This leader, serving as Executive Agent and Organizer for DoD’s INDOPACOM and EUCOM AI Battle Labs which host Joint, Coalition Partner Hackathons, is making a change.
Stuart Wagner, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Air Force and Space Force, announces departure:
In posting the news Stuart shared:
Last week, my three-year term with Department of Air Force (DAF) CIO’s office expired. I want to first express thanks to the DAF, SAF/CN and our extensive partners who helped kickstart and enable our success. The work piloted permissive venues for engineers (civilian, military, contractors, industry, American citizens) to build and adapt capabilities and tactics by leveraging live data from operations. The work also exposed some problems with innovation and risk discussed below. I focused on high-risk, high reward technical DoD activities. These included 1) A high-profile, joint, multi-classification weapons system hackathon series called BRAVO that incentivized DoD data sharing and 2) Battering Ram, an effort to increasingly automate security classification determinations to expedite DoD data sharing and aggregation including with foreign partners. Battering Ram received significant resourcing this year, important OSD approvals, and is advancing as a POM activity through STITCHES. BRAVO’s next big hackathon in Europe will proceed without me, arranged by Air Force, OSD CDAO and EUCOM (https://lnkd.in/gWPc3q2j). Over two years, we ran hackathons at nine locations, yielding nearly 200 software prototypes from DoD operational data at a cost resembling two SBIR IIs. This is an 80x improvement in cost per prototype over SBIR IIs, and if programmed could become a lower-cost, higher-speed defense innovation pathway. 20%-30% of hackathon projects produced effects by 1) starting new programs 2) refining existing ones, or 3) informing organizational change.
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