The Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) on Thursday said it is launching a new effort that encompasses the acquisition of the infrastructure and data it will own while fostering steady competition that leverages the data to meet warfighters’ requirements.
There are three components to the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR), the first being the government acquiring and owning data, the infrastructure it resides on, and the related processing, a senior defense official told reporters on Thursday. This has been procured from industry, which will manage it, the official said.
The second piece is “enterprise licenses for mature applications,” the official said. An example of this is the Maven Smart System (MSS), which was initially prototyped by Palantir Technologies [PLTR] and is moving into production through a five-year $480 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract awarded on Wednesday to the company.
“It’s a really useful application our combatant commands used to sense and track things,” the official said. “That is part of our advanced C2 capabilities and it does nest within that.”
In addition to the MSS award, the CDAO also awarded Palantir $33 million through an Other Transaction Agreement to quickly and securely onboard third-party and government capabilities into MSS to meet the digital needs of U.S. Combatant Commanders. The OTA was awarded through the CDAO’s Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace.
The third part of Open DAGIR is maintaining a competitive environment for software vendors to leverage the government-owned data stack to “agilely and rapidly” meet near-term COCOM requirements, the official said.
The CDAO will leverage its quarterly Global Information Dominance Experiment series, known as GIDE, to quickly build on the government-owned, contractor-managed data stack and applications to meet COCOM needs, the official said.
“But we have a whole bunch of other requirements we know our combatant commands need,” the official said. “So, let’s get those requirements in. Let’s share those requirements with industry in a transparent process with clear selection criteria. And then let’s test those capabilities in an experimentation series.”
The first set of new GIDE experiments will begin in July, the official said.
The official said there is about $50 million through a new Other Transaction Agreement to acquire applications to meet urgent or emerging requirements. Some of these applications will sunset and others will become enduring, in which case they will become part of the existing ID/IQ contract and integrate into the Palantir stack, the official said.