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 Navy’s Brad Cooper will take over at Centcom and get his fourth star, succeeding Army Gen. Michael Kurilla in that role. The Air Force’s Alexus Grynkewich will lead Eucom and be promoted to four-star, succeeding Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli in that position. Grynkewich will be dual-hatted as NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe.

The officers were confirmed unanimously by voice vote along with a slew of other nominations.

Cooper previously served as deputy commander of Centcom. Before that, he led Naval Forces Central Command and 5th Fleet, where he oversaw Task Force 59, which was established to help the Navy better integrate uncrewed systems and AI into its operations to strengthen the service’s maritime domain awareness.

Grynkewich had been serving as director of operations, J-3, with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Prior to that, he led Air Forces Central and Combined Forces Air Component Commander under U.S. Central Command. As commander of AFCENT, he was a booster for Task Force 99, which was stood up to operationally evaluate new drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and other missions.

Cooper is taking the helm at Centcom amid heightened tensions with Iran following the recent U.S. airstrike on Iranian nuclear sites with B-2 stealth bombers and 30,000-pound “massive ordnance penetrator” (MOP) weapons during Operation Midnight Hammer. Earlier this year, the command was combating Yemen’s Houthis during Operation Rough Rider.

In written responses to lawmakers’ advance policy questions ahead of his confirmation hearing, Cooper said that as Centcom commander, he would “launch new initiatives that advance our overmatch through the employment of cutting-edge technologies, including AI-enabled, unmanned platforms and digital integration. Ultimately, we must protect our homeland, counter malign influence, ensure freedom of navigation, compete strategically, and ensure USCENTCOM remains a combat-credible force for security in the region.”

Similarly, Grynkewich will command Eucom as the Ukraine-Russia war — in which drones and counter-drone systems have played a major role — rages on and U.S. military leaders are drawing lessons from the conflict.

“Since the conflict in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, warfare has evolved at a pace unseen since the Cold War’s end. Ukraine and Russia have developed and deployed new technologies and tactics on an innovation cycle of months rather than years. As a result, the U.S. Joint Force has established multiple cells to consistently analyze advancements and integrate lessons learned from the battlefield into U.S. and NATO exercises. For example, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have rapidly innovated their use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and uncrewed surface vessels (USV). UAS and USV operations are now conducted at scale, with significant impact and continuous technological updates. This attribute of the modern battlefield is fostering a shift to a culture of innovation, agility, and lethality across all elements of the U.S. and NATO Joint Force, from industry to operators,” he wrote.

Grynkewich told senators that as commander of Eucom, he would be “a strong advocate for continued investment and prioritization of funding for the fielding and protection of innovative logistics capabilities, such as AI-enabled tools with predictive analytics and autonomous distribution systems.”

Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Committee still hasn’t scheduled confirmation hearings for several other Trump nominees for key positions at the Defense Department, including Marine Corps Gen. Christopher Mahoney, who was picked to be the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle, who was selected for chief of naval operations; Air Force Lt. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, who’s been tapped to command U.S. Africa Command; Navy Vice Adm. Frank Bradley, who was chosen to lead U.S. Special Operations Command; and former congressional candidate and Green Beret Derrick Anderson, who was put forth to serve as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict after the nomination of Air Force veteran Michael Jensen for the ASD SO/LIC job was withdrawn without explanation.

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The comments by Vice Adm. Brad Cooper — the current deputy commander of Centcom, who’s been nominated for the top job and promotion to four-star — came just a couple of days after U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that featured the first-ever combat employment of “massive ordnance penetrator” bombs.

The Air Force dropped 14 of the so-called MOP weapons from B-2 Spirit stealth bombers during the mission, dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer.

It’s unclear how many MOPs or other so-called bunker-buster weapons the Pentagon still has in its arsenal in the wake of the operation. The Defense Department typically does not publicly disclose specific numbers for its munition stockpiles.

“As we’ve seen throughout the region, groups are going underground, [such as] Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis,” Cooper told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing Tuesday. “This is a serious issue that we will have to look at in the future.”

Nation-state and non-state actors have built bunkers, tunnels and other underground facilities to make their personnel and systems more difficult to locate and target.

“I think in the Central Command, and I think we would have to anticipate in the future, globally, you’re going to see threats begin to go underground, whether we’re talking about Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranians, other adversaries are clearly watching and see where they can gain advantage. In my current capacity, I have visited on multiple occasions the subterranean commando unit in Israel that goes after this problem set. I think, as we look to the future, and if confirmed, I think we need to focus on two areas — sensors and munitions. And if confirmed, I would advocate for both of those,” Cooper said.

Lawmakers and Pentagon officials in recent years have been beating the drum about the need to increase U.S. production of a variety of munitions and other systems as observers have watched forces expend large numbers of missiles and drones in places like Ukraine and the Middle East.

Cooper on Tuesday said he welcomed ideas like the FORGED Act and other measures that could help the Defense Department cut through red tape and bring new technologies into its arsenal.

Another concern raised by lawmakers during the hearing was the growing threat posed by adversaries’ unmanned aerial systems. American troops have come under attack from enemy drones in recent years, including at Tower 22 in Jordan. The weapons have also played a huge role in the Ukraine-Russia war and the recent Israel-Iran war.

Counter-drone capabilities are in high demand, especially in places like the Centcom region.

“I do agree that the nature and the character of warfare is changing before our very eyes, and this is why I think the important work of this committee, whether it’s the FORGED Act or anything associated with it, where you can accelerate the delivery of counter-UAS systems or other warfighting tools into the hands of the warfighters, forward — those are all value added and needed imminently,” Cooper said.

“If I look back specifically toward the Tower 22 incident in the ensuing now 17 or 18 months, we’ve made considerable improvements across the board — layered defense, employing both kinetic capability and non-kinetic capability. We really are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were before. Having said that, I would never be satisfied that we have the maximum readiness. I’ll never be satisfied that we have enough to protect our men and women in uniform. And if confirmed, I would focus on this every single day,” he added.

During his previous assignment as commander of Naval Forces Central Command and 5th Fleet, Cooper oversaw Task Force 59, which focuses on combining AI, uncrewed systems — including commercially owned platforms — and other digital and communications tools to boost the command’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in the Middle East.

In written responses to lawmakers’ advance policy questions ahead of his confirmation hearing, Cooper said that, if confirmed as Centcom commander, he would launch new initiatives to advance U.S. military “overmatch” through the employment of cutting-edge technologies, including AI-enabled unmanned platforms and digital integration.

“In my own experience, having commanded the Navy’s first unmanned and artificial intelligence task force, I’m very familiar with the capabilities that exist in America’s elite tech sector. I believe that we need to leverage that tech sector to maximum capability and deliver capability in the very near term, because we could do more,” he told lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing.

Cooper’s selection to command Centcom is unlikely to face major political opposition in the Senate, and his nomination is expected to be confirmed.

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On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich has been tapped by the commander-in-chief for appointment to the grade of general and assignment as commander of U.S. European Command. NATO has also agreed to appoint him as supreme allied commander Europe, according to the announcement.

Grynkewich is currently serving as director of operations, J-3, with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Prior to that, he led Air Forces Central and Combined Forces Air Component Commander under U.S. Central Command. As commander of AFCENT, he championed the work of Task Force 99, which was stood up to operationally evaluate new drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and other missions.

If confirmed, Grynkewich would assume the top military leadership role in NATO as the alliance is pursuing AI and other new tech as well as new relationships with non-traditional industry. The Trump administration is also pushing other members of NATO to shoulder more of the burden for defense of Europe, stating that the U.S. military needs to focus more on the Pacific and homeland defense.

On Wednesday, Hegseth announced that Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper was nominated for appointment to the grade of admiral, with assignment as commander of Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East region. Cooper is currently serving as deputy commander.

Centcom’s area of responsibility has long been a hotspot for U.S. military actions against militant groups and nation-state actors, including recently battling the Houthis and trying to thwart their drone and missile attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.

Prior to his current job, Cooper led Naval Forces Central Command and 5th Fleet, where he was a big proponent of Task Force 59, which was established to help the Navy better integrate uncrewed systems and AI into its operations to strengthen the service’s maritime domain awareness.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Dagvin Anderson has been tapped to become a four-star and command U.S. Africa Command. Africom earlier this year was given expanded authority by Trump to attack terrorist targets in its area of responsibility and is adjusting its posture as it tries to deal with growing threats.

Anderson has held a number of positions in the special operations community during his career, including as commander of Special Operations Command-Africa, among other assignments. He’s currently serving as director of joint force development, J-7, with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

On Tuesday, Hegseth announced that Vice Adm. Frank Bradley, who comes from the Navy SEAL community, was selected for appointment to the grade of admiral and to lead U.S. Special Operations Command. He’s currently serving as commander of Joint Special Operations Command.

SOCOM has been a leader within the Defense Department in adopting cutting-edge tech such as AI and other digital tools, including via its SOF Digital Applications program executive office. The command recently released an updated strategy dubbed SOF Renaissance, which laid out SOCOM’s vision for how the force needs to transform to meet future challenges by adopting new technologies and other reforms, including modernization efforts geared toward surface and subsurface maritime platforms; next-generation ISR; mission command systems; and collaborative and autonomous unmanned systems.

In other SOF-related personnel news this week, Trump on Monday nominated former congressional candidate and Green Beret Derrick Anderson to serve as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

The nominees must be confirmed by the Senate to take on those new roles.

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“These were the first direct U.K. strikes under this new U.K. [Labour Party-led] government — the last time was on 30 May 2024,” a spokesperson with the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., told DefenseScoop on Wednesday.

These strikes also mark the first to be authorized by the Brits during President Donald Trump’s second presidency.

They were conducted directly in support of Operation Rough Rider — the aggressive campaign Trump initiated in March to dismantle Houthi infrastructure and leadership, as the group continues to carry out intensifying one-way attack drones and missile assaults against military and commercial watercraft in the Red Sea. The Yemen-based fighters kicked off the attacks in 2023 and have indicated they’re meant as a form of protest of America’s support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

On Monday, before the U.S.-U.K. joint mission, the Office of the Navy Chief of Information released a statement confirming that a F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet (valued at more than $60 million) was “lost at sea” after falling overboard the USS Harry S. Truman — reportedly as that aircraft carrier made a sharp turn to evade Houthi fire. 

“This action was taken in response to a persistent threat from the Houthis to freedom of navigation. A 55% drop in shipping through the Red Sea has already cost billions, fuelling regional instability and risking economic security for families in the U.K.,” British Secretary of State for Defence John Healey said in a statement to reporters late Tuesday about the latest joint mission.

The strikes happened after dark and Houthi facilities targeted were located around fifteen miles south of Sanaa, Yemen’s largest city.

“Royal Air Force Typhoon FGR4s, with air refuelling support from Voyager tankers, engaged a number of these buildings using Paveway IV precision-guided bombs — once very careful planning had been completed to allow the targets to be prosecuted with minimal risk to civilians or non-military infrastructure,” the British Embassy spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

They added that U.K. forces have also recently supplied routine allied air-to-air refueling support “to aid the self defense of U.S. forces” in the region prior to these strikes.

“We have been clear that the U.K. will not hesitate to take action to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom of navigation,” the official said.

A Pentagon spokesperson referred DefenseScoop’s questions Wednesday to U.S. Central Command. Spokespersons from the command did not immediately respond to the request.

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Joy Angela Shanaberger, who recently served as a senior adviser to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks during the Biden administration, took on the CTO role at U.S. Central Command, which is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, last month.

“Joining a great team in the sunshine state,” Shanaberger wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that she’s “ready to achieve big things together, deliberately.”

In her new job, Shanaberger is poised to play a key role in driving forward innovation efforts that have applicability across the military.

In addition to conducting operations against terrorist groups, the Iranian military and its proxies in recent months and years, Central Command is serving as a test bed for advanced technologies — including unmanned platforms, AI and machine learning, and counter-drone systems — via organizations like Task Force 59, Task Force 99, Task Force 39 and others.

Shanaberger succeeds Schuyler Moore, who served as the first-ever CTO at Centcom. Moore is now serving in an intelligence role at U.S. Naval Forces Europe headquarters in Naples, Italy, where she’s been mobilized by the Navy Reserve.

“Hat tip to Schuyler Moore for the incredible work accomplished in her tenure and setting me up for success. Looking forward to scaling up!” Shanaberger wrote on LinkedIn.

Moore wrote that the combatant command was “lucky” to have Shanaberger onboard.

According to Shanaberger’s LinkedIn profile, she previously founded a company called Boone, which she described as a “tech-acceleration company serving defense and intelligence communities with rapid tech deployment to the tactical edge.”

During the Obama administration, she served as a special assistant in what was then known as the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The AT&L directorate was subsequently split up to make way for separate Acquisition and Sustainment and Research and Engineering directorates.

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“The drone struck [Rumalyn Landing Zone] at about 5 p.m. EST [on Friday], late into the evening in Syria, and caused damage to one set of facilities,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said during an off-camera briefing. 

He largely declined to provide the latest details about the drone’s maker or origin in response to reporters’ questions, noting that the incident review is ongoing. 

But Ryder said U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East and is leading the assessment, have at this point “credited swift and effective preemptive measures as limiting the drone’s effect.”

“We have a significant amount of air defense capability. I’m not going to go into the specifics in terms of where that’s located and how it’s employed. Certainly, we are going to continue to do everything we can to ensure that U.S. forces are protected no matter where they’re serving,” Ryder said.

He told DefenseScoop that Pentagon leadership has no plans to announce new measures for boosting surveillance or air defense assets in that specific location, following the attack.

“As a matter of course, commanders are always assessing the situation, always looking at how we can make sure that we’re protecting our forces and, most importantly, conducting our mission,” he said.

About 900 American troops are currently operating in Syria to support local forces and partners working to counter any possible resurgences of the Islamic State terrorist organization.

This latest one-way drone attack there comes against the backdrop of escalating tensions between the United States and Iran-backed militia groups around the broader region, and amid intensifying concerns that Israel’s war in Gaza will morph into a wider conflict in the Middle East.

So far, “no group has claimed responsibility for the [Aug. 9] attack,” a defense official told DefenseScoop on Monday.

Although initial reports stated that American troops were not wounded at Rumalyn Landing Zone, the official said on Monday that multiple U.S. and coalition personnel were treated for minor injuries, including smoke inhalation.

“Others are being examined for traumatic brain injuries. Out of an abundance of caution, several service members were transported to a separate location for further assessment and evaluation,” the official told DefenseScoop.

Centcom spokespersons did not respond on Monday to requests for further information about the attack or a timeline for the ongoing assessment, and White House officials referred questions back to the Defense Department.

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According to two senior officials, the ultimate aim of Centcom’s new commercial solutions opening (CSO) released in collaboration with the Pentagon’s Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office is to pave the way for self-service platforms that allow warfighters to produce custom, performant CV models in seven days or less.

“That’s the unique thing here — we’re trying to enable our broader workforce to be able to self-serve their urgent model gaps and build things quickly, so that we can respond to those emergent threats concerns,” Centcom’s Chief Data Officer Michael Foster told DefenseScoop.

In a joint interview alongside his colleague Chief Technology Officer Schuyler Moore, the two senior officials briefed DefenseScoop on their intent behind this new CSO, how it’ll unfold and how it might reach Defense Department components beyond just Central Command.

“This is not just Centcom working in a vacuum. We’ve got a really great set of partners coming in with us,” Moore said.

A ‘gap filler’

“In general, when we have thematic areas of investment for digital modernization activities here at Centcom, we usually will give them a name. Desert Sentry is the name that we have given to this particular thrust around computer vision,” Foster told DefenseScoop.

In the official CSO, which is open through the month of June, Centcom invites solution providers to submit a three-page “Discovery Paper” pitching their capabilities, via the CDAO-aligned TradewindAI platform. 

A formal pitch round will follow in the Aug. 5-16 time frame. Then, based on results stemming from there, Centcom might make none, one, or multiple pilot project awards, likely in the form of other transaction agreements.

“I’m trying to be transparent in that it’s not a foregone conclusion that one or more capabilities will emerge from this activity with follow-on funding — but there is a path for that. Because, if we find something is actually fully responsive to the minimum feature set that’s described in the CSO, that is something that we would deem as potentially being operationally relevant as soon as possible,” Foster explained.

He and Moore declined to provide any details regarding how much funding could be allocated for this work.

In drafting the CSO, Foster said his team was “very deliberate in describing mandatory features and desirable features.”

“The mandatory features — think of those in aggregate — like, all of these features must be met in order to be a viable solution. And often at least one of the perceptions on getting is that initial interest from industry is usually around groups that might provide one or two of those functions, but not necessarily an integrated capability,” Foster said.

“But let’s think about the end game here. The end game is to enable a small group of users — operators and analysts — to self-serve the entirety of the process. That doesn’t work if it gets broken across a segmented group of tools. So, we’re trying to get an integrated, streamlined interface that addresses the totality of mandatory features,” he explained.

Prior to joining Centcom in December, Foster served in leading data and AI-enabling roles at the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office, and more recently in executive positions at Maxar and CrowdAI.

“I think it is worth pointing out, [Foster] has worked with the organization that builds satellites within NRO. He’s been with the organization that processes data that comes off satellites with NGA. [Foster] has been with industry, building the tools to process that imagery and do more in addition to the other imagery that comes from commercial [assets]. So, he was built for this and has experienced every angle of this that could possibly exist,” Moore noted.

Drawing from his time in the private sector, Foster said he’s recognized that there’s much more that the military can do to leverage commercial capabilities. 

“It really falls in line with the idea of ‘buy what we can, build what we must,” he told DefenseScoop.

Computer vision platforms that allow users to drive a model development process in a very rapid fashion are technical capabilities that Foster said are already “emergent in industry, if not mature.”

“And then, if you compare that to some of the pain points that we’re feeling right now in terms of seeing problems and specific AI use cases where we need to adapt our models quickly — and specifically, our users have that intuition in terms of how are their problem sets adapting and evolving, which which makes them very well-suited to drive that model development process,” the CDO explained.

“So it’s really, can we put our users at the center of a model build process in a way that makes them more responsive to mission demands? And that’s a bit different from the traditional approaches to AI, which have largely been more of an asynchronous process by which demand signals are gathered, you take that out to machine learning developers to be responsive to try to best address it — but then … you stand by and wait for something to come back. And that iteration is not necessarily as fast as what the mission actually requires,” Foster said.

DefenseScoop asked him and Moore to point to a real-world illustration that helps visualize this need.

“There’s an image that’s been in the media from Ukraine in recent months, where it shows Russians were putting car tires across the wings of one of their strategic bombers to try to presumably defeat things that were trying to target those bombers. It was a defensive countermeasure. But the presumed point of it was, it was defeating AI that was looking for things that look like bombers — but if you put car tires across the entire broad cross-section of the wings, it can defeat AI,” Foster said.

Moore added: “I think that that is the best and most tangible example. It also implies the speed at which you have to iterate, because the time that it takes to throw tires on top of things and how long it takes to train a model, it really drives that time urgency.”

Putting the need another way, she offered a hypothetical associated with modern Centcom missions. 

“If you have an adversary that’s changing cars every day, your model may be really good at looking for a red Toyota,” Moore said. “But now you need to look for a white van and you need to look for a black pickup truck,” yet the model might not be well-trained for that.

With this CSO opportunity, Centcom officials are placing what Moore called “a ruthless focus on utility.”

“We don’t need all the bells and whistles. We don’t need fanciness in the PowerPoints and everything else. We need tools that anybody from our intelligence shops and from our other shops can pick up and use today. That’s one metric,” she told DefenseScoop.

Foster chimed in: “Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll offer that we have mechanisms to optimize AI performance. This is meant to be a gap filler for those things which are truly urgent, and where we have to go fast.”

Beyond Central Command

“This CSO is essentially a series of control gates and evaluations by which we intend to winnow down the best athletes that will culminate in participation within Centcom users at an exercise. So ultimately, our users will interact with the best athletes and give us feedback on which platforms, if any, really addressed the mission need,” Foster explained.

In the official post on TradewindAI, officials also wrote that the CDAO and its partners intend to accept and review responses to the announcement periodically for inclusion in the Digital Falcon Oasis exercises.

Moore and Foster said Central Command has experimented with computer vision in prior digital exercises, and has seen a lot of good returns on the feedback they can offer for model builders. 

Now, this work is meant to be a continuation and flash expansion of that, which also opens the aperture to commercial partners.

“Relative to inclusion in Digital Falcon Oasis, Centcom has a periodic drumbeat by which we perform operational validation on various capabilities and experiment with all things digital modernization,” Foster noted.

“The extent to which industry has had an opportunity to play in those really varies from opportunity to opportunity. But we wanted to make it clear that participating in Desert Sentry is going to be in context to a broader exercise narrative that Centcom advocates for, champions and drives,” he said.

While responses to the CSO are only going to be accepted through June 30, the general solicitation on that landing page will be periodically reviewed, updated and amended to garner information regarding other solutions that meet Centcom’s shifting mission needs.

“This is not a Centcom-unique problem. So, we hope that this opportunity becomes more widespread when we work with the CDAO,” Moore noted.

“And one of the key things that was attractive about working with the CDAO with a commercial solutions opening vehicle, in particular, is that it’s flexible,” Foster added.

The technology and data chiefs also emphasized that in this process they are bringing together a panel of subject matter experts from across a broad range of organizations to review these methods.

“What has excited me and has made this easy to me is that it really is so focused on users being able to help themselves, teaching us how to fish instead of handing us fish,” Moore said.

“That approach in computer vision, in particular, has sometimes been a challenge because there are questions of compute time and latency of time from a picture being snapped to the time when AI is run on it and then you get a detection on the backend. This is getting at shortening that time and making the entirety of the cycle of model development drop to as low as you can. And I don’t think that I’ve seen that anywhere in the department,” she told DefenseScoop.

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Wednesday evening the Pentagon announced that Palantir landed a deal for its Maven Smart System led by the Army. On Thursday, company executives said the effort will significantly grow the user base and help the department’s Chief Digital and AI Office proliferate the technology to warfighters and pursue its vision for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which aims to better connect the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international partners to improve decision-making, operational effectiveness and efficiency.

The IDIQ contract will help the combatant commands and the Joint Staff do CJADC2-related work, Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir, told reporters.

The tech is expected to facilitate battlespace awareness, global integration, contested logistics, joint fires and targeting workflows.

“This is taking what has been built in prototype and experimentation and bringing this [Maven system] to production,” Clark said. “The prototype began in 2021, we fielded that to a small set of users at each of these combatant commands. Now this is offering an enterprise capability with essentially no user limit at these combatant commands. So any individual that is focused on some of the workflows that [the technology is designed to aid] … will have access to the platform. That’s one of the things we’re so excited about, frankly, is because this means that an intel analyst or a user that’s doing work in the field has access to this platform, as do the combatant commanders themselves.”

Work under the new contract will initially cover five U.S. combatant commands: Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command/NORAD, and Transportation Command. The tech will also continue to be deployed as part of the Defense Department’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), according to Clark.

“Users are going to span everyone from intel analysts and operators in, you know, some of the remote island chains across the world to leadership at the Pentagon. It’s going to reach thousands of users across the globe,” Clark said.

The company will be working with other vendors and U.S. government partners to integrate their technologies with Maven.

“We will be partnering with them to help integrate other AI capabilities, not just what Palantir brings to the table. So they will be able to build on all the data integrations that Palantir is doing, build on the pipelines and the applications within the platform or other platforms through open APIs and our ontology software development kits,” Clark said. “We want to be able to integrate with any data system, any new AI capability that the government procures and wants to be part of this ecosystem. So, you know, should tomorrow a new sensor come online, should … a new AI capability come online, we want to be able to integrate with that.”

The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office also awarded Palantir a $33 million prototype other transaction agreement “to rapidly and securely” onboard third-party vendor and government capabilities into a government-owned, Palantir-operated data environment, according to a CDAO release that went out Thursday afternoon.

The Maven system and the data environment will support the Defense Department’s plans for the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR) initiative that was announced Thursday.

The first task order under the $480 million Maven contract is worth $153 million. The funding will go toward licenses to deploy the company’s software, according to Clark.

“This task order kicks off on June 1 … Those licenses will be made available immediately to all those users,” she told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters. “That’s the beauty of commercial software. The beauty of the product that we built is that we can get it up and running in days and weeks, not months and years.”

The Maven tech can integrate data from a variety of reporting systems — such as satellite imagery, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, human intelligence, or other sources — across multiple domains to provide users with better situational awareness of friendly and adversary forces. That info can be displayed for commanders and other personnel via easy-to-use maps and dashboards, Andrew Locke, DOD enterprise lead at Palantir, told reporters.

The system can also “layer in” AI capabilities, such as computer vision models that scan imagery and look for objects of interest.

“For the user, they can go immediately from kind of that tip and cue that something of interest is there and actually nominate, you know, targets from the platform. So, you know, when we think about the integration of AI into these workflows, it is very much like humans involved in the process … They’re providing their unique subject matter expertise to verify that, you know, what AI maybe suggested is there is actually there. And then go from that into what you know the next stage of a process might be,” Locke said.

That could include what he called a “targeting nomination workflow.”

“In this case, you can either nominate a single target or multiple targets. We help to augment the user where we take all the metadata associated with those detections and kind of package that in the … format that they’re familiar with as part of the target nomination. As they do that, that would then transition to a separate capability that we’re providing across target management where nominated targets would then pop up right into a board … And for a staff, they can really optimize a process, take like their standard operating procedures that are unique to that organization and then code that in software,” he explained.

Data from social media could also be integrated into workflows if the U.S. government asked for that, he suggested.

“On our side, [we’re] really agnostic, you know, to the data sources. And really no technical limitation,” he told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters.

Palantir will defer to the Pentagon in terms of providing specifics on the actual social media sites or programs that they might want to pull from, he noted.

“But basically … if the government were to be using a sort of AI to initially run off of social media, whether that’s computer vision against images or videos that are in posts, or some type of like geolocation or, you know, natural language processing, you know, over keywords … then we would provide, like, the integration of whatever those social media sources potentially look like. And then … move that into classified networks, and then provide that sort of information in conjunction with the other data sources that we’ve integrated on the government’s behalf,” Locke said.

Updated on May 30, 2024, at 5:20 PM. This story has been updated to include information about an other transaction agreement awarded to Palantir and the Pentagon’s Open DIGAR initiative.

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In his new role as CDO, Foster will “lead will lead data efforts across the organization’s headquarters, components, and subordinate units,” according to a press release.

He was tapped for the job in November, per the release.

Foster is a military and intelligence community veteran with a technical background. During his 11-year Air Force career as an Air Force officer, he served as a laser radar scientist with the Air Force Research Lab and branch chief and program manager for advanced payloads at the National Reconnaissance Office, among other positions, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He was also in the senior executive service at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. At NGA, he was co-director for commercial GEOINT activity, portfolio initiative lead for advanced analytics and “activity based intelligence,” and an image scientist in the analysis directorate.

In the private sector, he was director of GDBX solutions at DigitalGlobe, director of emergent solutions at Maxar Technologies, and most recently head of solutions engineering at CrowdAI.

He holds a Ph.D. in imaging science from the Rochester Institute for Technology and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Air Force Academy.

“I am excited by the challenges of developing data-centric solutions to enable warfighting across the CENTCOM region,” Foster said in a statement.

Central Command is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East region. The hiring of Foster reflects the combatant command’s desire to recruit tech experts, including from the private sector.

Earlier this year, it hired Andrew Moore — who previously worked as general manager for AI and industry solutions at Google Cloud — to serve as its first-ever advisor for artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing and data analytics.

“Our strategic approach … relies on bringing in the best talent from across the military and from civilian industry and then empowering that talent,” Centcom Commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla said in a statement. “Dr. Foster is a phenomenal talent with a rare set of skills in the employment of data to enable the warfighter. He will help us advance as a data-centric organization to enable our critical mission in the region.”

CTO Schuyler Moore has said that Centcom will serve as an AI integration test bed for the Department of Defense. It has already stood up three units — Task Force 59 under Naval Forces Central Command, Task Force 99 under Air Forces Central, and Task Force 39 under Army Central — to experiment with and deploy emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, unmanned systems, the cloud and data analytics.

The command is also developing and testing counter-drone tools through exercises such as Red Sands, smartphone apps and other initiatives.

“As an organization focused on digital modernization and data-centric operations, we are committed to leveraging our data more effectively and efficiently in support of our missions. Dr. Foster brings an impressive resume as a data leader at the U.S. Air Force, National Reconnaissance Office, and multiple cutting edge artificial intelligence and machine learning companies. We look forward to leveraging his exceptional capabilities to drive forward our digital initiatives,” Kurilla said.

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