The live-fire event, which took place in Poland, Germany and Arizona on May 11-27, was led by the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under 56th Artillery Command and included international allies.

Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, commanding general of 56th Artillery Command, called it a “premier training event” that tested the task force’s ability to operate across all domains, find targets “at depth” and strike those targets with kinetic and non-kinetic effects.

In U.S. military parlance, the term “kinetic effects” generally refers to munitions or other projectiles, while non-kinetic effects include things like electronic warfare, directed energy and cyber capabilities.

The Multi-Domain Task Force is “improving and refining the technology and the tactics, techniques and procedures. Our soldiers, our sergeants and our lieutenants are the ones who have their hands on this equipment, who are determining the best way to employ it, to get the effects and find the targets that we’re asking them to. And we are putting that feedback right back into the system to improve the capability and optimize not just the equipment that we have, but the way that in which we’re employing it,” Rafferty told reporters Friday during a teleconference.

The results of the exercise are also setting the conditions for the evolution of Rafferty’s command into a multi-domain command in Europe that’s going to take place over the next few months, he noted.

Unmanned systems of various types were key components of the latest iteration of Arcane Thunder, part of an effort to demonstrate the ability to “fight with live data” across a large-scale combat theater.

The Army teamed up with the Navy in the employment of unmanned surface vessels to test out the multi-domain ops concept — which fits in with the Pentagon’s vision for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to better connect the sensors, shooters and information networks of the U.S. military services and allies and partners.

“It’s really trying to perfect the ability to transition from the littoral domain to the land domain, and … how does the MDTF, as part of the joint force, gather data from our joint partners and also share data with our joint partners,” Col. Patrick Moffett, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force, told reporters about the use of unmanned surface vessels during Arcane Thunder. “Working with the USVs, we worked the joint kill chain where the Navy vessels would identify a target, that target would get passed to the second MDTF all-domain operations center, and then we would pass that target to really, for this exercise, to our Polish partners. So that was the tie-in.”

As a land-based force, the Army’s understanding of littorals is often limited, but those USVs gave the task force the ability to better understand what was going on in the sea domain, he noted.

The robo-boats were also used to haul Army equipment in a contested logistics scenario, where the military might need to push that type of gear forward to “isolated elements,” Moffett explained.

But USVs weren’t the only uncrewed systems involved in Arcane Thunder. Drones, high-altitude balloons (HAB) and unattended ground sensors were also part of the mix.

Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, noted that soldiers used sensor data to inform the employment of so-called “launched effects” — such as loitering munitions — to strike targets.

“For us, as we kind of, you know, fought through the scenario-based portion of this exercise, it was using … the micro HAB to provide that geolocation. And then that would trigger battalion- and company-level decision points on if and when … we launched the launched effect to actually close the kill chain on that,” he told reporters.

Stitching together the different technologies involved in the exercise and enabling interoperability between platforms and payloads were some of the biggest challenges the Army had to tackle, he noted.

Rafferty emphasized the importance of being able to pass live data through mission command systems — which in the case of Arcane Thunder, involved forces in both Europe and the continental United States.

He noted that the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under Moffett’s command demonstrated the ability “to make sense of the information and generate enough fidelity to produce targets that then, in some cases, were passed back to the 56th multi-domain headquarters … to work through the process of assigning, you know, the right shooter to those particular targets. So there was a whole range of possibilities and scenarios there.”

Rafferty added: “Really the breakthrough, like I said, was getting that data in virtually real-time from a micro HAB, refined by another platform, made sense of by [Moffett’s team in Poland] and Aaron Ritzema’s soldiers at Fort Huachuca [in Arizona] … and then, in seconds, back here to Wiesbaden and Mainz-Kastel in Germany for, you know, additional analysis and assigning to the right shooter. So really taking that kill chain and taking what was once, you know, hours to really into minutes, essentially … That live data part is probably the biggest breakthrough for us, from my standpoint.”

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The pair of firsts was conducted as part of Project Convergence Capstone 5, the latest in an annual experimentation event hosted by the Army to test emerging concepts, largely in line with the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

CJADC2, as it’s known, envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of the framework refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

Marines placed commercial maritime radars, such as those that can be purchased at fishing or boating stores, at San Clemente Island off the coast of San Diego and integrated them into the Army’s Sensitive But Unclassified-Encrypted (SBU-E) architecture.

As the radar data was integrated into the unclassified network, Marines sent maritime tracks to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to ingest as part of its maritime domain awareness. Located nearby in Barstow, the Army then leveraged a cross-domain solution to bring those tracks up in classification to the secret network and then sent them back to the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity near San Diego to control a notional shooter simulating a Tomahawk strike on an adversary ship.

“We were able to validate that we can see the vessels out around San Clemente Island, pass that unclassified track data to Fort Irwin, get that up class to [SIPRNet] and then send it back to use it,” Maj. Anthony Johnson, an operations officer within Marine Air Control Group 38, said in an interview. “It demonstrated that if we were able to give these commercial sensors to a coalition partner or even if the military were to use these coalition sensors on this network, we can use that in tandem with our military sensors to contribute to maritime domain awareness for the component commander, being the joint maritime component commander.”

The demonstration gets to the heart of what the Pentagon desires to achieve with its CJADC2 initiative by not only integrating into a multiservice common operational picture, but also proving that commercial, non-U.S. military sensors can be integrated into operations. Oftentimes, coalition communications and equipment aren’t compatible with Department of Defense architectures (not to mention interservice compatibility issues), slowing down multination operations.

That coalition integration is one of the main draws for the Army’s SBU-E architecture. Officials have described that it has significantly sped up coalition operations because it negates the need for liaisons in formations communicating directions back and forth on multiple radio systems because the partners aren’t authorized to use classified communications or equipment.

The thought behind it is that tactical wartime information is so perishable — meaning it is acted upon and expires so quickly that even if the enemy were to discover plans, it would be too late — it does not need to be classified, increasing the speed of operations.

“It was demonstrating that we can have a common operational picture, a common tactical picture-like capability on the SBU network. It was cool to see how our commercial sensors can contribute to that common tactical picture that the Army’s Joint Modernization Command was monitoring over at Fort Irwin,” Johnson said.

The experimentation effort was also part of a small unit concept that the control group and communications squadron were testing out.

Johnson explained that the control group consisted of a detachment with a mix of Marines from Marine Air Support Squadron 3, 3^rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion and Communications Squadron 38 forming a communication-sensor integration team. The concept, which doesn’t currently exist within the Corps, sought to pair communications Marines with air defenders and tactical data link maintainers to integrate commercial sensors and augment the Corps with ground-based maritime sensors in addition to what the unit already has.

Planning for the concept began in October after Project Convergence last year, where the unit realized that they always have to integrate radars into their network. But, taking it a step further, they wanted to prove they could integrate commercial sensors.

“In our minds for comm squadrons, well, we’re already doing military sensors, now we’re being presented an opportunity to do commercial sensors, so why don’t we start making a team that specializes in understanding how radars work and how to integrate them into military networks,” Johnson said. “For our occupational field, so for the communications MOSs, it validated that we can have small-scale teams that can perform this function of integrating commercial capability.”

More broadly, the concept, if fully realized, will enable the Corps to send small, task-organized teams out to multiple locations to contribute to maritime domain awareness, which could be critical in a Pacific theater fight given the various islands there, not to mention that smaller teams are more difficult to target.

“Right now, we have the TPS-80 radar and a couple other sensors that are not in the 3^rd Marine Aircraft Wing, but those are few and far between, just due to the limited quantity of military equipment we have,” Johnson said. “Now that we’ve demonstrated this capability, now we can have more nodes, if you will, spread about multiple islands. So we can increase the sensor coverage in Indo-Pacom.”

Lessons from Project Convergence

While broadly a success, Johnson noted there were some coordination challenges during the event involving passing track data back and forth with the Army at Fort Irwin through the service’s cross-domain solution. However, once the requirements were understood between both organizations, it was a quick turnaround to instantly pass track data through SBU-E to the secret network.

Following Project Convergence, Johnson said his unit is looking to get the devices necessary to enable them to access the SBU-E environment, given that’s not a capability the Corps possesses currently. They’re hoping to integrate the architecture into squadron internal events such as an 18.6-mile foot march in early May, where Marines will ruck with 25 pounds.

They plan to integrate SBU-E with the Tactical Assault Kit to be able to see and track participants as they conduct the march.

The experimentation also showed that with commercial sensor integration, the Corps could potentially look to COTS capabilities to supplant more exquisite, military-built systems that can be more costly and time-consuming to acquire.

“Why we use it in a Marine Corps blend scenario, like we talked about how coalition partners can also have these as well, but this also gives the Marine Corps more capability with something that’s significantly cheaper than a programmatic solution that takes upwards to a decade to field, as well as to refurbish and update,” Johnson said. “Perishable commercial equipment, if it’s attritted or if it’s broken for whatever reason, it’s easily replaceable [rather] than having to wait with long lead times.”

Given the success of the communication-sensor integration team concept, Johnson said his organization will be entering a working group with the other communications squadrons across the Corps in early May to add the concept as an advanced mission essential task they are all required to perform.

“The task would be to integrate organic and non-organic sensors into Marine Corps networks. Since we realize that this is a continuous task that our Marines are having to perform, we want to register that as a requirement, where we’re actually appropriately evaluated on the ability to be able to do this,” he said. “That way, we can signal to headquarters Marine Corps that when the exercise presents itself, that we’ve actually done that task, instead of it just being for the sake of experimentation.”

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Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system — Maven Smart System NATO — to support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

NATO plans to use the system to provide “a common data-enabled warfighting capability to the Alliance, through a wide range of AI applications — from large language models (LLMs) to generative and machine learning,” it said in a release, ultimately enhancing “intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making.”

Neither party commented on the terms of the deal, but it was enough to drum up market confidence in Palantir, whose stock rose about 8% Monday morning. NATO, however, said the contract “was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system.”

Ludwig Decamps, NCIA general manager, said in a statement that the deal with Palantir is focused on “providing customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance, and empowering our forces with the tools required on the modern battlefield to operate effectively and decisively.”

Palantir’s commercialized Maven Smart System plays into the growing need for an interconnected digital battlespace in modern conflict powered by AI. The data-fusion platform served as a core element of the Pentagon’s infamous Project Maven. However, NATO warned in its release that it shouldn’t be confused with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven program, though the company’s AI is a component of the greater NGA program’s infrastructure

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command Control (CJADC2) attempts to do this by connecting disparate systems operated by the U.S. military and international partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains. Palantir has already inked a $480 million deal with the Pentagon to support those efforts with Maven. Last September, the company also scored a nearly $100 million contract with the Army Research Lab to support each of the U.S. military services with Maven Smart System.

Meanwhile, the contract with the U.S.-based Palantir comes as NATO has become one of the recent targets of President Donald Trump’s ire because he believes other members of the alliance aren’t committing enough of their spending to the organization’s collective defense, saying in March: “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them.”

NATO’s Allied Command Operations will begin using Maven within the next 30 days, the organization said Monday, adding that it hopes that using it will accelerate further adoption of emerging AI capabilities.

“ACO is at the forefront of adopting technologies that make NATO more agile, adaptable, and responsive to emerging threats. Innovation is core to our warfighting ability,” said German Army Gen. Markus Laubenthal, chief of staff of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, the military headquarters of ACO. “Maven Smart System NATO enables the Alliance to leverage complex data, accelerate decision-making, and by doing so, adds a true operational value.”

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Adm. James Kilby shared a status update on that work and shed light on some of the sea service’s associated near-term, technology-enabling efforts during a media roundtable at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space forum.

“One of our goals — one of our seven targets — is this hybrid fleet [with] robotic and autonomous systems,” Kilby explained. “The challenge for us is to really robustly lay out a roadmap to get there. We’ve had some fits and starts there, so we must do better. Our initial focus is 2027 though, [for a] capability that will help us in the Pacific.”

Last year, then-CNO Adm. Lisa Franchetti unveiled a list of seven “Project 33 targets” to accelerate to enhance the Navy’s long-term advantage and ensure readiness for a possible war with China by 2027. President Donald Trump fired Franchetti in February, but as Kilby suggested, the Navy continues to pursue those immediate modernization aims under his leadership and while waiting on a new nominee to be named. 

He said personnel are currently moving to deploy a unified network of unmanned and manned platforms “in a meaningful way.”

“The MQ-25 is the first unmanned aircraft to integrate with the air wing. Beyond that, once we do that, I’m looking at sensors, I’m looking at electronic attack, possibly a loyal wingman concept — but I also have to have unmanned surface [capabilities] helping me in that fight, as well,” Kilby noted. 

He acknowledged that while the Navy is pursuing a range of activities to boost global readiness and enhance platforms’ maintenance and efficiency at shore and sea, its force and arsenal are simultaneously in high demand all over the world. Kilby pointed to the Nimitz and Vinson Carrier Strike Groups, which are conducting deterrence and other operations in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as the P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft and a guided missile destroyer supporting Northern Command on the Trump administration’s new U.S.-Mexico border missions.

“Over the past 18 months, our sailors in the Red Sea have successfully countered hundreds of Houthi missiles and [unmanned aerial vehicles]. We have had over 20 ships that have operated in the Central Command area of responsibility for this, and today, the incredible sailors of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group are there carrying on that effort,” the acting CNO said.

As that conflict continues to disrupt commercial shipping and place sailors’ lives at risk, Kilby said he’s increasingly concerned about the Navy’s lack of options to more economically counter that threat, and America’s munitions industrial base.  

“As the former [deputy chief of Naval operations for warfighting requirements and capabilities, or N9], I was focused on a high-end laser, 500 kilowatts to 1 megawatt. And I have regret for that — that I had not been thoughtful enough to think about the UAV threat, where I think a much lesser-power weapon would have done what we needed to do,” he said.

The Navy’s secretive Project Overmatch marks another key element of its future warfighting capabilities and overarching intent to prioritize lethality, per Trump’s recent orders. 

That initiative is a major piece of the Navy’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) operational concept and will be crucial to the U.S. and its allies’ joint tactical network of the future.

“The classic example of Overmatch is I want to be able to communicate across every single modality I have at sea, based on prioritization of message. Comms-as-a-service and software-defined radios are a piece of that as well. So, that effort continues,” Kilby told DefenseScoop.

“This ability to communicate in a more effective manner at sea makes me more lethal, where I’m not having to wait for a certain prioritization of messages to go out — the system just understands the quickest means to do that and sends that message,” he explained.

For most of Kilby’s career, Navy forces have been able to conduct power projection, or sail anywhere in the world to carry out orders. But contemporary network advancements are introducing nascent challenges and making it easier for adversaries to locate U.S. forces’ whereabouts. 

“Overmatch, and [the fight from the maritime operations centers], and the mission control of my strike group is what I need to do to be able to have access into that environment,” Kilby said.

Earlier this year, the Project Overmatch team unveiled its first-ever formal project arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.

“Certainly we need to work with our allies across the board here, and I’ll meet with several of them during this conference,” Kilby told DefenseScoop during the roundtable.

Naval Information Warfare Systems Commander Rear Adm. Seiko Okano was recently tapped as the newest lead for Project Overmatch. 

Kilby confirmed he’s impressed with her early work in this role, including recent moves to target readiness across the maritime operations centers and from the strike group commanders in new and noticeable ways — and largely by handling data differently.

“She’s been critical in helping us with the unmanned surface vessels, and communicating with C2 and command and control, and using artificial intelligence to do things like automatic target recognition, which are important for those targets, and to have that data set updated — so I see it continuing and only growing larger as we move forward,” he said.

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Led by the 805th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, the biannual capstone allows the service to test new tech and assess their applicability for battle management and tactical command and control. After a successful iteration at the end of last year, the unit is poised to continue experimentation and rapid development of new capabilities and concepts to support the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort throughout the next year.

Although effective execution of CJADC2 involves countless technical and bureaucratic challenges, the 805th — also known as the Shadow Operations Center – Nellis (ShOC-N) — used its most recent capstone event in December 2024 to understand how AI-enabled technologies could assist battle managers in conducting dynamic targeting.

“Modern battlefields are exceedingly complex and require the ability to distill an immense amount of information into a cohesive, actionable amount,” ShOC-N commander Lt. Col. Shawn Finney told DefenseScoop. “The emergence of artificial intelligence in warfighting applications potentially gives battle managers the ability to focus on the most salient aspects of the operational area by reducing the volume of information they must evaluate.”

At the recent Capstone 24B event, the unit experimented with advanced prototypes across three lines of effort: human-machine teaming; international partner and allied integration; and cloud-based C2 decision advantage.

The capstone simulated multiple “combat-representative” scenarios, including offensive counter-air, defense counter-air, electronic warfare and special operations, Finney said.

Notably, officials tested artificial intelligence platforms such as the Maven Smart System and Maverick AI application. The tech allowed battle managers to conduct “tactical control, execution, and assigning” of both friendly and adversarial assets within a common operating picture, according to an Air Force news release. The AI was also able to ingest planning data to give battle managers insights into complex and evolving scenarios.

During the event, the Maven system was for the first time successfully integrated into the Air Force’s new battle management kit, known as the Tactical Operations Centers-Light (TOC-L), at a live exercise.

TOC-L is a mobile, scalable C2 kit embedded with different software and applications that creates a single air picture from hundreds of fused data feeds. The service began prototyping it in 2022 and has since delivered 16 kits to different units around the world — including to ShOC-N — so they could be used in experimentation efforts.

The program is “constructed in a way that we can quickly deliver these prototypes, get them in the hands of our operators, and inform future TOC-L requirements — and really inform, more broadly, the control and reporting center weapons system,” Lt. Col. Carl Rossini III, deputy chief of the deployable systems branch at the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System Division, said in an interview.

Battle management teams used the TOC-L system and AI capabilities during Capstone 24B to simulate a dynamic targeting cell, able to rapidly identify and defeat assets that weren’t planned for during operational planning. Rossini said they gleaned insights from the event that ranged from very technical procedures to broader concepts.

“One was how well that [dynamic targeting] cell could operate with some other systems we were evaluating for operational command and control, and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] for how we manage dynamic targets and authorize those targets for prosecution,” he said. “We also had good learning on the construct of that [dynamic targeting] cell in particular, like the roles on that battle management team.”

The Air Force is developing an integrated “system-of-systems” called the DAF Battle Network to support the Pentagon’s goals for CJADC2. Broadly, the concept looks to connect disparate sensors and weapons operated by both the U.S. military and foreign partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer across all warfighting systems and domains.

Steve Ciulla, TOC-L program manager, told DefenseScoop the Air Force is investing in the AI-enabled tools featured at ShOC-N’s recent capstone as a way to accelerate decision-making.

“Those are the specific things they were looking at, in terms of testing some of those cutting-edge software capabilities and speeding up the process of identifying striking targets — the dynamic targeting — and looking at how AI could help do some of those things, [and] also some human-machine learning as well,” Ciulla said.

While both Maven and Maverick AI successfully demonstrated automated capabilities during the capstones, Finney noted that the 805th will continue to experiment with them to mature the technology further.

“The human-machine team concept continues to evolve as we uncover new and better ways to unlock the potential of both the hardware and software while also understanding where software still has gaps that humans must perform,” he said.

Moving forward, the 805th plans to execute an experimentation campaign series throughout 2025 comprising four experiments — three of which will contribute to the Air Force’s Bamboo Eagle exercise and the Army’s Project Convergence — culminating in a final capstone event. Finney described the series as taking a “building block approach” in how the team uses lessons from previous events as baselines for subsequent experiments.

“This approach exposes large training audiences of warfighters to experiment results in a rapid and iterative fashion. We firmly believe in the experimentation-to-exercise process,” he said. “Through this, potentially immature capabilities can gain significant reps and sets within a single calendar year.”

As for the TOC-L team, Ciulla said they are focused on exercising the systems in the Indo-Pacific region over the next year. The goal is to conduct as much joint and international integration as they can across multiple exercises — including Project Convergence 25, Bamboo Eagle, Return of Forces to the Pacific (REFORPAC) and others.

The exercises will help inform the Air Force’s next iteration for TOC-L acquisition, expected to kick off by summer. The service intends to improve on current kits and scale the number of systems globally, Ciulla said. 

“It’s not going to just end with this phase one experimentation effort,” he added. “We’re still going to be getting this feedback loop [and] user data coming in to support our development, design for the next iteration of the system to tell us what the biggest risks are, what’s working [and] what’s not working.”

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Project Convergence Capstone 5, hosted by the Army, is an experimentation venue for all the U.S. military services and key allies to train alongside each other and test concepts for integration. This is in line with one of the Pentagon’s top priorities called Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

This year’s event will expand upon previous iterations, taking place in two scenarios: one in March at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, focused on enabling operations at the corps and below level along with joint and international partners, and the other in April along with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to exercise at the combatant command level with all service components.

The Indo-Pacific portion will be much more expansive than what the military did as part of last year’s Project Convergence capstone event.

“Last year, I said we had fake Guam, we had a simulation built that we had something we were defending and all the things that went along with it. This year, we’re taking all that stuff we did in tents at Camp Pendleton [in California] and we’re going to the Pacific. We’ll be operating out of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Japan and Australia,” Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, commander of Joint Modernization Command, said in an interview. “We’ll be doing the same type of things, but it’ll be at actual operational distances across the International Date Line, using the actual live networks. We’ll have all the live intelligence data, plus the simulation wrap that we put on it to do all the key activities, defense of Guam, offensive and defensive activities, etc.”

Miller said the Pacific portion is focused on transitioning from crisis to conflict — using a familiar real-world scenario of defending of U.S. and coalition territory, a nod to China’s ambitions to take Taiwan — involving theater-level offensive activity, such as strikes on maritime targets and land targets, while forces are continuing to try to gain intelligence and information about the enemy and defend themselves from adversary volleys.

At Fort Irwin, the exercise will be focused on more tactical operations that go beyond the day-one portion of conflict at the theater level once land, air, sea and special ops forces are introduced. This could be a Pacific or European scenario, Miller noted, as the technology the military is testing will be agnostic to theater.

As part of the exercise, there will be what Miller described as “leave behind” capabilities.

“When we’re done with this … everything from cross-combatant command coordination to target effector pairing at lower echelons, they will have capabilities they will keep that they will be able to fight with on the Indo-Pacom warfighting network. That’s a big deal,” Miller said.

Those leave-behind capabilities fall into two broad categories. The first is related to the minimum viable CJADC2 product that deals with cross-combatant command coordination and collaboration. This is focused on how forces make rapid decisions and understand resources across all the combatant commands in conjunction with the Joint Staff and senior policymakers in the nation’s capital.

This coordination across combat commands is another key difference in this year’s Project Convergence. It’s not just Indo-Pacom, but there will be a total of six combatant commands that are at some point touching the exercise. Officials recognize that a war in one combatant command’s area of responsibility will likely have global implications.

Those collaboration tools span around six or seven workflows, Miller said, which include the Maven Smart System as well as asset visibility and intelligence. There are also machine learning models that are built-in to help provide coordination and situational awareness across the various geographic regions.

The capability provides “the connective tissue so that we don’t have, when something happens, four different combatant commands producing PowerPoint presentations about what their recommendations are, that then the Joint Staff or somebody else has to somehow try to put together,” Miller said. “That’s a time-consuming process and the information gets stale in a hurry.”

The second set of capabilities is focused on the ability to conduct offensive actions from across all the services and coalition partners using any sensor available.

Most importantly, this capability is looking at how to strike heavily protected formations and targets.

“We have to understand, again, what are the totality of the effects we need? Some of it is we need this types of missiles or we this types of subsurface things,” Miller said. “Another part of it is things like how do we bring an enemy out of [emissions control] so we can make sure we know where they are for sure, [and] how we fuse different forms of intelligence rapidly.”

Officials are using the actual maritime strike concept from Indo-Pacom for the scenario.

Army objectives

When it comes to testing out Army-specific objectives for Project Convergence, Miller said the entire basis for the event is built around the forthcoming Army warfighting concept. The event will be based on a much more coherent scenario for how senior leaders think the Army will fight in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe.

Miller outlined four primary warfighting notions they’ll seek to explore during Capstone 5. The first is expanded maneuver aimed at how the joint force is thinking about time and space in all domains. Second is cross-domain fires, involving how to shoot and create effects across all domains of warfare. Third is formation-based layered protection, which is the idea of how to protect units in all domains, such as the electromagnetic spectrum, dispersion of command posts and countering unmanned aerial systems. Last is command and control and counter-C2, or preventing the adversary from being able to command their forces.

To test this out, the Army is looking at a battlefield framework that goes from corps all the way down to the platoon level.

The initiative will provide a unique opportunity to test an operational concept at the corps level in ways the Army typically hasn’t before.

Corps exercises are traditionally done at the command post level and are simulated. However, Project Convergence is providing a holistic training opportunity at all echelons similar to a combat training center rotation. Those events are typically focused on brigades and are the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train. Project Convergence will essentially be a combat training center rotation for corps and below as opposed to last year’s event, which saw independent pockets of experimentation — such as medical — separate from other operations.

The Army will also be looking at how to do maneuver in a multi-dimensional aspect, to include within the electromagnetic spectrum.

While the Army can’t replicate all these dimensions and capabilities at the National Training Center, it has built a robust simulation environment intended to overwhelm participants with what they might expect during large-scale combat against a sophisticated nation-state adversary.

“If you’re in a command post, what you’re going to have in front of you is a very, very detailed, hectic, confusing picture of what is going on in the air and on the ground for any friendly and enemy UAS systems. Everybody’s trying to jam everybody else. One-way attack munitions. All the same time we’re trying to fire rockets and cannons through that space. We’re trying to fly manned [and] unmanned rotary-wing aircraft. We’re trying to resupply. All of the stuff that has to happen to do an operation,” Miller said. “How we think about planning and operating in that space is huge. We have technologies that are brought in to help us make sense of all that. We’re very focused on making sure commanders and staffs understand what they look like in the electromagnetic spectrum and what their vulnerabilities are [and] at the same time what the enemy’s vulnerabilities are. That’s a big focus.”

They’ll also be focusing on robotics and human-robot formations, particularly for breaching, to ensure human soldiers aren’t the first forces in contact with the adversary.

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The Golden Dome for America initiative — previously referred to by Trump as the Iron Dome for America — calls for a multi-layered shield for the U.S. homeland. The Space Force is expected to play a central role in setting up the architecture — which emphasizes the need for space-based sensors and interceptors — and the service has already established a cross-functional “technical integrated planning team” and is reaching out to industry.

However, while Golden Dome is expected to include next-generation technologies, there could also be a role for some of the Air Force’s “traditional” capabilities such as fighter jets, suggested Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, the service’s director for force design, integration and wargaming.

Homeland defense is already a key element of the service’s force design vision, he noted during a Hudson Institute event Wednesday.

“This thought of a Golden Dome that protects the homeland, that is completely in line with the force design, and how we do that is completely in line. But I would suggest that the threat and the number of threats and how the threats are being presented, presents new challenges, but it also offers opportunities for … some of the capabilities, the traditional capabilities that we would call mission area three,” Kunkel said.

“When you think about how the Air Force and … the nation has defended itself, we defend ourselves as far away from our borders as possible. And when we build this Golden Dome, we can’t think of this Golden Dome as this thing that stops at the borders. And where we’ll use this air layer is in the countering of, you know, adversary bombers that are approaching our borders and shooting missiles from those borders. So you know that combined arms approach that we took in our force design, it’s equally applicable to this Golden Dome concept where there’s going to be a combined arms requirement for that to counter the different threats that we’re going to see,” he added.

Trump’s executive order directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to develop a plan to field additional missile defense tools noted that it must address the development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks before launch.

While sensors and weapons will play important roles in the multilayered missile defense architecture, battle management will also be key, Kunkel noted.

“The sense is a big part of it. The effectors are … a big part of it. But this battle management of the whole thing is also a big part of it. I know that Air Force is right in the middle of that with DAF Battle Network,” he said.

The DAF Battle Network fits in with the Pentagon’s next-generation warfighting concept dubbed Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which aims to better integrate the sensors, shooters and data streams of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners into a more unified network.

Kunkel sees AI as an enabler of these types of concepts.

“One of the major areas where I think artificial intelligence will help us is in decision-making, you know, that’s in battle management and those types of things, and understanding risk calculus and that. I think it’ll help us in autonomy,” he said. “There are opportunities there where AI can be introduced in some capabilities to achieve even longer endurance, you know, flights or longer-range weapons. And those are some of the areas we’re looking at. But I do think the area that is like ripe for exploitation for artificial intelligence is decision-making and how we do battle management.”

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The Pentagon is planning to implement a novel mission partner environment architecture on a live network in support of a maritime mission being led by the United Kingdom in 2025. The goal is to employ zero trust and data-centric security capabilities on a federated architecture, composed of “multiple secure, collaborative data services between partners and hosted users,” a spokesperson for the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told DefenseScoop in a statement.

“This enables us to create a global information sharing capability,” the spokesperson said.

The event will leverage previous work done by the Pentagon’s Project Olympus, according to a department news release. Led by the Joint Staff’s J-6 directorate for command, control, communications and computers/cyber, the effort looks to solve challenges that prevent international allies and partners from sharing critical warfighting data by testing, developing and integrating various enabling technologies via experiments and demonstrations.

During the 2025 maritime mission, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada will utilize zero trust and data-centric security capabilities that were previously tested during Project Olympus 2024, including the Indo-Pacific Mission Network and Collaborative Partner Environment, according to the spokesperson.

Other international participants include Norway, Australia, Chile, Spain, France, India, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Oman, New Zealand and Singapore.

“As part of this activity, we will assess command and control effectiveness and performance and CJADC2 capability maturity relative to a primary line of effort within the CJADC2 Strategy, Modernize Mission Partner Information Sharing,” the spokesperson said.

CJADC2 is the department’s new warfighting concept that aims to connect disparate systems operated by the U.S. military and international partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

Although the Pentagon announced earlier this year that it had developed a “minimum viable capability” for CJADC2, there are still a number of technology and policy hurdles that inhibit the department’s ability to effectively share information with allies. As a result, the U.S. is adopting new mechanisms — such as zero trust and data-centric security standards — that allow for protected information sharing.

“We’ve historically looked at security as the antithesis for information sharing,” Jim Knight, the United Kingdom’s lead for Project Olympus, said in a Pentagon news release. “The security folks come in and want to sort of clamp down. With zero trust and data centric security, they are security mechanisms, but they are enabling information sharing.”

Zero trust is a cybersecurity framework that assumes adversaries are already moving through IT networks, and therefore requires organizations to continuously monitor and validate users and their devices as they move through the network.

The strategy differs from traditional “perimeter-based” security models that assume all users and devices can be trusted once already inside a network. It requires Pentagon components to modernize their IT infrastructures, as well as adopt new governance processes.

“I think that’s a key focus point,” Knight said. “For the first time, we’re getting that balance right in terms of applying more security. And by applying more security, we’re getting greater information sharing.”

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“The good news is it’s just a very natural evolution from what was already there,” Plumb told DefenseScoop Monday during an exclusive interview at the Pentagon.

When it first achieved full operational capability in 2022, the CDAO was structured around four combined predecessor organizations: the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program. Plumb, who before this role served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, assumed leadership after the office’s first chief, longtime commercial tech executive Craig Martell, departed in early 2024. 

After comprehensively reviewing the office’s inner workings, her team spent the last several months shuffling its structure to take a new path forward designed to expedite Defense Department components’ access to and adoption of AI for contemporary day-to-day operations. In the interview, Plumb provided DefenseScoop with a first look into the re-organization and the motivations behind it, as well as why she believes it makes sense ahead of her planned departure and the entrance of the second Trump administration.

“I will transition in mid-January, but the rest of the CDAO is career and technical expertise staff, and they will just stay and so a lot of the priority missions will continue,” Plumb noted.

Pressing needs

Putting it simply, some of the CDAO’s original teams — including those working on Advana, joint command and control pursuits, AI assurance, what was previously referred to as the algorithmic warfare group and others — have been renamed and reassembled into new efforts aimed at delivering in-demand AI and analytics across the enterprise, and via ongoing operational missions. 

“Over the last six months, it was really clear that two things were happening,” Plumb explained.

On the one hand, she spent time with CDAO colleagues focused on what she called “the integration that has to happen between those [DOD] customer needs, and the platform services” delivering products that meet them. 

Secondly, through steadily evolving efforts to propel the department’s realization of the military’s next-generation concept for combined all-domain command and control — including through its Global Information Dominance Experimentation series, better known as GIDE — Plumb said she and her team “really saw the importance of, early on, having that scaled capabilities view as we look at new solutions through these acceleration cells.”

Just as the CDAO is organized with lines of effort under policy and acquisition, for example, Plumb has established a new Scaled Capabilities directorate with a Senior Executive Service-level role and, for now, two existing divisions named “mission analytics” (MA) and “enterprise platform services” (EPS), focused on scaling capabilities to the enterprise.

While MA broadly includes CDAO officials working on customer support activities, the AI and Data Acceleration or ADA initiative and several others, EPS — formerly known as algorithmic warfare — is responsible for the underlying infrastructure, software tools and services for enterprise capabilities like the Advana platform.

Separately, but now reporting directly to the CDAO and operating in conjunction with that, is the existing “Advanced C2 Accelerator Cell” — as well as the new AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, which Plumb unveiled last week. 

Describing the fresh vision, she explained: “When we see capability gaps at specific [combatant commands], how do we solve that pressing need — but then build that in a way that’s future-proof and can be scaled to other settings? So for instance, if we solve, as we have, operational real-time issues outside of the United States, then when we have major issues in the United States — like, say, a hurricane, and we need to optimize our operational response to that — how can we take those same tools and scale them to that new use case?”

The new AI RCC envelops maturing AI assurance and test and evaluation work, and CDAO-led efforts to facilitate the military’s responsible use of emerging and still-uncertain generative AI capabilities. 

Notably, the AI RCC (pronounced “arc”) marks the DOD’s next iteration of Task Force Lima. Plumb said it was in some parts born out of the learnings identified by that group. 

“I think one key finding was that there was a pressing need for the department to accelerate its identification of these AI capabilities, and then create pathways to scale,” she said, adding that the idea is to introduce “a small core team that works on pilots in the priority areas” paired with a team tasked with scaling such capabilities for wider use. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop, she said the leadership team is “in the final stages with a candidate” who was recommended as a Defense Innovation Unit “pick” to steer the AI RCC. 

On Tuesday, a DOD spokesperson said Capt. M. Xavier Lugo — who led Task Force Lima through its duration — “has moved to lead another priority initiative at CDAO,” without clarifying which.

In terms of tangible generative AI progress the office has made this year, Plumb said that officials recently accelerated a large language model translation service identified by DIU for use across two military service partners. 

“We basically said, ‘OK, we know there are use cases. We know they’re [budgeting] for them in a few years — let’s not make people wait two years to have access to it.’ So we got a contract that allows the relevant customers to access it through, I think, Advana. But we’re working to integrate it on the Maven Smart System side too, so that our customer base can just start translating, leveraging, sort of the best of commercial tech out right now,” Plumb noted. 

The solution can take “a whole bunch of context and translate more like a person translator than a text translator,” she added.

Sometime in January, the CDAO also aims to open up new cloud-based sandbox testbeds for approved DOD users to experiment with different generative AI applications via the new cell. Plumb declined to share the cloud service providers involved at this time.

Crossover capabilities that enable C2 operations but function between the two rapid acceleration cells will be advanced in future GIDE experiments, according to the CDAO.

“The intent is that they should work themselves out of a business,” Plumb told DefenseScoop.

She pointed to a hand-drawn chart she produced during the interview to visualize the office and new moves, and used the Maven initiative as an example of the overarching approach.

“What we’re doing now is, we worked through identifying how we could scale Maven. We scaled it to a number of [combatant commands]. We’re expanding that scaling. So now, we’ve got the solution. Now that solution needs to move from this accelerator over here to our enterprise platforms, and I don’t have a timeline for you on that transition, but they’re working together — the Advanced C2 lead and our Scaled Capabilities and Enterprise Platforms lead to say: ‘OK what does managing this stack look like?’” she said. 

The CDAO confirmed that all of the new management changes aligned with the reshuffle are expected to take effect by Jan. 6. 

Change ‘during a baton pass’

Plumb acknowledged that upon taking over the AI office, she “put a lot of things on hold” to assess if the organization was operating at its best capacity — and areas where there’s room for improvement.

“I also pulled a lot of authorities up to me to create the management structures we needed,” she explained.

The CDAO’s new make-up comes as Plumb prepares to exit the office next month as a member of President Joe Biden’s departing administration.

“Transitions are a time of uncertainty and stress. I think the CDAO has really done a lot — has been through a lot, but it’s done a lot — to prove out how valuable this type of work is. This is a natural evolution in that process. That it comes at this time is just, we can’t lose time during a baton pass between administrations on these AI capabilities. And so we wanted to keep the momentum going,” she told DefenseScoop. 

Principal Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri is set to serve as the acting chief of the office in the interim until Trump’s pick is named, and officials tapped to lead the reshuffled non-political positions are listed on the office’s recently updated website.

Plumb expressed confidence that steady bipartisan, bicameral support from Congress and commercial players — and the increasingly in-demand value proposition the CDAO offers to enable CJADC2 and more — will prove it even more valuable in the months and years ahead.

“I think the next three to four years are going to be probably dispositive on how the Department of Defense integrates AI into its warfighting and enterprise management. This is the time when the solutions are coming, and we know they can be transformational. So the next year, the team really needs to get those foundations, and they’re set to do it, get the foundation set, get those pilots going, and get the assessment criteria clear,” Plumb told DefenseScoop. 

“We’re almost fully staffed up now in terms of hiring personnel and had a big hiring push over the last six months. So we’ve got a team that is talented and has the vision and can execute. So, I look forward to seeing what happens,” she said.

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The Defense Department unveiled its Replicator 2 effort in September, with a goal of accelerating high-volume production of technologies designed to detect, track and destroy unmanned aerial threats.

Shortly after signing off on a classified counter-uncrewed systems strategy last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin jetted off to DIU’s Silicon Valley headquarters to meet with companies developing these types of solutions.

The organization is playing a key role in bringing vendors and enabling technologies into the fold for Replicator.

The unit needs to “start early on the hardest problems, which in many cases are the software problems. And so for Replicator 1 [uncrewed platforms], we’re doing a whole host of things related to collaborative autonomy and command and control … For Replicator 2, we have a similar challenge with command and control across these systems, so we’re starting that now,” Aditi Kumar, deputy director of DIU, said Thursday during an event at the Hudson Institute.

While Replicator 1 is focused on accelerating and fielding thousands of uncrewed systems to counter China’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific, Replicator 2 is also searching for tools to protect sites in the continental United States.

Lawmakers and other observers outside DOD are also concerned about these types of threats. For example, the compromise version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which was released over the weekend, would require the secretary of defense to create a “C-UAS Task Force” and for the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — which investigates reports of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) — to designate liaisons to parter with that organization.

In recent days, sightings of mysterious drones in New Jersey have made headlines and raised alarm. And just last month, U.S. and U.K. military personnel were actively monitoring installations around and airspace over Royal Air Force Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford for mysterious small drones that have been repeatedly spotted near those bases.

Operating counter-UAS platforms in the homeland presents some different challenges than deploying these types of capabilities in war zones overseas, Kumar noted Thursday.

For example, one of the risks of firing off anti-drone weapons — be they kinetic interceptors like missiles or electronic warfare tools — in the United States is the possibility that such weapons could harm friendly aircraft and other civilian infrastructure, unintentionally.

“Even though we are designing some conceptual operations that are focused on the Indo-Pacom theater, I think similarly for Replicator 2 we had a chance to talk to some of our commercial partners about this, where there is the homeland defense challenge and then there is the OCONUS challenge. But even overseas, there are restricted environments, dense environments, populated environments that look very similar. We would think about them very similarly to environments in the homeland. And then, of course, there are, you know, conflict zones, and those are different types of solutions that we need to field. And so as we think about them, I think, you know, the homeland defense challenge is going to be probably the biggest one that we need to tackle, and as we think about the types of solutions that we can apply there, we can think about how broadly applicable they are to those other environments so that we can field something more broadly,” Kumar said.

“Even in the way that we selected Replicator 2 locations, Replicator 2 is focused on, you know, protecting our installations and force concentrations. The way that we selected those sites where we would field this capability was very deliberate because we wanted a sample set that is representative of the global footprint. And so as we field to those sites, we will then be able to draw lessons on how we can proliferate those technologies across the globe,” she added. “I think we start with the most limited environments, and then we go out from there.”

She noted that her organization recently released a solicitation via its commercial solutions opening for a “Forward Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Command and Control System,” or FCUAS C2.

The document states that critical infrastructure and force concentrations are increasingly at risk from the growing threat of adversary drones.

“Current command and control (C2) systems are not optimized to address the speed at which kill chain decisions (detect, track, identify/ assess, defeat) must occur to counter unmanned systems. As the UAS threat increases, a single operator conducting air defense operations may be overwhelmed,” officials wrote.

To address this problem, the Pentagon “seeks a tactical edge based C2 system that enables a single operator to manage multiple targets and is capable of fire control providing the ability to rapidly adapt to counter swarms of unmanned systems along with other potential manned or unmanned system threats. The solution should reduce operator cognitive load and accelerate the decision process to conduct multiple simultaneous kinetic and/or non-kinetic engagements, be easy to operate and can quickly integrate additional data sources, capabilities, sensors, and effectors and be able to operate autonomously if needed,” per the solicitation.

Some of the “primary attributes” that DIU is looking for when it comes to industry solutions include the ability to operate solely on a laptop, tablet or other portable system as a single piece of hardware; utilize or ingest sensor data for detection, tracking and identification; and “be capable of automated creation of engagement plans and providing fire control for various systems to include effectors such as kinetic, directed energy (DE), and electronic warfare, and attack UAS (interceptors).”

The unit also wants tools that support automated identification and classification of targets, weapons pairing, “prosecution of target,” and assistance with linking “the best sensor with the best effector option” for defeating threats.

Such a capability would fit in with the department’s concept for Combined Joint-All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which aims to better connect the sensors, platforms, data streams and commanders of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners.

Vendor software needs to be able to support a minimum of 2,000 tracks at 4Hz; help with fratricide avoidance and airspace deconfliction; mitigate interference of electronic warfare systems; and support track cueing and track forwarding, according to the solicitation.

“This prototype will require several field exercises and will include integrating with existing sensor and effector systems and executing a full kill chain in a live fire CUAS test event projected for the summer of 2025,” officials wrote.

They noted that prototype other transaction agreements that are awarded may lead to awards of follow-on production contracts or transactions without the use of further competitive procedures.

“The follow-on production contract or transaction will be available for use by one or more organizations in the Department of Defense and, as a result, the magnitude of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the prototype OT,” according to the solicitation.

Industry responses are due Dec. 23.

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