The Trump administration is set to implement a comprehensive plan aimed at accelerating the military’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This initiative, as outlined by the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, seeks to provide commercial AI options directly to users on the front lines, focusing on three distinct operational categories essential for modern warfare.
Questions regarding the Department of Defense’s (DOD) AI strategy have intensified since August, when the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering assumed control over the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) following a significant workforce restructuring.
Pentagon CTO and Research and Engineering leader Emil Michael shared insights into the DOD’s current efforts to enhance AI integration during a media roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group. “My idea is in the next [forthcoming] weeks — so a timeframe of days or weeks — where we’re going to start pushing the deployment of these [AI] capabilities directly to some portion, if not all, of the 3 million users at the Pentagon at different classification levels,” Michael stated to DefenseScoop. “And once you get it in front of them, people start to learn how to use it.”
The Pentagon’s history with AI has been complex, with multiple administrations recognizing it as a critical technology area. However, the DOD’s efforts have faced hurdles, including procurement challenges, ethical considerations, and personnel issues. The CDAO achieved full operational capability in 2022, merging several previous technology-focused entities, such as the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) and the Defense Digital Service (DDS), under the deputy secretary of defense.
Michael noted the evolving mission of the CDAO, emphasizing a renewed focus on forging partnerships with leading AI companies to quickly deliver models and tools tailored for the Pentagon’s specific requirements. “When the office was initially created, AI was not as commercially available for average consumers as it is today,” he explained.
He pointed to major players like Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI, and Google, which have invested heavily in AI infrastructure, research, and development. “Now you have four giant companies investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, in research and development, data centers, power cooling chips — you name it. So the explosion of capabilities has been enormous, and we’re just catching up to that,” he remarked, highlighting a shift in public perception towards AI. “The familiarity is increasing, and there’s less fear and more excitement about it.”
While Michael did not elaborate on how existing partnerships with these companies will influence the DOD’s new AI strategy, he indicated that the use cases will be categorized into three primary areas. “One is enterprise, or corporate. So we’re a large organization. How would any large organization use AI for efficiency, to just make the worker more efficient and more productive? Then there’s the intelligence use cases. How do you use it to analyze more intelligence? We have a lot of intelligence that we get from satellites and so on. We don’t analyze all this. A computer probably could do that, because it just needs power and capability to do that. And, [the third is] for warfighting,” said Michael.
The vision encompasses deploying engineers and providing training and resources from the CDAO to facilitate the application of AI solutions within the military. Notably, Michael acknowledged the need to “rebuild talent” within the office due to the departure of senior leaders and technical personnel amid the previous administration’s workforce reduction policies. He has initiated a “recruiting binge,” dedicating specific times each week for outreach to potential candidates to join the CDAO and the broader Research and Engineering directorate.
During the roundtable, Michael emphasized the urgency of adapting to the rapidly changing nature of warfare. “We’re seeing the weapons and systems needed are dramatically different than they were for the Global War on Terror, where the adversary was an irregular army with sort of crude improvised explosive devices and these sorts of things. Now, you have very sophisticated adversaries in China and a sophisticated war happening in Ukraine and Russia,” he pointed out. “You have a robot-on-robot front line now, we’ve never seen before, and that’s why you see this explosion of drone technology.”
He concluded by underscoring the necessity to integrate AI for enhanced decision-making capabilities. “Those changes — combined with the rise of AI and how AI is going to be used for decision superiority for extending human capability beyond what a human analyst can do in any one capacity — all [of these] are new sorts of concepts that are ready for the department to start thinking about in a real way.”
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