Pentagon poised to launch inaugural ‘challenge’ for Global Information Dominance Experiments

The Defense Department will soon kick off a new “challenge” related to its Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) as officials look to bring additional vendors into the mix, according to the officer overseeing the initiative.

The U.S. military has been conducting GIDE events for several years, but the pace has picked up recently as Pentagon leaders prioritize capabilities that will enable a warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which seeks to more seamlessly connect the data streams of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners for better and faster decision-making. The department’s Chief Digital and AI Office has been put in charge of the events, which also feature the department’s various combatant commands across the world.

There have been 11 numbered events in the GIDE series so far, which now occur every 90 days or so, and the department is gearing up for the twelfth iteration this fall.

“We are about to announce our inaugural GIDE Challenge in the next week or so. And then we’ll see how many [vendors] we can bring into the enterprise. But we’re really excited to start bringing some new entrants in and to be able to hopefully show them off in GIDE 12,” Col. Matt Strohmeyer, the Pentagon’s director for the Global Information Dominance Experiments, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the Air Defense Summit hosted by the Potomac Officers Club on Tuesday.

He said it’s yet to be determined how many industry partners will be tapped.

“It’s going to be a unique approach, but we’re going to be using the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace to announce it and to kind of manage the process. It is going to focus on contested logistics and contested sustainment. That’s the mission set as part of that version 1.0 of JADC2 workflow that we have for global integration. And so there we’ll be looking for vendors to submit proposals on — or there’ll be a document that’s published that shows them exactly kind of what we’re thinking through, what the workflow is, what the tasks and subtasks we’re looking for them to perform are, whether they try to perform on all of it or perform on a section of it. And then we’ll be looking to try to bring them into an evaluation and then into subsequent GIDE events leading up to GIDE 12,” Strohmeyer explained.

His team is now approaching joint experimentation through multiple venues that build on each other, he noted.

That includes weekly engagements that take place outside the numbered GIDE events.

“We call them GIDE technical workshops where we have the actual software that’s on actual networks with actual users. And we go through a very scoped workflow and we just get quick feedback on what’s working, what’s not working … Those then build into something we call GIDE Xs, which are still scoped, but it’s with several operational users on an operational workflow. And it usually takes place over the course of one-to-two days where we’re now going through a more scaled workflow and process to see what works, what doesn’t work, get feedback from operational users. And then those are on about a monthly basis, and those build into the numbered GIDE events, which that next one is GIDE 12. And that’ll be a several weeks-long event where we really see — did these systems perform the way that we wanted them to?” Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.

“Our goal, by having that threefold approach, is that we don’t just have a lot of development that happens under the surface and we do an event and then it turns out that the software didn’t exactly meet what we wanted it to. We can get iterative feedback on it as we go through the process better than what we’ve been able to do in the past. And we learned that last year. We used to just do numbered GIDE events, and we learned actually in GIDE 8 last year [that] we need more regular feedback. And that’s when we adopted this new approach,” he added.

The upcoming GIDE events will be held in the wake of the Pentagon’s launch of a new CJADC2-related initiative known as Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR), which aims to scale data analytics and artificial intelligence tools across the department.

“The idea behind Open DAGIR is to allow us … to be able to have a common platform that any vendor can come into that has access to a trove of government data that the government controls, and then we can plug and play vendors as necessary,” Strohmeyer said during a panel discussion at the Air Defense Summit. “We’ve made a pretty significant investment to allow us to be able to do that in the term.”

The Global Information Dominance Experiments will serve as a testbed for vendors’ AI tools and other technologies to determine if they meet military requirements.

One of the strategic objectives of GIDE is to provide a venue for combatant commands, the Joint Staff and coalition partners to exercise their ability to digitally collaborate across the globe on a crisis response decision, Strohmeyer noted.

Another strategic objective is to help the U.S. military and other friendly be better postured to close so-called offensive and defensive kill chains, including through automation.

“We found that the first step is really just getting the data right, getting the workflow right, and then applying some algorithms to it. But then eventually, there’s areas where we think we might be able to apply AI to allow us to be able to smartly — with humans cognizant over the decisions that are being made — allow us to be able to close those kill chains better and faster,” he said.