What’s next for Centcom’s Digital Falcon Oasis experiment series

Hamas’ surprise assault against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, marked a watershed moment for U.S. Central Command’s still-maturing Digital Falcon Oasis exercise series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘turning point’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From potluck to race car

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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