Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE)

Global Information Dominance Experiments, known as GIDE, is a series of joint military exercises run by U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command to test AI-assisted decision-making across combatant commands. The first three events took place across 2021 under then-NORTHCOM commander General Glen VanHerck, who framed them as an attempt to move faster than adversaries by fusing data already collected by U.S. and allied sensors into a single operational picture. GIDE sits under the Pentagon’s broader CJADC2 concept — the coalition evolution of Joint All-Domain Command and Control — and is one of the earliest public demonstrations of that programme in action.

The experiments pull data from space-based sensors, undersea arrays, radar networks, cyber sources and open-source feeds, then run it through machine-learning models to flag anomalies and predict adversary behaviour. VanHerck told reporters after GIDE 3 that the goal was to give commanders “days” of decision advantage rather than reacting to events already in motion. According to briefings from NORTHCOM and outlets including Breaking Defense and C4ISRNET, the software stack drew on commercial cloud infrastructure and analytics tools from vendors including Palantir Technologies , with the eleven combatant commands contributing data and analysts. NORTHCOM officials said decision timelines that had previously taken hours were compressed to minutes during the exercises, though independent verification of that figure has not been published.

The operator has been the U.S. military, with the eleven unified combatant commands and Five Eyes partners participating at varying levels across the three events. GIDE has not been used in combat — it is an experiment series, not a fielded weapon — but the tools and workflows it validated feed directly into operational programmes. Reporting by Defense One and others linked GIDE outputs to real-world watch-floor use at NORTHCOM, particularly for tracking Russian and Chinese military movements in the Arctic and Pacific approaches to North America.

The series has continued past its initial 2021 run, with follow-on iterations under subsequent NORTHCOM leadership and adjacent experiments hosted by other combatant commands. The Pentagon’s 2024 announcement that a “minimum viable capability” of CJADC2 had been delivered was widely reported as building on the GIDE lineage. What distinguishes GIDE within the broader command-and-control landscape is less any single piece of software than the willingness to run recurring cross-command exercises with commercial AI tools in the loop — a pattern other combatant commands, and allied militaries including the U.K. and Australia, have since started to imitate.