Capt. Sarah Miller and Tech. Sgt. Carrol Brewster, 834th Cyber Operations Squadron, discuss options in response to a staged cyber attack during filming of a scene for an Air Force Reserve Command mission video at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, on June 1, 2019. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Maj. Christopher Vasquez)

The Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is developing a joint operating system to help combatant commands build and field artificial intelligence algorithms rapidly, the agency’s director said Tuesday. 

The effort is a part of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Initiative (AIDA) announced last year by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. Through AIDA, data and AI teams would be dispatched to the military’s 11 combatant commands in an effort to help them understand what data they use and create AI tools to streamline decision-making. Since the announcement of the initiative, the Defense Department has completed its first round of assessments at the COCOMS.

The JAIC is now developing an “integration layer” that will make the development of AI algorithms easier through the AIDA initiative, which has a three-year timeline. This will help COCOMs meet their priority “information requirements in their decision making processes,” JAIC Director Lt. Gen. Michael Groen told Breaking Defense following a panel at the NDIA 2022 Expeditionary Warfare Conference.

The integration layer will be the first of its kind for the Defense Department, he noted. 

“If you want to build apps, you need a place that you can go where you can get access to data feeds that you need, for example, or link to other apps that you might want to incorporate into your application,” Groen said. “So if you don’t have an integration layer like that, then you have to go find all of the data sources yourself. … This is something we don’t have yet in the department. We need the ability to make application generation — the development of apps — very easy and quick by providing the background resources and link that you need to generate an application.

“So it’s a fairly simple concept, but it allows us to scale because once you have all of those services available, then it’s real easy for anybody to develop apps and we can quickly grow our AI applications across the whole force,” he continued. 

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The effort could assist COCOMs when building a series of applications for situational awareness or a common operational picture for a commander and an additional data feed needs to be integrated. Groen said having that integration environment where the data feed is available would make it really easy to “just plug that into the application.” 

“If you have to go find that data feed and curate it separately, then there’s a lot more work that has to be done to actually make that part of your common operating picture,” he said. “So it’s making the difficult things simple and making the development faster so that you can do more applications for more functions at a command headquarters, for example.”

Groen told Breaking Defense the JAIC has partnered with multiple vendors to develop the integration layer, but he declined to name specific companies. Additional vendors are expected to be involved in the future. 

“We’re all familiar with the tech giants and we’re all familiar with how data and AI are driving finance and production, commercial activity, retail sales, delivery, I mean all of those enterprises are driven by data and artificial intelligence,” Groen said. “We want the Department of Defense and our warfighters to be able to benefit from that same level of technical integration so that they can make decisions fast, they can gain efficiencies on the battlefield and they can be productive. It’s a really powerful transformation, it just takes time to turn a ship as big as the Department of Defense into the technological wind so that we can actually really start making speed in our warfighting capabilities.”

The JAIC last month awarded Xcelerate Solutions a five-year blanket purchase agreement for the development and integration of commercial AI tools in support of DoD, according to a press release. The areas of focus include emerging AI technologies and includes four task orders, the last of which calls for an alignment and integration with JAIC’s Joint Common Foundation, a cloud-based AI development and experimentation platform. 

Groen also declined to specify how much funding JAIC is asking for the project over the three-year period, but said the figure fell into the millions.