U.S. Northern Command has asked Congress for an additional $29.8 million to buy information technology equipment and to optimize infrastructure for artificial intelligence and machine learning at its joint operations center with the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The upgrades would buttress efforts to ingest, process and aggregate data across the Department of Defense's cloud-computing environment and share intel with forces across all domains, also known as the "information dominance enabling capability," according to a fiscal year 2023 unfunded priority list obtained by Defense News. Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of NORTHCOM and NORAD, told lawmakers March 24 that "advanced capabilities" like AI will help give the U.S. an advantage over complex competitors. "Incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into existing capabilities will allow users to pull needed information from existing data sets and share that data with leaders at all levels to expand their decision space and options necessary to achieve desirable outcomes," VanHerck said in testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Combatant commands and other leaders send wishlists to the Hill annually.

U.S. lawmakers this month pitched a new program to increase adoption of artificial intelligence across combatant commands, one of the latest efforts to boost a technology that officials say provides an edge over world competitors like Russia and China. A $200 million Artificial Intelligence Development Fund was included in the $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2022 government funding package, and was highlighted by House and Senate appropriation committees. Another $50 million was flagged to improve recruitment and development of AI talent at the Department of Defense. "The congressional defense committees' oversight efforts discovered numerous opportunities to accelerate the pace of change, especially with respect to security and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, space and cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure and public shipyard improvements," budget documents state. The efforts lodged in the latest budget dovetail with the Pentagon's Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration initiative, announced in June 2021.

The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center recently started building a joint operating system and integration layer that combatant commands and other military components could eventually use to rapidly make and field artificial intelligence algorithms. This work is one key piece of the center's new Artificial Intelligence and Data Accelerator, or AIDA, JAIC Director Lt. Gen. Michael Groen confirmed this week during the NDIA 2022 Expeditionary Warfare Conference. "AIDA brings us, in small teams, out to the combatant commanders--now, for those of you who have been in combatant commands, or you're familiar with that environment--combat commanders have all of the challenges, all the problems and only some capability, right? And so what we're trying to do from an information advantage perspective is bring them the advantages of good data and good artificial intelligence-generating insights," he explained. Launched last year by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, AIDA marks a broad initiative to boost data-based decision-making across the military's 11 combatant commands.

Establishing strong data environments and strategies will be key to the adoption of artificial intelligence in the military, according to Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center at the Defense Department. Speaking in a webinar Wednesday on Federal News Network, Groen painted a picture of AI within DOD, emphasizing the need to cultivate an infrastructure that can handle a dynamic data environment. Groen described acquisition of AI technologies as a "generational transformation" that would take time, beginning with shifting DOD from a hardware-centric organization to a "world class software organization. "Getting our data strategies together is a really important component," he said. A major part of this will be changing the data ecosystem that DOD employs, specifically in regard to installing a common data environment to facilitate AI usage throughout the department.

The Department of Defense's Office of the Chief Information Officer, or DoD CIO, is pursuing several efforts to make sure the U.S. combatant commands have the fundamental tools to enable artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid their operational command and control. The DoD CIO's efforts naturally hinge on data and data management, an appropriate transport layer and future cloud capabilities, solutions that will benefit a broad range of warfighters not just at the commands, said Kelly Fletcher, who is performing the duties of the department's chief information officer on behalf of John Sherman, the nominated CIO who is currently going through his confirmation process for the position and testifying tomorrow in front of the U.S. Senate. A senior executive service official, Fletcher has been working in the office since 2020. She presented a keynote address during AFCEA International's TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore on October 27. Fletcher emphasized that the DoD CIO's office supports more than 40 major combatant commands, services and agencies, "and they all have unique requirements," she said.

The director of the Department of Defense's artificial intelligence clearinghouse hopes a new initiative will help combatant commands better make use of the department's data. The new Artificial Intelligence and Data Accelerator, or AIDA, is housed within the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. "We're just now discovering what is the state of our data. Everybody loves to say that the Department of Defense has all kinds of data. Most of it's crap," Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the JAIC, said during a pre-recorded interview shared at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit.

I'll be moderating today's press briefing. Today it's my pleasure to introduce the director of the Department of Defense [Joint] Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Lieutenant General Michael Groen. Lieutenant General Groan is joined today by Dr. Jane Pinelis, who is the Chief of Test and Evaluation for the JAIC, and Ms. Alka Patel, who is the Chief of Responsible AI (Artificial Intelligence). We'll begin today's press briefing with an opening statement followed by questions. We've got people out in the line. And I think we'll be able to get to everybody today. LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL S. GROEN: Thank you, Arlo. And greetings to the members of the Defense Press Corps, really glad to be here with you today. I hope many of you got the opportunity to listen in to at least some of the AI symposium and technology exchange that we had this week. This week, it was our second annual symposium. We have over 1,400 participants in three days of virtualized content. I want to say thank you, ...

U.S. Northern Command hosted a global information dominance exercise and the results point to the tremendous advantages the Defense Department would receive by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to all-domain information, Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck said yesterday. All 11 combatant commands participated in the exercise, which was based on a global scenario involving two peer competitors. "What we were looking to do is show the incredible value of information and how information can be used today," he said. This is especially true if commanders can take information from all domains -- undersea, space, cyberspace, air, land, sea and share it through machine-learning artificial intelligence, he said. This would serve to make data and information available in a timely manner to produce space for decision makers.

WASHINGTON – The leader of the Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub said Tuesday that he wants the office to become the "world's best software company." Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said he wants the DoD to be in a place where service members can write lines of code quickly to do a specific task, receive an authorization to operate quickly and perform the function and throw the code away. If that's the case "we will have won the next war," he said, "because that level of agility and insight and reconfigurability is where we want to be. "We'll be the world's best software company; we happen to be in the military business," Mulchandani said, said on a webinar hosted by the Institute for Security and Technology. The cornerstone of the JAIC's work is the Joint Common Foundation, a recently awarded platform that's designed to provide common artificial intelligence tools and datasets across the Defense Department in an effort to knock down silos.