As technologies are continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, officials from the Department of the Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) said on Feb. 14 that the United States must be dominant in artificial intelligence (AI) in order to win the “information fight.”
At the WEST 2024 conference on Feb. 14 in San Diego, Calif. – co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute – the officials explained how AI provides a massive decision advantage to warfighters.
“We have to, have to, have to win the information fight – 100 percent,” said Keegan Mills, the engineering and cyber tech lead at the Marine Corps Systems Command. “If we are going to achieve the prime directive of the National Defense Strategy, which is deterring this fight from happening at all, we have to be dominant in this space. We have to think about the risk of not doing it as the bigger problem to solve.”
Deputy Navy Chief AI Officer John “Jack” Long, who sits within the Office of Naval Research, added that the United States needs to deploy AI capabilities “to meet that adversary capability – even in peacetime.”
Instead of getting wrapped up in metrics, Long said that department leadership needs to send a clear message down the line to “get technology out the door” quickly to meet the capability gap.
“It goes back to, ‘What risk are you willing to accept?’ I’ll accept a cost overrun or I’ll accept a little bit of something else to get it out there eight months or even 12 months earlier because the most important thing is no longer cost. It’s actually speed,” Long said.
“The problems that we need this technology to solve and the pace at which we need to make decisions inform us that we need AI and other technologies that fuse data and multiple classification levels at machine speed,” Mills added.
However, Mills said that there is currently no cross-domain solution or large language model (LLM) that can fuse data and make decisions that fast.
“That’s something that we need to solve, and we need to solve it fast. Because the adversary does not respect those boundaries,” Mills said. “So, their AI is going to be doing that fusion and they are going to be coming up with actionable information at a much greater pace and a much greater speed than we are even capable of doing.”
Nevertheless, he said that the Marine Corps Systems Command – the acquisition command of the U.S. Marine Corps – is working to solve that problem as it experiments with data-centric architecture and data-centric security.
Additionally, he called out to industry to ask for help in finding tools that can secure AI, as well as “secure, operate, and defend data.”
“There’s nuance to bringing it to the defense use cases,” Mills said. “We need to get after that at speed because I think that’s going to be a critical enabler for us to develop the kinds of solutions that we need for the 21st century.”
