War Secretary Pete Hegseth, a recipient of the 2025 Wash100, issued a new memorandum on the Advana program as part of the Department of War’s effort to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption and auditability.
The memo, issued by Hegseth’s office on Friday, tasks the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer to establish three distinct program components to transform Advana into a platform to harness the department’s extensive data assets and support warfighting, intelligence and enterprise missions.
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What Are Advana’s New Program Components?
Each program component will have technical leaders and will have access to enhanced engineering resources. The CDAO will oversee the programs and provide the Office of the Secretary of War with status updates every 45 days until the programs achieve full operational capability.
The three program components are:
- War Data Platform, or WDP, will focus on standardized data integration to support AI and application development across the department.
- Advana for Financial Management will support the under secretary of war comptroller‘s audit remediation teams in the mission to ensure that the DOW can achieve a clean audit opinion in fiscal 2027.
- WDP Application Services will rationalize and migrate non-audit Advana applications to the new WDP architecture.
What Is Advana?
Advana was introduced during President Donald Trump’s administration to provide DOW users with analytics tools and services and data derived from the department’s over 400 business systems to support decision-making.
In March, Steven Morani, who was then acting under secretary of war for sustainment, issued a memo about the department’s intent to turn Advana into a formal program of record.
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