Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint war-fighting operations
Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint
war-fighting operations
Nathan Strout July 8,
2020
The Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub is
shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing
artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of
Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts.
“As we have matured, we are now devoting
special focus on our joint war-fighting operation and its mission initiative,
which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its
goal of preserving America’s military and technological advantages over our
strategic competitors,” Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint
Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. “The AI capabilities
JAIC is developing as part of the joint war-fighting operations mission
initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the
American war fighter.”
Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said May 21 that the
JAIC needs the authority to buy its own artificial intelligence technology in
order to move fast.
That marks a significant change from where JAIC
stood more than a year ago, when the organization was still being stood up with a focus on using AI for efforts
like predictive maintenance. That transformation appears to be driven by
the DoD’s focus on developing JADC2, a system of systems approach that will
connect sensors to shooters in near-real time.
“JADC2 is not a single product. It is a collection
of platforms that get stitched together — woven together ― into effectively a
platform. And JAIC is spending a lot of time and resources focused on building
the AI component on top of JADC2,” said the acting director.
According to Mulchandani, the fiscal 2020
spending on the joint war-fighting operations initiative is greater than JAIC
spending on all other mission initiatives combined. In May, the
organization awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a five-year, $800 million task
order to support the joint war-fighting operations initiative. As
Mulchandani acknowledged to reporters, that task order exceeds JAIC’s budget
for the next few years and it will not be spending all of that money.
One example of the organization’s joint
war-fighting work is the fire support cognitive system, an effort JAIC was
pursuing in partnership with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the U.S.
Army’s Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical.
That system, Mulchandani said, will manage and triage all incoming
communications in support of JADC2.
Mulchandani added that JAIC was about to begin
testing its new flagship joint war-fighting project, which he did not identify
by name.
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“We do have a project going on under joint war
fighting which we are going to be actually go into testing,” he said. “They are
very tactical edge AI is the way I’d describe it. That work is going to be
tested. It’s actually promising work — we’re very excited about it.”
“As I talked about the pivot from predictive
maintenance and others to joint war fighting, that is probably the flagship
project that we’re sort of thinking about and talking about that will go out
there,” he added.
While left unnamed, the acting director assured
reporters that the project would involve human operators and full human
control.
“We believe that the current crop of AI systems
today [...] are going to be cognitive assistance,” he said. “Those types of
information overload cleanup are the types of products that we’re actually
going to be investing in.”
“Cognitive assistance, JADC2, command and
control—these are all pieces,” he added.
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