A soldier wears virtual reality glasses. Illustration created by NIWC Pacific. (DVIDS)

AFA: Beyond throwing around “artificial intelligence” as a buzzword during briefings, the Air Force needs to communicate more clearly within own its ranks and to industry about what it wants in AI capabilities, a top Air Force intelligence officer said.

“I’m in the Pentagon, so I see a lot of PowerPoint presentations, and I see a lot of slides saying ‘we’re going to use some AI'” to solve a problem, Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien said. “But we need to be more precise. Sometimes we say we want AI, but what we describe to industry is an automation tool, or a visualization tool, or [some technology] without training data.”

O’Brien, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and cyber effects operations, spoke on a panel at the Air Force Association’s 2021 Air, Space & Cyber conference on Wednesday alongside others, including Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Barrett Knausenberger.

“Most of the time when we talk about AI, we’re talking about automation or software that works,” Knausenberger agreed. “We’re on a good path [toward AI], but we have to solve some basic problems first.”

O’Brien said some of those basic problems the Air Force needs to figure out revolve data management. To the point, O’Brien said she was “cheering” in May when Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks released DoD “data decrees” designed to make information sharing more efficient. But O’Brien said she’s “waiting for some teeth” to the decrees.

Nonetheless, O’Brien said, at core, the service must quickly answer the question of “how do you feed the right data to the right operators in the right format when they need it? In the short term, we have to get the foundations right.”

O’Brien and Knausenberger stressed throughout the talk that the Air Force has the airmen it needs, but, as O’Brien said, “We owe them the tools, data, and capabilities they need” to complete their missions.

To not do so is “like having an excellent sniper and handing him a knife that hasn’t been sharpened in a while,” Knausenberger observed.

And, yes, one day mature AI will likely be part of the Air Force’s toolset, but getting it will be just the start. “Once we do get the AI, what are we doing to defend the algorithms, the training data, because if our adversaries create doubt about [those], then we’re dead in the water,” O’Brien said.

Which is where panelist Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh — Commander Sixteenth Air Force, Commander Air Forces Cyber, Commander Joint Force Headquarters Cyber, and another panelist — will come into the picture. Haugh is charged, partly, with defending the Air Force’s data in cyberspace, which he characterized as “multi-domain and problem-centric” work focused on “finding innovative ways” to uncover adversaries’ behaviors.

This entails, he said, “exposing adversaries’ weapons systems or operations in the gray zone,” a term used to describe hostilities that fall below the threshold of kinetics.

“It’s about outcomes. That’s what we’re going to get graded on,” Haugh added.

Overall, the three panelists thought the Air Force had the internal IT expertise it needs, but Knausenberger observed, “We could use more of the operator perspective in leadership.”

O’Brien echoed the sentiment later, adding “The people with all the stars do not have all the ideas.”

There was a lighter moment when, during her opening remarks, Knausenberger referenced her fellow panelists’ offensive cyber operations savvy.

“If you ever go to dinner with these guys, don’t leave your cellphone on the table,” she said.