Cyrus Jabbari stepped into the CDO role at U.S. Central Command in May, but his hiring wasn’t officially announced by the organization until this week.

In his new position, Jabbari will “oversee the strategic integration of data-driven solutions to enhance operational effectiveness across CENTCOM’s area of responsibility,” according to a press release.

Centcom has been on the cutting edge of U.S. military technology adoption. It has three units — Task Force 59 under Naval Forces Central Command, Task Force 99 under Air Forces Central, and Task Force 39 under Army Central — that in recent years have been experimenting with and deploying emerging tech such as AI and machine learning, data analytics, unmanned systems and cloud computing. The command has also adopted tools like the Maven Smart System to aid decision-making.

Jabbari isn’t a newcomer to the Defense Department. He previously served as the first-ever CDO in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In that role, he was charged with developing, managing and overseeing implementation of data policies across the Pentagon’s R&E enterprise, including for organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), Missile Defense Agency, Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Test Resource Management and Defense Technical Information Center, among others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At the R&E directorate, he also chaired the Transition Tracking Action Group, which was stood up in February 2024 to boost DOD’s ability to keep tabs on, manage and make smart investments in technology transition efforts across the Pentagon’s vast capability development enterprise, all the way from the early stages of R&D to fielding, according to a press release.

The action group enabled “a new approach to technology portfolio management that leverages advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to provide DOD officials with the insights [they need] to make informed, innovative decisions,” Jabbari said in a statement last year.

Prior to that, Jabbari supported the Pentagon as a data and analytics lead at ANSER, a non-profit corporation that develops solutions for clients in the national security community, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“Thrilled to officially welcome a fantastic partner Cyrus J. to the team — it’s amazing when the right people end up on the right team and in the right position for the right mission at the right time — magic happens,” Centcom Chief Technology Officer Joy Angela Shanaberger said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday night.

In a separate statement, she said she was “confident his expertise will be a game-changer in our efforts to harness the power of data to drive warfighter-centric innovation across United States Central Command.”

“Joining CENTCOM is both a professional honor and personal calling. This command stands at the forefront of operational experimentation and complexity — where decisions must be made faster, with greater precision, and under immense pressure,” Jabbari said in a statement. “CENTCOM is where data must drive action and where data is valued as a warfighting asset. A lot of great leadership has put CENTCOM on the right path, and I am honored to carry us into our next phase of accelerating data capabilities for ever-pressing missions.”

The position of Centcom CDO was previously held by Michael Foster. He left the command in December near the end of the Biden administration and is currently chief data engineer at Raft, a defense technology company, according to his LinkedIn profile.

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The command is increasingly tasked with executing global operations in and around contested environments, like in the Red Sea, where Iranian-backed Houthis are launching missiles and drones in attempts to close the sea line of communication as a response to Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza. 

“When we’re looking at any types of disruptions throughout the Red Sea, we’re able to identify what type of critical missions we’re supporting. We can identify what types of ships they were on, and then — from a Transcom perspective — be able to identify what type of cargo was on those ships, and potentially how it could impact our missions,” Marine Corps Maj. David Costanzo, deputy chief of Transcom’s Operations Integration division, said in a recent interview with DefenseScoop.

Strategic moves Transcom started making almost 7 years ago to better understand and organize all of its sprawling internal and external data sources and apply analytics capabilities to inform decision-making are now having direct impacts on those current operations.

Maj. Costanzo and Transcom Chief Data Officer Markus Rogers briefed DefenseScoop on the command’s evolving ability to rapidly tap into data and deliver digital tools that support and enhance worldwide military transit and operations — including custom dashboards that monitor and visualize U.S. security posture, among other workflows. While the Transcom officials couldn’t share specific details about the dashboards, like their names, they were able to “talk about kind of what they’re really providing,” Costanzo explained. 

The pivot 

After serving as a longtime networks and integration leader primarily for the Air Force, Rogers joined Transcom in 2019 as its first-ever chief data officer. 

Alongside Costanzo in the interview, he told DefenseScoop that his top aim in this capacity continues to be ensuring that command officials “have the right data, at the right time — and that they can understand and trust — in order to make decisions.” 

“Transcom has been, I’ll say, on this ‘data journey’ for a very, very long time. We are, by our very nature, that information broker type of organization in the way that we support all the combatant commands. So, the data journey is not new to us,” Rogers explained.

Around 2018, the command started to fully grasp the emerging power of what he referred to as “big data analytics” that could impact high-level decision-making. 

“I’ll be very honest upfront here. For the first about two years, that journey was not really that good. And I say that because it shapes the way forward and kind of how we made this pivot going forward,” Rogers said.

Leadership was buying in and the command began to see appropriate investments and resourcing at the time, but the CDO said his team just couldn’t get on the right track to deliver. 

“[In terms of] things that you really need as you go do this, first you’ve got to have sort of the infrastructure tools and capabilities needed that you can leverage so that you can actually manage data and leverage data for analytics. We were trying to do that. We were building a platform of our own and ran into a lot of problems in delivering that — all the way from standard acquisition challenges, security challenges, priority challenges — things like that are really hard. So, during that time, we were really not making any advances,” Rogers told DefenseScoop.

Then, he said, “we made a pivot. And so, three things kind of happened in that about two-and-a-half, three years ago timeframe.”

First, Rogers and his team restructured all the data resources within Transcom, which were spread across multiple branches, and organized them under the CDO purview.

From there, the command pivoted to procuring its own one-stop environment through the Defense Department’s big data platform for advanced analytics — Advana. The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) manages that centralized hub for all civilian and military components, and it was just becoming fully operational around that time. 

“The CDAO provides Advana as a platform-as-a-service. But what we do is we pay for our own community space — Pegasus. If you’re familiar with Jupiter, for the Navy, it’s the exact same thing that this is for Transcom. There’s eight or nine of them now that are out there,” Rogers said.

This offered the command an established capability that was already in place from the Defense Department and easy to access. Plus, it was designed to interconnect with all of the DOD’s heaps of datasets, not just those from Transcom.  

Then, marking the third enabling piece, CDAO liaisons embedded with the command and started providing direct access to the office’s assistance and resources, via the AI and Data Acceleration, or ADA, initiative.

“When we pulled those three things together, that’s what allowed us to make sort of this advancement going forward where we now had capabilities and toolsets that we can leverage and the expertise to actually leverage. And that all tied into the partnership with [the J3 directorate] and Maj. Costanzo’s team, with them being some of the first customers that we actually brought in to leverage [this],” Rogers said. 

‘Intrinsic visibility’

Costanzo has served in the Marines for almost 15 years, and at Transcom for the last three. 

“I work in the J3 [logistics and planning directorate] for part of our Operations Integration Division. We’re charged with identifying the IT requirements from our Global Operations Center and really try to be the advocate from our team to be able to operationalize our logistics data and be able to integrate it to be able to support our operational requirements. So, we’re working with [Rogers] as kind of the advocate for the planners on the floor themselves,” Costanzo told DefenseScoop in the interview.

Transcom’s Global Operations Center, or GOC, is both a physical space and a dynamic digital environment that provides a holistic and multimodal view for strategic and operational planning and monitors the end-to-end movement of forces.

Broadly, the J3 team’s mission process is pretty standard.

“We get a valid requirement from a customer — a combatant command — that says ‘We need X moved from A to Z.’ And so regardless of what the venue is, whether it’s an exercise, a normal deployment distribution operation, or emerging requirement for something that’s come up unexpected in the world, whether it’s in competition or crisis, then we’re usually applying the same kind of model,” Costanzo said.

Following that model, his team generally tries to identify how to best gain those requirements with their IT and data systems, and then how to communicate that information both laterally across to the other commands, down to components, and up to leadership so that everyone’s abreast of how Transcom’s delivery capabilities might be impacted.

“One example is our [Presidential Drawdown Authority] for Ukraine shipments,” Costanzo explained.

Since Russia’s invasion in early 2022, the U.S. has committed to sending billions in weapons and military support to Ukraine. Early on in that conflict, his team was tasked with identifying what Transcom’s requirements were, which the major said were coming from multiple different PDA numbers in rapid succession. They also weren’t always sourced at the same time.  

Costanzo’s team therefore had to accurately depict what those requirements were going to be and then sequence those with available capabilities on coordinated timelines to make sure that everything was where it was meant to be when it was supposed to be there so that the command could ultimately deliver those capabilities in European Command’s area of responsibility to meet Ukraine’s wartime needs.

“From the combatant command perspective, they really wanted to know — just like any other customer, if you order off of Amazon — ‘When’s my stuff going to be here so that I can execute my mission?’” Costanzo said. 

The J3 officials were able to leverage a lot of Transcom’s execution data coming from authoritative sources associated with both sealift and airlift assets to then provide, in near real-time, when an execution schedule was available for European Command to see.

“We’d be able to project out, over a certain amount of time, exactly what and when things were going to arrive and where they were going to arrive. So then, the combatant command could go ahead and prepare to have resources in place to be able to move those on from the place where we dropped them off to their final destination or where they were needed on the battlefield throughout the [area of responsibility],” Costanzo said.  

“Normally, this was all done through spreadsheets, email, and those types of things. So with this one, we were able to provide dashboards — and it wasn’t just us. When we were producing this, we were helping and talking through the process, and working with the Joint Staff and their team, the ADA team and the CDAO to really provide the dashboards,” he added.

Though he couldn’t explicitly name them or get into much deeper detail about the other types of dashboards and advanced visualization mechanisms Transcom has been generating, Costanzo said they’re all broadly providing force movement, deployment and distribution planning enhancements.

“That’s kind of a long-winded way of saying [they’re] really looking at kind of intrinsic visibility of ‘Where’s our stuff and when is it going to be here for me to use it?’” he said.

With the dashboards in front of military leadership, Costanzo said he and other J3 planners can then say and show: “These are the missions that are expected today, over the next 96 hours, the next week, these are the high priority missions, and then these are the ones that we can expect either on time or delays due to X,Y, Z factors.”

From Rogers’ perspective as chief data officer, the command is now “postured to rapidly adapt as things change around the world” in a way it was never able to before. 

“And we’re also postured in a way to support the other combatant commands with data that we’ve never been able to before,” he noted.

U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility (AOR) is another region where this maturing capacity has recently become more apparent. 

There, Iranian-backed Houthis have been deploying drone and missile strikes against Naval and international merchant vessels in the Red Sea as part of what they say is a retaliation campaign against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

“When operating inside of Centcom’s AOR, there’s disruption. A lot of things we’re looking at that we can influence is potential disruption to our transportation and transportation network. That’s really where Transcom [Commander] Gen. Jackie Van Ovost and her staff can really influence how we operate. And so, they’re really looking at how we take warnings and indications and any type of alerts that could potentially impact and disrupt our transportation network — and if we can identify those early, how can we go ahead and mitigate those risks to ensure that we can protect our force, but also still execute the mission?” Costanzo told DefenseScoop.

Eyeing self-sufficiency

As part of the ADA Initiative, officials from the Pentagon’s CDAO have been conducting digital readiness assessments on each of the 11 combatant commands. 

When asked by DefenseScoop in a recent interview which command, so far, has demonstrated that they were the most “digitally ready” in DOD, Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri immediately pointed to Transcom, explicitly naming Rogers and his CDO team.

“They have been tested through fire. The [Afghan non-combatant evacuation operation, or NEO] — how do you get people in and out of Afghanistan? The Ukraine support in terms of how are you going to move equipment all over the place? And [the COVID-19 pandemic] actually was a big Transcom challenge,” Palmieri said. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding some of the elements Transcom brought to the table that really contributed to its progress so far, Rogers pointed to his original vision to fully integrate ADA officials within the command as soon as they first embedded — so that when they eventually departed, his team would lose capacity but not capability. 

“My focus has been on making the command self-sufficient. Leveraging CDAO support and skill sets of capabilities, all of that, but how do we make ourselves self-sufficient as we drive this forward, in that, if we can’t take care of ourselves, then we’ve not truly transformed — we’re relying on whoever’s going to do something for us. And I think that’s had a huge, tremendous value,” Rogers explained.

That impact is demonstrated by Maj. Costanzo’s team on the J3, he added, noting how “they now have an analytic shop in place where they’re doing this work for themselves and relying less on [his] team, and they’re having huge successes going forward.”

In Costanzo’s view, part of Transcom’s success in this space to date was a result of, very early on, “putting in a lot of effort and focus” on adopting and enabling data integration capabilities to tap into all that’s available across DOD.

“Everything that we did for Afghanistan — some [things were] similar, some different from Ukraine. Everything that was done for Israel — some different, some the same for the current operations now. So, that was really helpful,” Costanzo said.

For the J3 directorate, “the next step forward is really trying to deliver predictive analytic capabilities,” he said, noting that doing so will be necessary “in the future to really create those decision spaces for leadership” in more high-paced, critical conflict environments. 

Building on that, Rogers said that a primary near-term effort in his office is to improve its overarching ability to deliver data as a product to J3 and other commands and components. 

“When I today build a dashboard that says ‘This is where all of the DOD cargo is on a commercial or military ship — here’s where they are, here’s where they’re going,’ that’s still my product or my application, built the way Transcom is consuming that information and not the way Centcom may want to consume that information inside the Maven Smart System and their C2 processes. So, I now want to build that data as a product set, where using modern API technologies, we deliver the answer to that question as pure data, and that you understand where it came from. We’ve done the data integration, all you have to do now is plug into your picture,” Rogers said.

“I’ll also say that we’ve made tremendous progress over the last few years — but we have a long way to go to get what we need to get at. So, there’s still a lot of room on this journey for us to continue with,” the chief data officer told DefenseScoop.

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During a panel at the AFCEA NOVA Naval IT Day conference, Hagan briefly spotlighted this new in-the-works plan, which he said is being designed for continuous updates in the future. It’s inspired by the Marine Corps Information Environment Blueprint from 2018.

“Now, in the Navy, we’ve worked in the same approach [as the Marine Corps’ prior guide]. And this blueprint is our strategic document. It’s a work in progress. It’s a living document, right, because it’s ever-changing and ever-evolving with the introduction of new technologies. But it outlines what an enterprise architectural view looks like, which is really the key for us as [chief data officers] is to define the big-picture architecture — and from that, define the requirements that then get deployed to the individual systems and are researched effectively,” he said. 

The Marine Corps blueprint, produced around five years ago, was created to help guide and inform capabilities for the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups, or MIGs. Those forces, formed in 2017, support each MEF and integrate electronic warfare with intelligence, communications, military information support operations, space, cyber and communication strategies to provide MEF commanders with an information advantage.

At the AFCEA event, Hagan noted that the new blueprint is being drafted as officials are “refactoring the entire architecture of Naval information systems,” and while they’re also working to establish more sustainable and enduring investments in associated technologies and the enterprise’s underpinning data infrastructure.

“We don’t know what the next military conflicts — or current military conflicts — are going to look like fully. I can tell you that they’re going to involve information, they’re going to involve targets upon information systems. And I can tell you that having quality data is going to be as useful as having the right missile or the right bullet,” he said.

How similar the Navy’s blueprint will be to the Marine Corps’ that preceded it, remains to be seen. Hagan did not provide any information regarding when the first iteration of the document will be completed.

Editor’s note: Mark Pomerleau contributed to this article.

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The Pentagon’s new Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) has met weekly with service counterparts, like the Department of the Air Force’s Chief Data and AI Office, since its formation, according to Brig. Gen. John Olson, the chief of AI and data for the Air Force.

“We’ve been having weekly meetings for quite a period with the folks leading and standing up the CDAO office at [the DOD],” Olson said during a conference co-hosted by AFCEA and George Mason University on Wednesday. “And we’ve been doing so in a joint environment … Our brothers and sisters in the Department of the Navy, with both the Navy and Marine Corps, as well as Army — we’ve all been having these weekly CDO small group meetings and CDAO planning activities. So there’s a lot of cross flow.”

The Pentagon’s CDAO reached full operational capability last week and, with it, announced a slew of new leaders for different sections of the office. And this week, the new office hosted a public symposium, during which it revealed much more about the organization, mission and challenges associated with launching.

At the symposium Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said she wants to see meaningful progress with the CDAO’s key initiatives such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) within the next year.

“What I will say is that we have to be able to deliver. We have to advance and advance quickly on the challenge set that the warfighter faces,” she said. “The CDAO has to be seen a year in as delivering on that and that it is the go-to place for talent and technical expertise to get after that problem” of JADC2 and scaling artificial intelligence across the department.

But one question that hadn’t been largely addressed is how the Pentagon’s CDAO will interface with similar components at the military service level.

Olson said for the Air Force, his office “implements and amplifies the national and Department of Defense direction that comes down from the White House and the laws driven by Congress and Title 44.”

Olson didn’t go into great detail about what specifically the services have been working on together regarding AI coordination and projects, but he did offer that the Air Force and Navy, in particular, have made strong progress together to support the department’s JADC2, data-driven, connected warfare concept — developing synergy between each of their contributions: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and the Navy’s Project Overmatch.

“I would say the synergy of the … Department of Navy and Department of the Air Force has never been better and it’s growing,” Olson said.

He also revealed that some major acquisition awards will be coming soon for ABMS.

Similarly, Olson pointed to the importance of bringing international allies into the mix on JADC2. Already the Air Force has worked with international exchange officers for the development of ABMS, he said, and it’s looking to increase partnerships with the U.K., Australia and Canada.

“I will be only satiated and happy when we have a truly interconnected and dynamic and synergistic ecosystem that includes all of our international partners and allies,” Olson said.

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Spirk did not discuss his next career step or who his successor might be. His two-year tenure leading the Pentagon’s data management efforts included the creation of a DOD data strategy and implementation of data decrees from top leadership.

He urged the DOD to continue building a data-centric approach to operations so the U.S. military can keep up on the battlefield.

“There are other near-[peer] competitors who are paying attention right now and understand these technologies. If we don’t pick up our pace and continue prioritizing moving towards that open data standard architecture that those data decrees described, then we will fall off pace,” he said Thursday.

Having a strategy in place put the department on a path to develop ways to implement real changes, he said. Building upon that strategy, Spirk lauded the decrees signed out by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. In a memo last year, Hicks issued specific guidance on data management for the whole department and called on senior leaders to use DOD’s Advana platform as a central place for decision-making data analysis.

Spirk emphasized the importance of having senior leadership buy-in for reforming the way the Pentagon manages its data.

The new directives “transformed the DOD into that data-centric organization that is critical to improving performance, creating decision advantage at all echelons, ensuring that we maintain a competitive data advantage moving forward,” Spirk said.

Combatant commands such as U.S. European Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command have been pleased with the experts the Pentagon has deployed to help them with their data, he noted.

Data management is one of the most important aspects to realizing the Pentagon’s new concept of joint all-domain command and control (JADC2), which seeks to more seamlessly connect sensors and shooters to allow for faster decision-making on the battlefield.

However, Spirk said there should not be a DOD-wide data standard or common data model, asserting that a single bespoke standard is not the way commercial industry does business and will not afford the necessary flexibility.

While he couldn’t say who his replacement will be, Spirk noted that the principal deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer is Margaret Palmieri, who previously stood up the Navy’s digital warfare office.

After his two-year stint, Spirk said he’s comfortable leaving now because of the progress that has been made including the creation of the new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAO), which he praised as “the future” for the Pentagon. The officer will lead the military’s adoption of data, analytics, AI and other digital technologies.

The new office will directly report to the deputy Defense secretary and oversee the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service and DOD’s chief data officer.

Spirk said the new office is not creating a new management layer, but rather taking the best parts of all the organizations it is overseeing and redistributing them for faster and better decision-making.

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