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.

Questions that loom large for the wider application of artificial intelligence (AI) in Defense Department operations often center on trust. How does the operator know if the AI is wrong, that it made a mistake, that it didn't behave as intended? Answers to questions like that come from a technical discipline known as Responsible AI (RAI). It's the subject of a report issued by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in mid-November called Responsible AI Guidelines in Practice, which addresses a requirement in the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to ensure that the DoD has "the ability, requisite resourcing, and sufficient expertise to ensure that any artificial intelligence technology…is ethically and reasonably developed." DIU's RAI guidelines provide a framework for AI companies, DOD stakeholders and program managers that can help to ensure that AI programs are built with the principles of fairness, accountability, and transparency at each step in the development cycle of an AI system, according to Jared Dunnmon, technical director of the artificial intelligence/machine learning portfolio at DIU.

The U.S. Defense Department is creating a new position to oversee its digital and artificial intelligence activities, with the hope the office will be able to drive faster progress in those areas and meet threats posed by China, according to a senior defense official. The new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, or CDAO, will directly report to the deputy defense secretary and oversee the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service and the DoD's chief data officer, according to a memo released Dec. 8. Today, those offices directly report to the deputy defense secretary, something the senior defense official said has led to disjointedness. "We've created the CDO, the JAIC and DDS each operating independently and as if the other ones don't exist," said the officer, who briefed media Dec. 8 on the condition of anonymity. "That causes two kinds of inefficiencies. One, it means we don't have the kind of integration across their lines of effort that we could really maximize the impact of the things that any one organization is doing. Two, it means we don't take advantage of when there are overlaps in what they're doing, or underlaps in what they are doing to drive the right kind of prioritization in these spaces."

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 United States isn't the only major military power trying to digitally link all of its weapons and execute operations faster with artificial intelligence. Russia has been making gains in its own version of centralized command and control across land, sea, space, and cyberspace, according to a new paper from a Navy-linked think tank. Over the past several years, Russian military leaders have steadily advanced an AI-linked concept called automated control systems, or ACS, says the paper, to be published Monday by the Center for Naval Analysis, or CNA. The Russian military's encyclopedia describes it as: "A system that automates such processes or functions of command and control of troops and (or) weapons (combat assets) such as: collection, processing, storage and delivery of information necessary to optimize command and control of troops and weapons." The concept bears an uncanny resemblance to the U.S. military's own vision for AI-fueled, network-centric operations.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A forward-operating, satellite-networked Air Force drone comes across a small, moving group of enemy surface ships heading toward vulnerable areas, when instant data is sent to Navy ships' commanders and land-based Army weapons operators in real-time, enabling a coordinated, multi-pronged attack using deck-fired Tomahawk missiles fired from the ocean, land-based attack rockets and fighter jets armed with air-to-surface weapons. This possible scenario, in which land, sea and air warriors and weapons system share information in real-time across vast, otherwise dispersed areas to optimize attack is precisely what the Pentagon intends with its new doctrinal and technical approach to future war. The Army, Navy and Air Force each have secure information-sharing combat network technology programs.

With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as "autonomous weapons systems," include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level -- by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems. Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency.

The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts. "As we have matured, we are now devoting special focus on our joint war-fighting operation and its mission initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its goal of preserving America's military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors," Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. "The AI capabilities JAIC is developing as part of the joint war-fighting operations mission initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the American war fighter." Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said May 21 that the JAIC needs the authority to buy its own artificial intelligence technology in order to move fast. That marks a significant change from where JAIC stood more than a year ago, when the organization was still being stood up with a focus on using AI for efforts like predictive maintenance. That transformation appears to be driven by the DoD's focus on developing JADC2, a system of systems approach that will connect sensors to shooters in near-real time. "JADC2 is not a single product.