Washington – U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced Wednesday an ambitious plan to expand the U.S. Navy with a range of unmanned and autonomous ships, submarines and aircraft to confront the growing maritime challenge from China. The Pentagon chief said a sweeping review of U.S. naval power dubbed "Future Forward" had laid out a "game-changer" plan that would expand the U.S. sea fleet to more than 355 ships, from the current 293. The plan, which requires adding tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. Navy's budget between now and 2045, is aimed at maintaining superiority over Chinese naval forces, seen as the primary threat to the United States. "The future fleet will be more balanced in its ability to deliver lethal effects from the air, from the sea, and from under the sea," Esper said in a speech at the Rand Corp. in California. The expansion will add "more and smaller" surface ships; more submarines; surface and subsurface vessels that are optionally manned, unmanned and autonomous; and a broad range of unmanned carrier-based aircraft.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure -- or JEDI -- will store and crunch vast amounts of classified data and let the military use artificial intelligence to speed up war planning and enhance fighting capabilities. Think of it as "The Terminator" meets your iCloud. The robots aren't taking over just yet, but the Pentagon could be bringing us one step closer, thanks to a new project dubbed the "War Cloud." The official name is JEDI: Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a plan by the Pentagon to build a cloud computing system for the military. The so-called "War Cloud" will store and crunch vast amounts of classified data and let the military use artificial intelligence to speed up war planning, and enhance fighting capabilities. It can also be used for strategic war games, playing out potential conflilcts in a virtual world to give us an early look at what the outcome could be.

The Defense Department's cutting-edge research arm has promised to make the military's largest investment to date in artificial intelligence (AI) systems for U.S. weaponry, committing to spend up to $2 billion over the next five years in what it depicted as a new effort to make such systems more trusted and accepted by military commanders. The director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the spending spree on the final day of a conference in Washington celebrating its sixty-year history, including its storied role in birthing the internet. The agency sees its primary role as pushing forward new technological solutions to military problems, and the Trump administration's technical chieftains have strongly backed injecting artificial intelligence into more of America's weaponry as a means of competing better with Russian and Chinese military forces. The DARPA investment is small by Pentagon spending standards, where the cost of buying and maintaining new F-35 warplanes is expected to exceed a trillion dollars. But it is larger than AI programs have historically been funded and roughly what the United States spent on the Manhattan Project that produced nuclear weapons in the 1940's, although that figure would be worth about $28 billion today due to inflation. In July defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton received an $885 million contract to work on undescribed artificial intelligence programs over the next five years.

A top Defense Department tech official on Tuesday said the Pentagon is weeks away from publishing its first broad strategy for artificial intelligence. The department plans to release a report detailing its long-term plans for artificial intelligence "within weeks" as leaders increasingly stress the technology's potential to strengthen national security, said Thomas Michelli, the department's acting deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity. Though he didn't disclose specifics regarding the strategy, Michelli said the Pentagon is standing up a number of artificial intelligence capabilities across the enterprise and people should expect "a big announcement" in the weeks to come. The department's updated cyber strategy, which is scheduled to publish shortly before the artificial intelligence plan, will also discuss AI and offer more details on how the military is funneling additional resources into the technology, according to Michelli. "We have to move forward or else we'll lose [our] competitive advantage," he said at a forum hosted by GovernmentCIO Media.

A top Defense Department tech official on Tuesday said the Pentagon is weeks away from publishing its first broad strategy for artificial intelligence. The department plans to release a report detailing its long-term plans for artificial intelligence "within weeks" as leaders increasingly stress the technology's potential to strengthen national security, said Thomas Michelli, the department's acting deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity. Though he didn't disclose specifics regarding the strategy, Michelli said the Pentagon is standing up a number of artificial intelligence capabilities across the enterprise and people should expect "a big announcement" in the weeks to come. The department's updated cyber strategy, which is scheduled to publish shortly before the artificial intelligence plan, will also discuss AI and offer more details on how the military is funneling additional resources into the technology, according to Michelli. "We have to move forward or else we'll lose [our] competitive advantage," he said at a forum hosted by GovernmentCIO Media.

A top Defense Department tech official on Tuesday said the Pentagon is weeks away from publishing its first broad strategy for artificial intelligence. The department plans to release a report detailing its long-term plans for artificial intelligence "within weeks" as leaders increasingly stress the technology's potential to strengthen national security, said Thomas Michelli, the department's acting deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity. Though he didn't disclose specifics regarding the strategy, Michelli said the Pentagon is standing up a number of artificial intelligence capabilities across the enterprise and people should expect "a big announcement" in the weeks to come. The department's updated cyber strategy, which is scheduled to publish shortly before the artificial intelligence plan, will also discuss AI and offer more details on how the military is funneling additional resources into the technology, according to Michelli. Be the first to receive updates.