Beauchamp began working for the department in 2015, and most recently served as the director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. In that role, he oversaw the Air and Space Forces’ highly-classified special access programs (SAP) and worked on insider threat mitigation.

But Beauchamp’s 29-year career spans across multiple positions at the Department of the Air Force, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). By and large, he either led or was involved in several critical events within the national security space — so much so that someone once described him as “the Forrest Gump of the national security world.”

“He goes, ‘You were kind of there in all the big happenings of your time of your career. You were right in the middle of all these things that were the big developments. Sometimes you were there in the background of the scene, and sometimes you were there front and center doing the thing,’” Beauchamp told DefenseScoop in an interview on July 3, his last day at the Pentagon, recalling how a colleague described his tenure.

After graduating from Lehigh University in 1992, Beauchamp was hired as a systems engineer for General Electric Aerospace’s programs with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He would eventually move to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) — the precursor to the NGA — after it was founded in 1996 as an operations analyst supporting work to collect imagery and targeting data in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars.

In 2000, Beauchamp became NIMA’s senior technical advisor for studies and analysis when he was 29 years old, making him the youngest person to be hired for a senior executive position within the agency since it was founded. Almost immediately, he was tasked with developing a congressionally mandated strategy that would convince the government to purchase imagery from commercial vendors.

At the time, the IC held a monopoly over space-based imagery and data, and the industry market was only just beginning to take hold. Beauchamp described the assignment as “trying to sell milk to people with their own cows.”

“Why would the NRO want to encourage the government to buy commercial imagery? They’re the judge to build and operate imagery satellites,” he said. “So I figured out what it would take in terms of investment to get industry to buy and build satellites sufficient to meet the government’s demands, because the national satellites were not meeting all of the government’s demand for mapping data.”

But after developing a business case for the strategy, Beauchamp said the government was largely opposed to implementing it. He decided to shelve the strategy after one final unsuccessful meeting held on Sept. 10th, 2001, he said.

“On the 11th of September, [Congress] called me up,” he said. “I’m in my office, we’re watching pictures of the [Twin Towers] smoking, and my phone rings and it’s the congressional staff saying, ‘You’ve got your money. Could you spend more?’”

Beauchamp’s $830 million plan was funded by one of Congress’ post-9/11 supplemental packages and created ClearView — the first program that allowed commercial companies to provide satellite imagery to the IC. Once U.S. forces had entered Afghanistan, Beauchamp also moved to purchase all of the overhead imagery of the country, he said.

“What we really wanted to do was make sure that this imagery that was being collected wasn’t being used by the Taliban to target our forces,” he said. “So I basically stitched a camouflage net made out of $100 bills over the country of Afghanistan in order to keep our forces safe.”

Today, commercially derived imagery is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet Labs all have several lucrative contracts with the federal government to provide space-based data for national security, weather and other needs. 

“So this industry, would it exist? Maybe. But would it have blown up the way it did? Probably not, if we hadn’t done this,” Beauchamp said.

The next several years of Beauchamp’s career would be spent at the NGA in various roles focused on strategy and acquisition. In 2012, he began a joint duty assignment as the ODNI’s director of mission integration under then-Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper — a job he noted was one of the highlights of his career. During his second day on the job, U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were targeted by militant groups, leading to the death of four American citizens.

Once Beauchamp’s team finished the assessment of the attack, he was immediately thrust into the fallout of the classified document leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013. His oversight led to a massive reform of the IC’s compartmented access programs and yet another overhaul of the government’s policy on commercial imagery.

“All of a sudden, now I’m convening people on the analytics side [and the] collection side, trying to figure out how to make up for the losses and capability that Snowden revealed,” he said. “And part of that is doing a reform of the IC’s compartmented programs, because they had way too many of them in overlap.”

Toward the end of his three-year assignment, Beauchamp started working with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work on a “side project” focused on standing up a new organization to pivot the Defense Department away from counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and towards great power competition, he said.

Beauchamp’s time in the intelligence community came to an end in 2015, when he was picked to be the Department of the Air Force’s deputy undersecretary for space and director of the principal DOD space advisor. There, he had two critical tasks, he noted.

“One, I’m working with all the international relationships with other countries who want to cooperate with us in space,” Beauchamp said. “At the same, I’m trying to convince the Americans to shift from space as a sanctuary from which you provide services, to space as a domain for warfighting.”

At the time, the Pentagon was reluctant to expand operations in space out of fear of being the first to weaponize the domain. But Beauchamp argued that the idea wasn’t about weaponization, and instead protection of critical space-based capabilities.

“It’s almost like before then, we were deliberately not protecting them so as you didn’t look like you wanted to start something,” he said. “And I was like, ‘This is not an option anymore.’ The Chinese had already demonstrated they could shoot down their own satellites, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing to us?”

Part of Beauchamp’s work was to develop a plan for how the Pentagon could make its space systems more resilient — many of which have become central to the Space Force’s operations, he noted. And when the first Trump administration decided to stand up the Space Force, Beauchamp was at the forefront of the effort to convince officials to approve the new military service.

Beauchamp would then transition to the Department of the Air Force’s office of the CIO, first as its director of enterprise IT in 2018 and later as the deputy CIO in 2020. His main focus was preparing the DAF for transitioning to telework operations as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, as well as consolidating the department’s enterprise licenses and creating a plan for modernizing base-level infrastructure, he noted.

“The overall trend line was eliminating the county option of uniqueness that was taking place at every base, and replacing it with a core set of enterprise services that were provided centrally,” Beauchamp said. “Big things like moving to zero trust — you can’t do those things if every base and every two-letter has their own architecture independent of everybody else’s.”

Today, the DAF has a strong path forward on modernizing its IT infrastructure, but Beauchamp said the true challenge will be convincing the department’s major programs to rely on enterprise services instead of building their own networks.

“It’s going to allow them to consolidate and collapse multiple redundant networks and really reduce the amount of money we’re spending on sustaining all this infrastructure,” he said. “When you modernize those networks, you also improve your cybersecurity, because the more deviation you have, the more gaps are created between the different baselines and different versions of software.”

Moving forward, Beauchamp said he will be taking time off but is open to other opportunities in the future.

“I’m excited for whatever the next challenge might be,” he said. “I’m interested in talking to folks who do exciting things, and to see who needs somebody like me to solve big problems.”

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Beauchamp has been tapped as the new director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. In this role, he will be responsible for the Air and Space Forces’ special access programs (SAP) — a security protocol given to highly classified programs within the Defense Department — personnel security and declassification issues, Beauchamp told DefenseScoop in an email.

Notably, the Security, Special Program Oversight and Information Protection office is set to become part of the new Office of Competitive Activities by October. That organization is one of several new ones being stood up as part of the Department of the Air Force’s broad plan to reorganize for large-scale conflicts in the future, and will combine multiple disparate efforts to oversee and coordinate sensitive activities under one roof.

Beauchamp has served as the DAF’s deputy CIO since December 2020, where he assisted in leading the department’s directorates responsible for enterprise IT, data, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. He provided insights that informed the Air Force’s IT investment strategy and modernization efforts related to cloud computing, data management and more.

“Winston has been the steady hand and seen the Office of the CIO through significant change, always keeping the organization on track,” DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said in a message to the workforce announcing Beauchamp’s departure. “He has been instrumental in the DAF’s digital transformation efforts, in right sizing the POM (5-year budget), in the standup of the US Space Force, integration of the office of the Chief Data and AI Office into the DAF CIO family, and more recently on reoptimizing for Great Power Competition.”

Jennifer Orozco — current director of the Security, Special Program Oversight and Information Protection office — will serve as the new deputy CIO for the Department of the Air Force beginning Monday, Beauchamp said.

As the DAF continues to work on modernizing its IT enterprise, Beauchamp told DefenseScoop the most pressing challenges moving forward will be the adoption of a zero-trust cybersecurity framework, as well as delivery of the Base Infrastructure Modernization program. The $12.5 billion effort looks to overhaul and modernize existing base area network infrastructure across the department.

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In the series, “Accelerating the Mission with AI and Security,” produced by Scoop News Group for DefenseScoop, and underwritten by Google for Government, leaders overarchingly agreed that AI, and the new subset generative AI, will define technology modernization trends across their agency.

Improving security resilience with AI

AI will be an invaluable tool for organizations to automate security data analysis and the response and remediation of threats, leaders say.

DISA technical director Andrew Malloy shares how the Cyber Development Directorate is exploring AI’s use as a “force multiplier when it comes to being able to auto-correct, auto-block certain things, to look at different malware variants and know what to do and what not to do.”

He surmises that AI tools on the commercial side could be leveraged to train models on government data for tasks such as training users and improving knowledge management within organizations.

Several leaders in the series cited specific projects across defense agencies that are currently being spun up to better understand AI implementation using appropriate frameworks. Gary Buchanan, CISO at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, highlights as an example Project Maven, a DOD-based AI intelligence system that helps NGA understand how AI can work within their infrastructure.

“From a defensive standpoint, we’ve been partnering with Gartner to understand how we can structure AI within our system so that it’s not, it doesn’t run rampant across places where it shouldn’t make sure it has access to the data that it should, and not the data that it shouldn’t,” he explained.

AI for data analysis and prediction models

The pace of innovation of AI models and the computing tools required to make use of this technology is within reach of a lot of organizations. However, having a sound understanding of the infrastructure needs, data hygiene practices, and use cases are essential to ensuring a sound investment strategy.

“When people think of AI, a lot of people think of it as a ‘magic wand,’ that if you ‘buy’ AI, then magically all of your problems will be solved,” quipped Jinyoung Englund, acting DCDAO for digital services at the DOD. “But the reality is, if you want to use AI, you first have to have infrastructure, you have to have quality data, you have to have cloud capabilities, you have to have accelerated compute.”

She explains that her office invests in building the infrastructure to enable other defense organizations to then deploy AI capabilities, such as by establishing an AI marketplace. For example, DOD has established ai.com as the place for industry players to register the AI tools and services they want to provide to their DOD customers.

“In the future, I’m hard-pressed to think of a program that isn’t going to employ AI in some ways,” added Winston Beauchamp, deputy CIO for the Air Force. “Certainly, for our flying platforms, assisting a pilot to make sense of the barrage of information that they face is a job well suited for AI. Same thing for space operations, as well as the business side of the house, logistics maintenance planning — every function has some role that can be better accomplished by use of AI as an assist to the folks who perform those missions.”

Duncan McCaskill, acting chief data and chief analytics officer at the Department of Navy touched on the power of generative AI to improve how personnel access information, stressing the importance of ensuring data is clean and made available to more modern cloud systems.

“So instead of someone aboard a ship, having to page through all kinds of paper manuals, we could get to the point where there’s a digital assistant [able to access] every technical manual for that particular vessel,” he said.

AI to accelerate workforce collaboration

Defense leaders also share how AI-assisted tools and platforms can streamline communication and workloads across the defense community at large to reduce productivity bottlenecks.

Among them is Jude Sunderbruch, the executive director of the DOD’s Cyber Crime Center, which provides cybersecurity training and services that support the defense industrial base.

He shares that their unit’s biggest challenge is making sure it is working in partnership with all stakeholders and building connections that can operate at scale and quickly. Improving data tagging and data governance across the organizations allows it to appropriately share information, validate origination, secure information, and ensure lawful compliance with all the applicable rules.

“Hopefully over time, applying more artificial intelligence and machine learning tools is really where we’re headed,” said Sunderbruch.

Among the many IT investments organizations are making, leaders point to the value of continuous learning and education of their workforce to keep up with these changes.

Eileen Vidrine, chief data and artificial intelligence officer for the Air Force made that clear, saying, “I would say our biggest challenge is always going to be talent. We want the absolute best in our workforce, total force, military, civilian active guard reserve. And we have that in common with our industry colleagues because the competition for the best talent is fierce right now. So we have to have really invest in multiple ways to bring in great capability.”

She stressed the value of offering education opportunities like data science or offering internships and other pathways for recent college graduates but also noted the importance of upskilling the Air Force’s existing workforce and continuing to invest in skills acquisition geared towards career growth.

Other participants who shared their insights in this series included:

• Maynard Holliday, PTDO Assistant Secretary of Defense, Critical Technologies, DOD
• Justin Fanelli, Acting CTO, Department of Navy
• Peter Guo, CIO, Ships Repair Facility, Department of Navy
• Dan Berrigan, Ph.D., Lead, Worldwide Research Collaboration, Digital Capabilities Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory
• Sean Baker, Chief Technology and Senior Information Security Officer, Uniformed Services University

This video series was produced by Scoop News Group, for DefenseScoop, and sponsored in part by Google for Government.

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“The single biggest thing we can do to improve our cybersecurity is modernize architectures [and] get rid of our tech debt, because our older systems … can’t provide the cybersecurity that we need to survive in today’s environment,” Winston Beauchamp said during a panel at the Google Public Sector Forum hosted by Scoop News Group.

Beauchamp noted that U.S. adversaries are already leveraging advanced capabilities like AI to enhance their cybersecurity attacks. For example, artificial intelligence tools can be used to bypass the Air Force’s signature management techniques — where a military asset can be deliberately modified to reduce the likelihood of detection — to rapidly alter an adversary’s signature just enough so that they go undetected on the spectrum, he noted.

“They can do so at speed, faster than we can update our signatures — so we have to run faster,” Beauchamp said. “And that means using AI to try a different approach other than signature management.”

The department is working to integrate both AI and cybersecurity protections across the architectures of its new systems as they’re being developed, Beauchamp noted. This pivots from legacy platforms that instead had these capabilities tacked onto the architectures either at the end of development or after deployment, which limits their effectiveness, he said.

Taking this approach to modernization is a journey that Beauchamp is “very optimistic” about.

“When you modernize, you bring in capabilities that — when cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are baked in — are inherent to what we’re delivering,” he said. “Then the nice thing about it is from an infrastructure perspective, we don’t have to think about designing it. It comes out of the box and we will tailor it and we’ll customize it to the mission.”

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Each military branch is responsible for enabling a major component of the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) — and the Air Force’s overarching offering is the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).

“Last fall, the Secretary of the Air Force laid out a series of seven operational imperatives, or actions that would be necessary to pursue in order to counter threats from potential adversaries around the world and necessary to determine the certainty of those threats. ABMS is one of those operational imperatives,” Beauchamp said at DefenseScoop’s DefenseTalks event.

Near that time, the branch’s leadership also declared that the period of experimentation for ABMS was over and officials would be moving into operational definition deployment — and that actions going forward would be focused in that direction. 

“And so the cross-functional team that is leading that activity right now is co-chaired by the Air Force and the Space Force,” Beauchamp said.

That team recently came up with four pillars “for how we move forward” and make real progress to enable JADC2 to come to full fruition. The first pillar involves “defining the foundation,” according to Beauchamp, who elaborated on each during the discussion.

“This is everything from definition of common terminology and critical lexicon, and setting some poor baseline principles for what a mess will be, and how it will define the future for data management command and control,” he added.

The second pillar involves “coming up with a model-based approach.” In that capacity, Beauchamp noted that the team is developing a model that would allow them to perform repeatable experimentation against proposed solutions, defining measures of effectiveness, and measures of performance, that would allow objective evaluation. 

“And that model is scheduled to be released to industry next week,” Beauchamp confirmed. 

The third pillar will seek to define a “passing scenario,” the deputy CIO noted, which would basically set the operational context for ABMS and how it should be measured. And the final pillar will enable the establishment of a common operational picture “that will put the operational context to that pacing scenario,” Beauchamp noted, so that officials can strategically lay out the roles, missions, functions and responsibilities, across the department, and joint partners

“That work is intended to be complete by the end of January,” Beauchamp said.

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RPA uses software technology that enables humans to easily build, deploy and manage digital robots that can perform manual, often repetitive functions. Over the last several years, it’s been having an impact across the government — including in the Air Force.

“RPA and artificial intelligence are not about cutting personnel,” Air Force Deputy CIO Winston Beauchamp said Tuesday during a UiPath event produced by FedScoop. “We realize that our mission set is growing and continues to grow. We’re not going to get more [staff], but we are going to continue to be asked to do more and more with the resources that we have. So in order to take on those new missions and continue to adapt to the technologies and challenges that we face in an ever-evolving world, we need to be able to make better use of the people that we have.”

The military service is leveraging emerging AI-aligned technologies like RPA to make decisions faster and better.

Air Force officials have seen some progress developing such solutions. But to drive more — and faster — innovation, they launched the RPA accelerator to simplify the making of relevant human-assisting software bots. 

Beauchamp highlighted some of the unfolding RPA use cases that are maturing with support from the accelerator, including bots associated with automated target recognition — and separately, automation to enhance critical weather models with additional data. 

More than 400,000 military service members each year typically receive orders to make a permanent change of station (PCS) for their next assignments. For many military insiders, Beauchamp said, PCS can introduce unnecessary complications or frustrations. So, his office is also working to deploy technologies to automate PCS-related processes.

“This is an area that I think is a pain point for a lot of people. It’s a retention issue, frankly, when people have to wait a year for their household goods to show up, for example,” Beauchamp noted. These are the sorts of things that give people pause about reenlisting or staying in the military.

Beauchamp later told FedScoop more about his office’s journey driving new automations. He said the five deployments that only took a week to launch through the accelerator demonstrate that “the barriers to entry are low” — and Air Force officials want to keep it that way.

“We are, to the maximum extent possible, trying to make this organic, coming from the functional areas, proposing and introducing areas to do RPA,” Beauchamp explained.

“We are fully aware that we don’t have all the answers at the Pentagon, and that the real innovation is happening in the wings and the squadrons. They’re closest to the work, and frankly, they’re unique. Every airborne platform and every weapon system has its own quirks, and the folks that are closest to it know where it makes sense to [deploy the technology and] where it doesn’t. But there are some things that are universal,” he said.

It’s ultimately those common “pain points,” like PCS processes, that the Air Force wants to consider automation to solve in the near term, he added.  

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