Applying AI to the right national security problems

The U.S. National Defense Strategy recognizes that the joint force must be able to rapidly plan and execute operations simultaneously across all warfighting domains: land, sea, air, space and cyber. So the services and the intelligence community are working together to enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), a new battle command architecture for multidomain operations. But many of the conversations confuse development of resilient, cross-service communications systems (which would be an enabler for JADC2) with development of the actual sense-making and decision-making needed to advance the way we do command and control. While dumping enough data into a common data lake won't allow AI to magically make sense of the world, AI is remarkably powerful at coming up with novel strategies for winning a variety of video and board games. We need to see if those same AI approaches could help us develop courses of action for operational-level decisions in conflict about how to use a set of sensors and weapons against a set of targets and tasks. Admittedly, as we try and bring capabilities from different domains and services together, the assignment problems get more complex and difficult computationally: These aren't "games" where players take turns, there may be no way to measure the instantaneous value of a move, there's no closed-form rule book to apply and the game board changes over time and from case to case.