applications and infrastructure have the biggest security coverage gaps across industries, with cloud impacting business services, healthcare and technology at 71%, 64% and 64% respectively. Cloud security impacts manufacturing at 64%. 

To address that problem within DoD, the Pentagon awarded the multibillion-dollar Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract to establish a common and secure cloud infrastructure. Last year, Chief Information Officer John Sherman instructed the military services to prioritize JWCC for their cloud modernization efforts. So far, less than 2% of the $9 billion contract has been utilized as concerns around security linger. 

Transferring to cloud, however, is essential to modernization efforts. Hurt noted that, in the end, it all goes back to the mission. 

The California statewide automated welfare system, for instance, needed to ensure it delivered benefits for Californians in a highly secure and uninterrupted manner. The agency was able to replace three disparate legacy systems with one single cloud-based platform, which saved over $30 million in taxpayer dollars.

“While they also improved productivity and reduced risks, that’s really the mission that this particular entity was trying to solve for” — safe, consistent access to benefits,” Hurt said. “And I think it’s similar for other agencies. They have their mission, and they’re looking for help to deliver on that.” 

No transformation happens without collaboration

Cloud transformation starts with a strategy and gaining the support of various stakeholders to deliver on the strategy.

“I know that sounds simple, but people want to jump to the capabilities or technologies. But what’s that strategy that you’re trying to align to? And do you have buy-in from not only your leadership but the people that are going to be implementing it — your employees — which I think is equally important,” Hurt said.

Determining the model will depend on each agency or organization’s unique mission needs and ensuring that the model can be scalable and increase as the demands grow. 

“So many customers are going cloud only. Some remain on-prem for unique mission needs. And then there are others that actually operate in a hybrid environment,” Hurt said. “And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong approach, as long as it serves your business needs. And also, as long as it allows you to scale in the future. That’s important.”

She continued: “The other thing I would say is to take a risk-based approach and ensure you have a strong inventory of assets, systems and classification prior to the migration. You might find that everything does not necessarily need to go to the cloud.”

Splunk spends the most time with customers conducting business value assessments to understand the pros and cons of moving to the cloud versus staying on premise, Hurt said.

“It goes back to the mission. What are the things that are mission-critical to your agency? What are the things that you care about most? And where do you want to house them? And what levels of security do you want to put around them? That will dictate whether you keep things on prem versus move to cloud,” she said. “Where are you trying to gain and obtain more efficiencies?”

It’s also important to expand participation in these conversations and bring in “not only your cyber teams but your infrastructure teams, your chief technology officer, your chief information officer,” Hurt said. “It’s really a cross-functional effort that should be considered when you’re building that cloud strategy.”

Discover more articles and videos now on Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange event page.

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The CDAO will spend the next three to six months developing a set of requirements that will allow more companies to contribute to the expansion of the data integration layer.

“We’ve been doing this with key industrial partners, mostly Palantir and Anduril. The technology that we’ve built — it’s there, it’s available. That’s why we call it a minimum viable capability. We then need to build out a set of requirements that allow other industrial partners to join in,” CDAO’s chief Craig Martell said during the House Armed Services Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee hearing Friday.

CJADC2, more broadly, aims to use data, cloud, artificial intelligence and much more to connect all military assets and enable faster decision-making.

When Martell assumed his role as the CDAO’s chief in 2022, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the office with launching the Global Information Dominance Experiment, also known as GIDE.

Last year, the CDAO office held several GIDE events. The primary goal was to deliver a joint data integration layer allowing INDOPACOM, CENTCOM, NORTHCOM, their components and international partners to access and exchange data. The last iteration of the experiment resulted in the minimum viable capability for CJADC2.

“We’ve been building out the prototype of what it would mean for the hardware to support the flow of data across combatant commands so combatant commands have a unified picture of what’s going on in the world,” Martell said.

“We do it every 90 days to these guided exercises, as the key learning exercise to understand through Wargaming what combatant commanders would need to see and what all of the components under the combatant commanders would need to see, would need to exchange and how data would need to flow in order for it to go from swivel chair and PowerPoint and email to digital data flows as that information goes across the combatant command and within the combatant commands,” he added.

The Pentagon has been vague about the applications or the regions the minimum viable capability is currently being used.

During the hearing, Martell was also asked about the possibility of his office having direct authority over the military services and their development of CJADC2 solutions.

“I’m not a fan of that. And I’m not a fan of hard authority there. Let me just say, in general, the center should provide oversight and policy and best practices. The edge knows their problems best. Solving the problems from the center and imposing it upon the edge, I think is dangerous. It’s going to create a one-size-fits-all solution,” said Martell.

He said there has to be authority about the interface, which will allow the right data to flow out of the services. The Army-led Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch, for example, aim to find solutions for the ways data would flow.

“What we’ve been doing is putting the tech before the policy. To allow the data to flow is going to force the right questions. Then there’s going to be an increased demand for data to flow. And then we can say, ‘Well, that now is a policy issue that we can tackle,” Martell said.

“The change is not going to my very strong opinion, that change is not going to happen by some large a priori view, a philosophical view of the way the world should be, and then trying to implement that.”

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The Reagan Foundation and Institute graded the health and resilience of what it calls the U.S. national security innovation base. This concept includes a wide range of stakeholders, such as national security agencies, research centers, laboratories, universities, traditional defense contractors, startups, venture capital, and allies and partners. 

The report card gave the country a generous A- in innovation leadership; a strong B when it comes to funds available to national security innovation initiatives; and a B when it comes to the willingness of the private sector to work with the federal government.

But the U.S. got a tough grade in customer clarity, or the ability of the government to signal demand not just through communicating innovation priorities and issuing strategies, but also through providing stable funding and utilizing acquisition pathways available to the Defense Department to buy at speed.

While the government communicates its innovation priorities to the industry somewhat well, budget instabilities and limited application of novel acquisition pathways that the Pentagon continues to use as an exception rather than the rule is what lowered the grade.

“For the first 80 yards in the last 10 or 15 years, the clarity from the Pentagon has been 20/20. Whether it be the strategy documents they put out, the national security documents, the war games we are invited to. The red zone — I can understand some of the grades that were given,” Eric DeMarco, the president and CEO of Kratos Defense, said during the National Security Innovation summit Wednesday. “The companies that actually bring a product forward, it might not be 100% of the requirement, but it’ll be 90-95% of the requirements. They get to that red zone and then the traditional process takes over.”

While the Pentagon has signaled through various reforms that it wants to do business with small and non-traditional companies, the majority of contracts still go to the top defense contractors. 

And the top 25 Small Business Innovation Research awardees, some of whom received less than $100 million in funding through the DoD SBIR program, got less than $500 thousand in the subsequent round of awards, indicating that DoD awards companies that don’t transition their technology into production.

“If we do not have more production contracts, if we do not see startups winning programs of record, because you can only require Silicon Valley to be as patient as it can be for a little bit of time before people start saying, ‘Okay, it’s impossible to work with the DoD.’ So we do think there has been an extraordinary change in the way we communicate, extraordinary education on both sides within the DoD on how venture works, within venture capital on how the DoD works and the expectations there, but we have to see some more wins in the next few years or I do think we are going to see capital dry up,” Katherine Boyle, the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said. 

Last year, the Pentagon announced Replicator, the department’s program to field thousands of small, cheap drones. Congressional appropriations allocated more than $200 million in 2024 to push the effort forward, which could provide a boost in sales for smaller companies. Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Doug Bush said the service is the biggest participant in the first round of the initiative so far. One system the service was working on made the cut for the initial round of the Replicator program, and the Army is already proposing several systems for the second round of the program. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife said the service has plans to participate in the second round as well.

And the Defense Innovation Unit, designed to connect technology companies with the Pentagon, just got a major funding boost. Congressional appropriators proposed an additional $800 million in the DIU accounts. That’s up from the $191 million enacted last year. 

Additionally, Bush said major reforms, such as Mid-Tier Acquisition and the Software Pathway are making a difference as defense officials are pushing Congress for more contracting flexibilities.  

“It does take time to filter through the system, but it’s becoming more normal to do, for example, a properly structured [Other Transaction Authority acquisitions] versus a FAR-based contract for certain activities. We’re moving away from fixed-price development, except in very exceptional cases; we’re able to go much faster with Middle-Tier Acquisition and Software Pathway, to get programs started, respond to urgent needs, and actually get something up in the field. So I think the loosening of the reins, so to speak, is having an effect, but we’re far from where we want to be,” Bush said.

How can DoD and industry traverse that last 20 yards?

“We are doing all of the things, we’re investing in the innovation base, we’re putting together DIU, we’re increasing SBIR spending, we’re communicating more openly about programs where companies are going to have a real shot, whether it’s Replicator or whatever. But actually transitioning that into real production is virtually impossible,” Trae Stephens, the co-founder and executive chairman at Anduril Industries, said. 

Stephens said that, in the end, it comes down to decision-making. 

“We can certainly offer hundreds, if not thousands of policy suggestions, authorities that need to be changed, ways that oversight can play into the process in more effective ways. But at the end of the day, I think it’s primarily just decision-making. If you assume you have all the policies, you need to make the right decisions; can we make the right decisions or not?” he said.

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While the majority of new recruits report having someone in the family who served, military families are becoming increasingly reluctant to recommend service to their loved ones. 

Blue Star Families has been tracking active-duty families’ likelihood of recommending service to a young family member or someone in their network since 2016. Only 32% of families said they would recommend their sons and daughters to go into the military, down from 55% in 2016.

On the other end of the spectrum, only 15% of families said they would not recommend service to their loved ones in 2016. That number more than doubled to 31% in 2023.

“One of the major takeaways this year is that we continue to see a declining likelihood to recommend military service among our military families,” Jessica Strong, the senior director of applied research, told Federal News Network. “We know the majority of new recruits have some ties to the military. They have a parent, or a grandparent, or relative who served, so they come from families who have a tradition of military service. We know that military families are the answer to that recruiting crisis.”

More than 7,000 active-duty service members, military spouses, veterans, veteran spouses, National Guard and reserve families responded to the survey which was conducted online from May 24 to July 17. 

Most survey respondents live and work at military installations across the United States, including Fort Liberty in North Carolina, Fort Cavazos in Texas and Fort Huachuca in Arizona. But they also live in communities that don’t have a military installation or large military presence. And some of them are stationed overseas at bases in Japan, South Korea, Germany and Italy, as well as embassies across the world.

Military families steer the younger generation away from service in part because of quality-of-life issues, including persistent problems with spousal employment, pay and housing. Time away from family is also one of the main factors that contribute to the growing dissatisfaction with the military service, indicating that active-duty service members and their spouses are finding it challenging to balance work and family. 

“What we’re hearing is that it’s really about these quality of life issues and the balancing whether it is worth it to have a spouse who’s gone a lot and spends a lot of time away. And you have these challenges with spouse employment, and it’s challenging financially, sometimes, particularly with relocation. Is that worth it? We do see that they often recommend service because of the sense of camaraderie, the purpose and the benefits like health benefits and education benefits are great. But they’re often the challenges to families that make people question whether they should recommend service to the next generation,” said Strong.

Spouse employment has been the top issue for family respondents for the last four years. Moving dozens of times throughout a military career is challenging enough, but difficulties finding and maintaining employment for military spouses further hurt the pipeline for young recruits, as unemployed spouses are less likely to recommend service to their children.

“We’ve seen it year over year, as one of the primary challenges that military families are facing, is challenges in spouses’ being able to stay employed. We have highlighted that as a primary concern and how it impacts military families’ likelihood to stay in service or to recommend military service to the next generation,” said Strong.

Additionally, one in six family respondents report experiencing food insecurity, and the number jumps to one in four for enlisted active-duty families. 

Spousal employment helps reduce household food insecurity as families struggle to make ends meet without dual income. About 37% of unemployed spouses say their families are experiencing food insecurity, compared to 11% of spouses employed at least part time. 

An employed spouse, however, does not completely eliminate the experience of food insecurity. 

“Our location and food prices, inflation, etc., have put us over the edge. We use food stamps and our credit cards. Our kids love and need fresh fruit and veggies, so we just buy as much as we can and go into debt because we are trying to prevent health issues for them in the future,” an active-duty Navy spouse told Blue Star Families. 

Time away from family tops other concerns for National Guard and Reserve families

While National Guard and Reserve activations have decreased since the pandemic ended, family separation remains one of the primary worries for spouses. 

National Guard and Reserve service members live and work in the civilian world while also fulfilling their military commitment, making it challenging for their spouses to have the support system military families living on bases or installations might have access to.

There’s also little understanding in the civilian community about what National Guard and Reserve families are going through.

“You’ll be a National Guard spouse and a friend will be like, ‘It’s okay, my spouse travels for work too.’ It’s a very different experience and often [families] talk about a lack of resources and lack of understanding for civilians [of] what the military life is,” said Strong.

Sense of belonging to the civilian community is tied to recommending service

This year’s survey found that active-duty family respondents who agree that they feel a sense of belonging to their local community report greater well-being than those who disagree, and they are also more likely to recommend military service to the younger generation. 

“We learned this year that when families are relocating, they have strategies for making those new connections. But one in five say, ‘I haven’t made any new friends at my new duty station yet.’ We know that is a challenge. If we can make connections happen for military families, we can solve a lot of the other issues because belonging is so tied to families’ resilience, their well-being and even their likelihood to recommend military service,” Strong said. “Those are the things that I think are not obvious, but really critical to understand.”

Among other findings:

• In 2020, only 11% of active-duty family respondents said that access to military health care was their top concern. In 2023, it was 28%.
• Four in 10 active-duty family respondents said they waited more than two months for a specialty care appointment from the time they sought an appointment to the date of the appointment.
• More than half of respondents did not know what the basic needs allowance, or a need-based stipend, was and only 3% of respondents said that they had applied.
• 64% of active-duty spouse respondents employed full time or part time worked some portion of their hours remotely during the past year.

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The Defense Department uses the metric known as procurement administrative lead time, or PALT, to measure the time between the date an initial solicitation for a contract goes out and the date a contract is awarded.

A government watchdog agency said that while there have been improvements in contracting processes since DoD began collecting data to measure PALT in 2018, the award lead times vary depending on total contract value, contracting approach, contract type, extent of competition and the type of product or service procured.

For example, the award time on orders valued over $50 million increased by 70 days in the last four years.

The Government Accountability Office found that the median DoD-wide award lead times decreased by more than 20%, from 41 days in 2019 to 32 days in 2022.

DoD-wide median lead time by contracting approach:

• Definitive contracts: 97 days
• Indefinite delivery contracts: 179 days
• Orders: 21 days 

Median order award times are generally shorter across the service branches, while definitive and indefinite delivery contracts take significantly longer to award. For example, the Navy takes 132 days to award a definitive contract and 185 days to award indefinite delivery contracts.

In some instances, it takes under a day to place an order since those can be fulfilled through an indefinite delivery contract awarded to one vendor where all terms and conditions are already established.

For example, the Defense Logistics agency awards many orders for commercial goods, services and  supply items on existing indefinite delivery contracts, often with the help of automation, which allows the agency to process the awards in under one day.

“Over 85% of all definitive contracts awarded and over 90% of all orders issued by DoD from fiscal years 2019 through 2022 were below $10 million in value and had shorter median PALT timeframes. PALT values, both DoD-wide and within selected components, were generally longer for the award of definitive contracts and orders with larger total contract values,” the report stated.

The Army and Navy contracting processes decreased by 13% and 12%, respectively, while the median award times remained the same for the Air Force and the Defense Logistics Agency.

Additionally, the award times decreased for competed contracts but remained the same for sole-source contracts or those awarded through other non-competitive methods.

For example, the Army takes 247 days to award a contract within the research and development category, but it takes 102 days for the Navy and 131 days for the Air Force to award a contract within the research and development category.

For comparison, the Army takes 69 days to award a contract within the electronic and communication equipment category, while it takes 55 days for the Navy and 42 days for the Air Force to award a contract within the same category.

Generally, the service branches have adopted strategies to monitor award times. 

The Naval Sea Systems Command categorizes its contract awards by competed and non-competed contracts and then sets its goals. 

For example, the command’s goal for sole source procurements is not to exceed 210 days, while competitive procurements cannot to exceed 240 days.

The Army categorizes contract awards into four groups and assigns award-time estimate to each group by dollar value and contracting approach.

For example, for $100 million to $250 million contracts, the award times range from 80 days for orders placed on an existing indefinite delivery contract awarded to one vendor to 270 days for awards of new contracts.

But DoD doesn’t have department-wide visibility and understanding of the award times. And the DoD’s PALT tracker has shown to be of  limited use because of its incomplete data.

Additionally, the military services don’t find the PALT tracker useful and “reported that it is burdensome and duplicative of other systems they use.”

“Given these different perspectives, DoD would benefit from engaging with the components to determine if the PALT Tracker is needed to enhance DoD’s visibility into PALT changes for higher-dollar value contracts,” the report stated.

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The Pentagon has already picked a successor for Martell. Radha Plum, the deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, will officially assume the role on April 8.

Martell left his position as the head of machine learning at the ride-sharing company Lyft to lead the department’s nascent office in 2022. The Pentagon created the hub to bring disparate efforts around the adoption of data, analytics and artificial intelligence under one umbrella and allow industry experts to lead that effort.  

“It’s not for the joys of the job. I’m doing it because of the mission,” Martell said during the conference hosted by the Defense Department at the time.

Martell left the private sector to join the Defense Department around the time the hub became fully operational after absorbing the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Services, the Chief Data Officer and the Advana platform.

When Martell assumed the role in 2022, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tasked the CDAO with launching the Global Information Dominance Experiment, also known as GIDE. Last year, she instructed the office to provide a minimum viable capability for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to the Joint Force.

At the conference hosted by the CDAO last month, Hicks announced the initial version of the Pentagon’s efforts to combine its IT systems to improve decision-making was up and running, which was “no easy task.”

“The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Dr. Kathleen Hicks, brought me on board two years ago to stand up the CDAO. We agreed early on that to “stand up” meant developing a strategy for the organization and the DoD as a whole, developing the right roadmaps to deliver on that strategy, and creating the right organizational structure to support those roadmaps. With the release of the Department’s Data, Analytics, and AI Strategy in November 2023, the roadmap work that each of the CDAO Directorates have done, and the organizational changes we have put in place over the last few years, these were achieved. We brought together four distinct organizations into one, and we accomplished so much in such a short time. I’m incredibly proud of the team that made this happen,” Martell said in a statement the Pentagon provided to Federal News Network.

The strategy Martell’s office was in charge of developing unifies all the Pentagon’s previous guidance and resources to provide the department with a comprehensive roadmap for the adoption and usage of data, analytics and AI.

Martell spent most of his career in the private sector, leading machine learning efforts at tech giants such as Dropbox and LinkedIn.

The reasons for his departure from the position are still unclear.

Plumb, who will take over Martell’s role in the next couple of weeks, spent most of her career in the federal government but briefly left the public sector to lead policy analysis efforts at Facebook and trust and safety solutions efforts at Google. Prior to that, she was a senior economist at RAND. She also spent some of her time at the Energy Department and on the National Security Council.

“Dr. Radha Plumb will come in as the new CDAO. Radha joins us directly from her tenure as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (DUSD(A&S)), and she is no stranger to the ways of industry. She has been right alongside me for the past year at many key senior leader meetings and working groups, and she will seamlessly step into the role,” said Martell.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement, “I am grateful for [Martell’s] willingness to step out of the commercial sector over these past few years to contribute his talents to public service. Craig and the entire CDAO team had a monumental task of bringing together the diverse talents and cultures of four organizations to advance data, AI, and analytics for our national security, and deliver tangible results in a short time. Dr. Martell and the CDAO team have delivered on those goals and his work will have a lasting impact on how the Department approaches every data and AI driven task.”

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