Cameron Stanley, a 4×24 Leadership Program member, is the Department of War’s new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, according to a DOW announcement.
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What Does the DOW CDAO Do?
In this role, Stanley will direct the DOW’s use of data, analytics and AI. He was most recently at Amazon Web Services where he served as national security transformation lead.
“[Stanley] and his team at CDAO will define AI deployment velocity metrics for all the pace-setting projects in the next 30 days, and report at least monthly after that,” War Secretary and Wash100 awardee Pete Hegseth said on Jan. 12 during a speech to SpaceX employees in Starbase, Texas. “These will become the new benchmarks for programs across the department.”
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Who Is Cameron Stanley?
Stanley is a national security professional with extensive prior Pentagon experience. He served as chief data officer of the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security office from 2022 to 2024. Stanley, here, supervised policy development and implementation for the defense intelligence and security enterprise.
He also served as chief of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team, also known as Project Maven, from 2021 to 2022. This was an AI and data pathfinder effort with a goal of creating improved warfighter results through the creation, deployment and sustainment of rapidly-fielded AI algorithms and data solutions.
Stanley previously served as the senior science and tech adviser for U.S. Southern Command and as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s liaison to the U.K. He is a graduate of the Air Force Academy.
What Is the Recent History of the DOW CDAO Role?
Stanley emerged as the top contender for the CDAO role in early January. He replaces Douglas Matty, who is now working on the Golden Dome homeland missile defense program.
The DOW in August moved the CDAO position under the purview of Emil Michael, under secretary of war for research and engineering, as part of an organizational restructuring. The goal was to consolidate the DOW’s AI strategy, development and implementation under R&E for faster delivery, tighter integration and better defined long-term goals, according to FedScoop.
Hegseth said a pursuit of the CDAO team will be advanced hardware and computing power to run AI systems. President Trump’s executive order, he said, directs the DOW to erect data centers on military property. It also instructs the Pentagon to work with the Department of Energy to make sure that it vastly increases the amount of breadth of resources to power this computing technology.
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