Thanks to advances in AI, human-agent teaming and machine learning, … that puts Artificial Intelligence at the forefront of U.S. defense policy.

Thanks to advances in AI, human-agent teaming and machine learning, soldiers will provide commanders with real-time information about the enemy …

The Department of Defense has made HPC news twice in the last few days – in one, the Army will spend $32 million on supercomputing technology from composable infrastructure vendor Liqid; in the other, DOD will partner with the Department of Energy and Microsoft to develop AI algorithms to support natural disaster first responders. In the deal with Colorado-based Liqid, the Army has purchased two supercomputers to improve data analytics for organizations "across the military branches requesting such services," according to a story by Andrew Eversen in the online military publication C4ISRNET. The computers will be located at the Army Research Laboratory's DOD Supercomputing Resource Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, according DOD announcement earlier this month. The High Performance Computing Modernization Program, or HPCMP, provides advanced computing capabilities to the DOD's R&D community. "The primary customer base for the (HPCMP) has been the physics-based modeling, which are your weapons designers and that kind of stuff -- it's all based on physics effects," Matt Goss, director of the center, told C4ISRNET.

The head of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center recently declared that deepfakes pose a very real threat to national security. Speaking at an AI conference on Thursday, Lt. General Jack Shanahan told the crowd that disinformation tactics, including deepfake videos, could have a serious impact on the upcoming election unless the government seriously invests in ways to counter them, according to C4ISRNET. The warning paints a troubling picture of the future, where democracy and national security could be compromised by convincing, AI-generated media. DARPA, the Pentagon's research division, has already spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-deepfake technology. But, as Shanahan notes, trying to catch up with the tech driving these AI-generated videos is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.

Airborne data collecting platforms like the RQ-4 Global Hawk have a problem: the usefulness of the data they collect is limited by how fast and how well it can be analyzed. US military intelligence gathers a lot of data, but in order to make the data useful for a decision making process, the Air Force needs a "sensing grid that fuses together data," C4ISRNET reported Wednesday. AI will help the force interpret that fused data. The AI will harvest information from airborne systems in development such as Gremlin drones, which the US military portrays as a swarm of small drones that take off from an aircraft mid-flight and are recovered by the same aircraft. "How do I get the data so I can fuse it, look at it and then ask the right questions from the data to reveal what trends are out there?" Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson said in a July 31 interview with the news outlet.