The Wrap: GIDE 12 Spotlights CJADC2; State Speeding AI Work; DoD Acquisition Rules Revamp

Welcome to The Wrap for Thursday, September 12!

From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

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GIDE 12 Spotlights CJADC2

The Pentagon is spotlighting its Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) network – particularly related to joint kill chains, global integration, and allied partner sharing – for the 12th iteration of Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) set to kick off in about 45 days. That was the news today from Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, GIDE 6 mission commander in the United States Department of Defense ’s (DoD) CDAO office, who talked about the GIDE 12 planning during the General Dynamics Information Technology Emerge conference. Strohmeyer explained that for GIDE 12, the department plans to build on the?minimum viable capability delivered last year. “Several elements of last year’s minimum viable capability are currently in use in real-world operations,” he said, adding that for GIDE 12, the team will have a particular focus on Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat Systems, and Coalition Collaborative Planning capabilities. “We are hoping to build on what was a minimum viable capability last year that we delivered, which didn’t mean it was perfect. It meant that it was performant. Our goal [with GIDE 12] is to significantly expand its capabilities and test it in a robust operational environment,” the colonel said.

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State Speeding AI Work

The 美国国务院 is running hard with two artificial intelligence (AI) use cases to improve its cybersecurity operations, according to Manuel “Manny” Medrano, who runs the agency’s Office of Cyber Monitoring and Operations. During a talk today at a Nextgov/FCW event, Medrano said the first use case aims to correlate all of the data sets from the security operations center (SOC) and different identity management solutions into a single visualization, with a due date of the end of this year. The second use case tracks with the first and focuses on defensive cyber operations (DCO) and using automation to give back to the agency’s security analysts some of the time they now spend on more manual tasks. “This is a program that we’re working on right now where we have a lot of data that we’re ingesting, and then we’re trying to work with our different partners – within the private sector, our Five Eyes, and the interagency as well – to make sure that what we’re doing is making sense of the data,” Medrano said. “What we’re focusing on right now with DCO, it is what I call people, process, and technology,” Medrano explained. “So, no offense to vendors out there, but the technology is only as good as the people and the process.”

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DoD Acquisition Rules Revamp

It’s very difficult to stand outside of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and understand the nuts and bolts of budgeting required by acquisition rules, so hats off to John Hale, chief of cloud services at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), who gave us a look inside the process today at General Dynamics Information Technology Emerge where he argued that the swift pace of technology evolution demands a “re-evaluation” of current acquisition rules. “Our planning and budget cycles are in such a way that they don’t really facilitate agile capabilities,” he said. “It’s September of 2024 and I just submitted my budget for 2026 and in that budget, I had to submit my five-year plan,” Hale explained, adding, “So, not only did I submit my budget for 2026 I had to also plan what I was going to spend all the way through to 2031.” He continued, “In today’s world with how rapid things are changing and how agile technology and capabilities are, those are the handcuffs that we’re playing on,” and asked, “How am I agile when I’m trying to predict in 2024 what I’m going to need in 2026, and 2027, and 2028?” Bottom line: “Those are where I think the procurement laws need to be changed and updated to deal with what we’re doing today,” Hale said.

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Maven Getting a Check-Up

The Maven AI program run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is about to get a regular check-up by the inspectors general offices at NGA and the United States Department of Defense (DoD) who will be looking at the “effectiveness with which the [NGA] has integrated the Maven artificial intelligence program into the NGA’s geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) operations and fielded the technology to DoD mission areas,” according to a Sept. 9?memo. DoD established Maven in 2017 and handed it over to NGA in 2022. While The Wrap always loves to read IG reports because they often reveal things that regular news people won’t ever get to find out, that doesn’t mean Maven’s turn with the IG offices represents anything too out of the ordinary. An NGA spokesperson told MeriTalk today that the IG evaluation was “pre-planned” and “pre-coordinated” as a “joint opportunity for NGA and DoD to focus on a high-priority mission area that is of interest both within the Defense community and beyond, given the importance of Artificial Intelligence to drive U.S. National Security policy.”

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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected].