Tuesday's Keynote Session

The AOC 2022 Symposium kicked off Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Gen. Chris Badia, German Air Force, who spoke from his perspective as NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation. Allied Command, Transformation is one of NATO's two strategic commands. Here are some of the main points from his speech.

NATO's situation: Baida began by discussing what has changed and what NATO needs to accomplish. The main issue for NATO is that the security climate has changed. NATO is faced with global power competition from China and Russia. Baida also says that conflicts are stretching longer – more than 10 years for places such as Libya, Mali, Syria and Iraq and eight years for Ukraine. He explains that NATO focused for too long on asymmetric threats and terrorism. While Russia and China developed UAVs and hypersonic weapons, NATO did not invest much in game-changing weapons.

MDO and EMO: Badia says, the Alliance has long understood the important role of protection of our forces and allowing access to the electromatic environment. He described NATO's approach to Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) and Electromagnetic Operations (EMO). MDO, he said, is an end-state and not a capability. It requires synchronization across all five warfighitng domains – air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. EMO cuts across all five domains, as well. One of NATO goals is to integrate MDO and EMO.

The second speaker of the morning was Margaret Palmieri, Deputy Chief Digital AI Officer, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). Coming to CDAO from her prior role as Director of the Navy Digital Warfare Office, she began with a brief overview of the Navy's efforts to develop network and information warfare concepts over the past 10-20 years, spanning from the early days of NIFC-CA to its current concept of Information Warfare. She said the Navy's concept of Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare in the 2012-15 timeframe had a significant influence on its later Distributed Maritime Operations concept. "That DMO concept was about distributed forces integrating effects and maneuver in the electromagnetic spectrum over space and time and bringing together kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities."

Palmieri moved on to talk about her current role at CDAO. She said the CDAO is charged with accelerating the adoption of AI throughout the DOD. One of its focus areas is identifying and removing barriers to AI adoption. "We get to be a demanding customer for the rest of the Department. So, if we run into a barrier somewhere – whether it's on the networks or infrastructure side, the compute side or the culture and concept side, we get to go after it. We fix it ourselves or work with partners to go fix it or elevate it up…. And that can't be underestimated."

In the Q&A session, Palmieri was asked about AI and EW. She said EW is one of several AI hubs that CDAO has partnered with OUSD R&E to develop.