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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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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In an email after making the announcement of her departure on social media, Moore told DefenseScoop that in addition to her civilian roles, she’s also served in the sea service’s reserves for the last four years.

It was in that capacity as a reservist that Moore previously made waves as a rising star at U.S. Naval Forces Central Command’s innovation-pushing Task Force 59 in Bahrain. Now, she said, the service is mobilizing her to U.S. European Command’s Navy component for one year as an intelligence officer.

Moore said in the email that while she’s sad to leave her team at Centcom, she’s looking forward to gaining more experience in uniform. 

Centcom personnel responded to — and captured critical data on — disruptive, real-world attacks from Iran-backed rebels and other threats in waters around the Middle East during Moore’s tenure. Even before she arrived, that command had built a reputation as one of the Defense Department’s leading early AI adopters. 

And with Moore as CTO, that hub has accelerated military technology deployments via modern and rapid experimentation series, and steadily refined high-tech computer vision, pattern detection, and decision support capabilities for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and other missions.  

In the email with DefenseScoop, Moore declined to share the name of the person who’s been tapped to succeed her at Centcom, but called them a “rockstar.”

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And now during the next push of rapid technology experimentation that’s approaching nearly a year later, Centcom aims to ramp it up and expand its reach by inviting personnel from across more of the military to “plug in,” according to three senior defense officials. 

“We’re really focused on integrating more of the services for this one,” the combatant command’s Chief Technology Officer Schuyler Moore told DefenseScoop.

Refined over the last couple years, Digital Falcon Oasis encompasses Centcom-led events held on a 90-day drumbeat, that bring together people, technologies and processes in real-world scenarios to train collaboratively and drive the adoption of digital warfare capabilities they’ll all likely need to use jointly in future fights.

Moore discussed the series’ evolution during a panel alongside the Navy’s acting Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli and Chief Technology Officer for the Army Chief of Staff Alex Miller, hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Sept. 13.

In an exclusive interview after that event at CSIS’ Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies, the three officials briefed DefenseScoop on some of the ways Digital Falcon has already impacted contemporary military operations and what’s in store for the upcoming iteration.

“We can, and will, and are taking the feed from what’s happening here and using that as informing our innovation pipeline,” Fanelli said.

The ‘turning point’

At the CSIS roundtable — moderated by Greg Allen, who leads the think tank’s new Wadhwani center and previously led artificial intelligence-related policy and strategy initiatives at the Defense Department — Moore reflected on the original vision for Digital Falcon and how it has matured so far.

“[It’s] based on a very specific and simple premise, which is that the best way to test software tools is to give them to the users and get them feedback as much as and as quickly as humanly possible. And it’s a really interesting and blunt experience for us because, especially I think in the early stages of the experiment, we were really just trying to get the muscle memory of how you sprinted and how you communicated between users and engineers — and they were looking at each other like they completely spoke different languages. So we were trying to do a lot of translation,” she explained.

But with each new sprint, participants’ familiarity with the processes and capabilities increased to a point where they fully understood the “game.”

“So you will roll into an exercise — our next one is going to be in October — and they will sit down. They understand the experience and that you’re supposed to bump around with this software tool, figure out where it breaks, figure out where it works, and then you give that feedback,” Moore said. 

In the conversation with DefenseScoop, the Centcom CTO elaborated on how Digital Falcon Oasis is steadily facilitated and coordinated.

“We orchestrate it out of [the command’s Tampa, Florida] headquarters, but all of our components participate. So if you are [U.S. Air Forces Central and U.S. Army Central] and you’re up at Shaw Air Force Base [in South Carolina], you’ll be logging in and using the tools and getting your feedback at the end of the day. If you’re forward in Qatar, in Kuwait, for Operation Inherent Resolve, if you’re at [Naval Forces Central Command] in Bahrain — all of those teams are participating. Coordination just happens to be happening at headquarters, but that’s good because it reflects the way we fight,” Moore said. 

Ahead of each sequence, Moore said she “literally [goes] from joint directorate to joint directorate” to collect engineering priorities from those who are on the ground using and experimenting with the digital tools.

“We then have battle-rhythm events leading up to the exercise where we’re preparing all of the components in the work that they’ll need to do. Sometimes we’ll actually have physical assets — vessels out at sea, aircraft up in the air — that are involved. And so it goes from engineering priorities for the software coordination of what the actual practice is going to look like, or sometimes just rolling it into operations as we go,” she noted.

In Moore’s view, the command was “lucky in many ways” that it launched the experimentation series around January 2023, and had conducted approximately three iterations around this time last year.

DefenseScoop asked the CTO if Centcom is deploying capabilities in ongoing operations in the Middle East theater that have been developed and improved upon through Digital Falcon.

She responded: “We absolutely are — and the turning point was Oct. 7.”

The command was running different scenarios and experiments up until that day, when Israel’s war against the Palestine-based militant group Hamas started after the initial ambush. Then, Moore said, the Centcom team focused on Digital Falcon went hands-off and watched users surge the tools that were ready and move away from those that were not ready for full deployment as the U.S. military addressed the growing crisis that engulfed much of the Middle East region.

“It was a mix of both — and both are really useful feedback where, for example, the targeting tools that we’d spent a lot of time on were used immediately. Adoption for those literally doubled overnight. We had to rework the compute and the actual infrastructure underneath it because we had so many users. There were some other tools where people said, ‘We’re doing real-world operations and that’s not ready.’ And that alone was fantastic feedback,” Moore said. 

Her team waited and watched how U.S. operations in the region subsequently played out last fall, and then re-engaged with service members to continue to introduce and drive adoption of new capabilities to meet the rapidly changing needs.

“The software tools that we have — that didn’t exist two years ago — have fundamentally shaped what we do now,” Moore told DefenseScoop.

Now, this suite of command-and-control software applications and other assets being enabled and pushed forward through each experiment are the same ones that she and her team use for daily tasks and log into each morning. 

“It’s worthwhile saying we struggle internally around how we call Digital Falcon Oasis an exercise series — but at this point, it really isn’t. It’s operational. We’re using it because we happen to have operations where we’re like, ‘This is a good opportunity to surge particular testing of this feature.’ But we’ve talked internally about, do we call it an experiment? Because it is constantly an experiment. But [the word] ‘exercise’ increasingly, candidly, does not reflect the reality of how we use it,” Moore said.

From potluck to race car

The military services’ relationships with U.S. combatant commands are changing because the ways those CoComs conduct business is shifting — and the Digital Falcon Oasis series is a direct reflection of that, the three chief technology officers explained. 

“What we are trying to think about as services is, how do we plug into a CoCom commander’s decision-making cycle and then enable it at the most tactical level?” Miller, who is the first official to serve as a CTO directly for the Army’s chief of staff, said.

Gen. Randy George tapped him to be “voice and advocate,” according to Miller, for the soldiers who are using and deploying these capabilities in day-to-day military operations.

At the CSIS roundtable, Miller discussed how the Army was involved in Digital Falcon Oasis 1 and 2, as well as the intent for what’s in the pipeline. Notably, the Army’s 513th military intelligence brigade is responsible for Centcom’s analytic control and intelligence processing. 

“So as long as Centcom says, ‘Here’s how we will conduct command and control the Army,’ we’ll be involved — because that is how we will provide intelligence to the C2 apparatus,” Miller told DefenseScoop during the interview.

He emphasized that the 18th Airborne Corps is America’s global response force, while the 82nd Airborne Division is the nation’s immediate response force — both of which are key Army units.

“They are a corps and a division, which means that if we cannot plug into any theaters, we just have the most reps in Centcom C2, then we’re just wrong. That’s sort of the ‘up-and-out.’ The ‘down-and-in’ — and we aren’t quite there yet, but I think we will be in, if not a couple months,  next year — is how do we connect the operational and tactical command and control to that strategic control at the CoCom level? What does that look like from a technical perspective and from a doctrine perspective?” Miller said. 

This pursuit is also an important element as the Army seeks to achieve its new concept for “transforming in contact.”

“[That] has really been about the division and the brigades — how do we connect that? Because normally what we do is we go to a CoCom, we bring stuff, and then we knife fight each other on connecting. And that can’t work anymore. It’s not fast enough,” Miller said.

If commands are exposing data and interfaces in new ways, in his view, systems need to be purchased at the service level to interoperate and consume that information. 

“The other part of that is figuring out who needs what data and what data do they not need all the time, because we’ve got into a very bad habit of acting like everyone needs all of the data all of the time — and that is not a reality. There’s too much to do anything useful with at the tactical level,” Miller added.

Centcom’s Moore chimed in with a creative comparison to help highlight this ongoing cultural transformation within the military.

“An analogy we’ve frequently used [to describe] the historical way of the services interacting with combatant commands — it was something like a potluck, where you make your own dish and then you bring it, and then that’s fine. You don’t have to worry about what other people are bringing. You just show up. But the reality, increasingly, is it’s like bringing different pieces of a race car,” she explained. 

“And if you have not thought about the other parts of the race car in what you are bringing, you are in for a very bumpy ride. And so I think the exercise series helps us at least share our views of how different parts of this need to be built independently, but then also how it fits together when we’ve got to actually start racing,” Moore told DefenseScoop. 

The Air Force and Navy have also supported the Digital Falcon Oasis series and made their own gains. 

And this year, according to Moore, Centcom’s partnership with the sea services will significantly expand.  

“This exercise in particular will have a lot of partnership with the Marine Corps and some of the systems that they’re using. We’ve had some experience with ‘big’ Navy and with the Army about integrating their systems — but the Marine Corps has been really wonderful in leaning forward and saying, ‘Hey, we see that you as a command are using these software tools. We believe that these are the tools that we will be bringing into the fight. Let’s integrate and do that test of whether we can send data back and forth,’” Moore noted.

In the interview, Fanelli, the Navy’s acting CTO and technical director of the program executive office for digital and enterprise services, also shed light on how this work contributes to the implementation of his department’s new Information Superiority Vision 2.0. 

That strategy is meant to help guide and govern how data is used to “improve every aspect of operations within” the Navy and Marine Corps, Fanelli said.

Centcom’s Digital Falcon Oasis, among associated and other activities, is deeply influencing how the Department of the Navy plans to invest in technology in the near term.

“We have more data, so operational decision-making informs all other decision-making in a more impactful and a more streamlined and faster way, based on what they’re feeding us,” Fanelli explained.

To him, tech-informed concepts of employment are opening up new opportunities for the DON and its components.

“And so the relevance of our [tactics, techniques and procedures, or TTPs] is increasing based on what they’re learning, and that applies much broader than any particular use case,” Fanelli said.

In the interview, he and the other CTOs also reflected on how Centcom would not be where it is at — particularly in terms of maturing rapid experimentation efforts to drive adoption of joint C2 capabilities — were it not for the top-down leadership and prioritization led by Centcom’s commander, Gen. Erik Kurilla. 

“He is, in many ways, the power user of the software applications,” Moore said.

As the series continues to evolve, Centcom leadership, she added, is now moving deliberately to “build Digital Falcon Oasis into the formal battle rhythm of the command.” The next event, coming up in October, will help the team cement that objective.

“And the reason that that’s so important to us is that we never want any of these efforts or exercises to be a cult of personality. Innovation should never be anchored on an individual. It should be just embedded in the organization,” she said. 

“So this will be the first time that we have this formalized, documented, ‘blessed’ event that will happen. Even if I were to get kidnapped tomorrow, the exercise series would continue. And we’re really excited about that,” Moore told DefenseScoop. 

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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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The Pentagon’s JADC2 warfighting concept aims to connect sensors and shooters from across the U.S. military under a more unified network to enable faster and more effective decision-making and employment of forces, with the aid of artificial intelligence and other enabling tools. In February, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced that the “minimum viable capability” for it “is real and ready now.”

It’s already being used by Centcom, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of Air Forces Central and Combined Forces Air Component, told reporters Wednesday during a Defense Writers Group meeting. Centcom has been battling drone swarms, missile strikes and other threats in the region from the Houthis, ISIS and other groups.

“The proliferation of unmanned technologies and missile technologies, and the combination of ballistic cruise missiles, UAVs — all these unmanned things that can come at you at different speeds in different directions — does add complexity to the overall defensive architecture for how we have dealt with that. I mean it truly is a multi-domain, multi-service response that we have to orchestrate in these instances. So there’s a number of different systems that we use in the joint world to do this. Some of them are, you know, top secret systems that pull in a bunch of different intel sources together to try to build coherent understanding. The one that is new and Centcom has really been pushing and all the components are on now is the kind of the minimum viable product of JADC2,” Grynkewich said.

“I would say it’s a common operating picture that pulls in feeds from everywhere. I almost think of … the game Hungry Hippo. It is [the] Hungry Hippo of data. And it’s going out and it’s pulling in lots of data, and then you can layer it and look at it different ways. So it’s really trying to use data centricity to build understanding. The thing that that does is that synchronizes us across the domains and components to have a coherent picture. So now … my battle cabs conversations with the [Naval Forces Central] maritime ops center, they’re looking at the same basic picture,” he added.

Commanders still have to take into account the sources of the data and assess their confidence in it, he noted.

“But when you understand all of that, you can have that common picture, and now you can make real-time decisions in seconds about — is the ship going to engage that [threat]? Is a fighter going to engage it? Do we need to call one of our partners to warn them about it? Etcetera, etcetera. So that’s a key part of it,” Grynkewich told reporters.

Task Force 99

Meanwhile, Centcom’s Task Force 99 is evaluating and experimenting with new drones to help the military field cost-effective unmanned aerial systems to improve its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

The organization was stood up about a year-and-a-half ago amid a broader push by U.S. Central Command to boost its unmanned capabilities and enabling technologies.

AFCENT wants to find alternatives to very high-end drones, Grynkewich told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters Wednesday.

“The inventory of unmanned aerial vehicles that we have right now … all come with different price points with different capabilities. And there’s a tradeoff there, you know, more expensive/more exquisite, less expensive/less exquisite. We’re trying with Task Force 99 to find a way to thread the needle where we can use commercial off-the-shelf technologies or things that we develop in-house, to develop something that has a bit more capability than you might find on a standard off-the-shelf drone but doesn’t cost nearly as much [as high-end platforms]. And the reason you don’t want the cost to be so high is so you can sustain losses when you take them or so that you can have affordable mass and bring volume to the fight,” he said.

Grynkewich added: “So, Task Force 99 is working that very hard right now. They have a couple of promising technologies. I won’t get into exactly what they are. But … the task I’ve given them is I need them to figure out a way to flood the zone with additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance so we can identify these threats … faster, better, cheaper than we can right now. They’re getting really close.”

DefenseScoop asked Grynkewich if the task force is currently aiding U.S. military operations against the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea.

“Their task is to develop solutions that we can apply in Yemen or elsewhere. We have used their capabilities in the [Centcom area of responsibility] in actual combat conditions before. I won’t say where it was, but we have done that before and I intend to do it again as soon as we have the right capability to apply in the right environment,” he said.

Replicator

Another Pentagon initiative that’s intended to help the department acquire more affordable “mass” is Replicator. The stated goal of the first iteration of the effort, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced last year, is to deliver thousands of relatively low-cost, “attritable” unmanned systems across multiple domains in 18-to-24 months to help U.S. forces counter China’s military buildup.

The Army and Navy are said to be highly involved in the early stages of the project, but the Air Force not so much.

Grynkewich noted that U.S. enemies are using drone swarms and he’d like to turn the tables.

“You’re seeing that play out as adversaries are attempting to use mass to overwhelm our defenses. That’s really what it comes down to — it’s affordable mass to try overwhelm our defenses … I would like to turn that around and use affordable mass to try to overcome the defenses of adversaries as well. Replicator is trying to identify which of the solutions that we have that … is affordable but we haven’t quite figured out how to scale it,” he told reporters. “So I think that it’s a fantastic initiative of the low-cost technologies to get that affordable mass.”

Replicator is primarily aimed at countering China in the Indo-Pacific. But Grynkewich said those types of capabilities would be useful in any conflict in any region of the world.

However, he noted that he doesn’t see low-cost drones as a silver bullet.

“In my view, the flip side of it is, I don’t think that that means that some of the more exquisite weapon systems — whether they’re manned or unmanned, and irrespective of domain — are irrelevant at all,” Grynkewich told reporters.

The Air Force, for example, will still need next-generation drones like collaborative combat aircraft, he suggested. CCAs are expected to serve as robotic wingmen operating alongside manned fighter jets and also perform other missions on their own.

“You would need some exquisite … unmanned technology like a collaborative combat aircraft that’s able to do certain things. And then you can follow that with affordable mass or you can pair it with the affordable mass,” Grynkewich said. “If you do just one and not the other, you won’t really optimize the system from a warfighting perspective.”

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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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