Army is Launching AI-Powered, Commercial-Facing DevSecOps Platform

The Army is launching a new commercial-facing initiative to streamline how industry partners submit code and software products for military accreditation, said Army Acting CIO Gabe Chiulli Tuesday.

What is dubbed “Project Gatekeeper” will deploy a tailored version of the Army’s DevSecOps platform onto NIPRnet, using artificial intelligence to provide commercial developers with instant feedback and risk assessments. Chiulli said that the project will help remove acquisition friction.

“The concept behind this is that we are going to work with industry similar to Operation Jailbreak, where we can have [industry partners] commit code containers, whatever might be in isolated areas, and allow us to give you that feedback,” Chiulli said at the Carahsoft DevSecOps Conference in Reston, Virginia.

Chiulli added that the platform addresses a widespread operational bottleneck where individual vendor requests for sponsorship and accreditation frequently exceed the capacity of Army personnel. By allowing companies to upload code containers into isolated staging areas without requiring a Common Access Card, he added, the platform offers a streamlined pipeline toward pipeline authorization and security approval.

“Everybody comes to us and says, ‘Gabe, I want sponsorship to get a FedRAMP,’ or ‘I want sponsorship to get inside the Army, and I want you to look at our product,'” said Chiulli. “We just don’t have enough people to derive every person’s product and every capability to say, ‘I’ve got this built in. I can’t pay for it all.'”

“This is a mechanism to try and get us at least another step in the right direction to offering more products out much quicker,” Chiulli added.

Beyond intake automation, Chiulli said, Gatekeeper supports broader Pentagon priorities aimed at keeping pace with rapid commercial innovation and serving a generation of digitally savvy warfighters. War Secretary Pete Hegseth and other department leaders have instructed teams to iterate rapidly, simplify developer tools and deploy secure capabilities to tactical users at the edge. Chiulli said that the Army is looking to leverage digital native warfighters to fulfill those goals.

“Warfighters come in across the services that are much better at doing using digital technology than we are,” Chiulli said. “We’re trying to figure out how to scale to the idea of technology that is moving extremely fast.”

To further simplify industry collaboration, Chiulli said, the Army is establishing focus areas to communicate technology requirements at scale rather than managing disparate vendor inquiries.

“I am trying my hardest to find ways to communicate to industry, but it’s hard to do this via one message at a time,” Chiulli said.

By establishing automated guardrails, Chiulli said, Project Gatekeeper will allow valid commercial technologies to reach operational networks safely and significantly faster.

“I’m trying to set industry up for success to actually engage with us,” Chiulli said. “We’re setting the framework in place to move out rapidly.”