The Pentagon is in its AI era: 5 stories from 2022

JASPREET GILL

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WASHINGTON — Writing about artificial intelligence, cyber and networks can be dry. But it’s a vital topic to stay on top of when the next conflict might be fought with ones and zeros as much as it is with missiles and bullets.

So, as the staid Pentagon raced to catch up to the digital age, there was plenty to write about. Below are my top five stories, that I think, as the Breaking Defense Gen-Z ambassador, slayed. [Editor’s Note: What’s that mean?]

1. Lyft exec Craig Martell tapped as Pentagon’s AI chief: Exclusive Interview

As the title says, the Pentagon is in its AI era. Among the many investments the Defense Department is making in that area, it stood up a brand new AI office earlier this year and hired a Silicon Valley heavy hitter to lead it. In April I got the chance to exclusively interview the new Chief Digital and AI Officer Craig Martell, a former Lyft exec, on his priorities for the next year and the benefits and challenges of DoD hiring someone as technically minded as him.

Martell isn’t the stereotypical Silicon Valley tech bro though: Prior to Lyft, he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military. He also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn.

In the past few months, Martell learned that bureaucracy within DoD is real (three days into the job he revealed he still didn’t have a CAC card and had to wait in line at the visitor’s entrance to get into the building) and his priorities have slightly shifted.

“I’m convinced we’re going to be able to do some great things,” Martell told me. “But they’re going to be hard things. It’s going to be a challenge.”

2. Anduril CRO: ‘There is no fair competition’ for non-traditional companies in defense

This one made my list because it got people riled up and I received a few salty emails about it. But besides that point, the Anduril chief revenue officer’s comments highlight a very real issue that the Pentagon faces and is trying to mitigate: non-traditional companies/startups face long odds when trying to get in the DoD game, even if Anduril itself has found its way to lucrative deals.

It’s because DoD takes forever to award real production contracts to companies, which, unlike larger defense firms, cannot sustain such a delay financially. And DoD knows this is an issue. Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has initiated several efforts over the past year focused on funding these non-traditional companies and rapid experimentation.

3. Pentagon’s Shyu eyes base defense for third ‘sprint’ of rapid experiment campaign

Speaking of Heidi Shyu, she spoke to me and my colleague Courtney Albon, a reporter at C4ISRNET, at the sidelines of the annual Association of the US Army conference in October. Of the many things Shyu is responsible for in her role, she’s spearheading the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, a relatively new effort aimed at addressing capability gaps and emerging technologies.

At AUSA, Shyu told us the next experiment — the third “sprint” — will be focused on base defense. She’s previously said she wants to do two sprints of RDER per year focused on different areas, but not a lot has been revealed about the effort.

She also hit on another effort she’s leading called the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovation Technologies, a program established this year to bridge that dreaded valley of death. Under that effort, $100 million is allocated to 10 different program offices to procure technologies from vendors.

Shyu said the companies “are thrilled.”

4. JADC2 chair: ‘I cringe’ at reports saying services efforts aren’t aligned

Joint All Domain Command and Control lives rent free in my head, and there’s been a lot of back and forth surrounding the infamously nebulous initiative.

Some of it’s coming from inside the military services themselves, whether it’s a Navy official saying DoD hasn’t actually defined the problem it’s trying to solve with JADC2, the Army acquisition executive saying there isn’t enough coordination between the services (each service has its own JADC2-aligned effort underway) or the Air Force’s principal cyber advisor saying between all of the disparate service-specific efforts, no one is thinking about how to be interoperable.

So when the head of the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team said the services actually are aligned and that she cringes reading stories saying otherwise, it added even more confusion to the mix. There’s also the issue of defining what exactly JADC2 is and how to think about it. For the CFT director, it’s an “ecosystem.” The Pentagon earlier this year also released a public version of its JADC2 strategy which left more questions than answers as to how the military services were going to accomplish goals defined in the document.

5. Why Ukraine recruiting amateur ‘IT army’ could backfire

During the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, volunteer hacktivists from all around the world formed Ukraine’s “IT Army” to fight on the cyber front. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation announced the effort in February on Twitter, linking to a Telegram channel that would give out “tasks” to people. The channel currently has over 200,000 subscribers, but it’s unclear how many of those subscribers are actually involved in the cyber operations.

There were concerns that the digital free-for-all could backfire, but Ukrainian officials have claimed that there have been some successes from the group in which people shut down a number of Russian government websites and propaganda TV channels.