Hon. Christine Wormuth, Secretary of the Army, and Mr. Douglas R. Bush, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army briefed on capabilities by panelist Col. Robert J. Whisham, Director of Army Applications Lab and Dr. Casey Perly, Director of Technical Insights & Analysis on September 20th, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
I/ITSEC 2023 — While the Army is seeing more innovation from the commercial sector, it’s still struggling with resources when it comes to training and affordability, while at the same time trying to understand how to best utilize emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, the service’s top acquisition official said today.
“We need to hear from [industry], we need the innovation that’s coming from the private sector and I think we’re getting that,” Doug Bush, Army acquisition head said at I/ITSEC 2023. “I think the challenge the Army has, as always, is just resources. How do we allocate resources to modernize quickly in this area of training, for example, while trying to do everything else?”
Bush said that the service has done a better job on resourcing “recently,” but “It’s always a struggle to make sure that we are starting an acquisition program and thinking about the training part up front, especially when we’re doing it faster.”
“You can have a terrific piece of gear, but if it’s very difficult to train, it’s just not going to be as effective or if it’s too expensive to train on, it’s not going to be as affordable for the Army to do at scale and everything the Army does is at vast scale,” he said. “Millions of people, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. So affordability there becomes a key factor for us, especially when we’re developing new systems.”
At the same time, the Army, like the rest of DoD, is trying to better understand how to best use and train with AI. The service’s ability to test AI starts with understanding it, Bush said.
“So the Army’s got efforts underway — the other services do as well — to build our capacity to fully ingest and understand how they’ve developed and actually make sure we understand what we’re being offered or what we’re proposing to use in the area of AI,” he said.
For example, applying AI capabilities to the business management side of the Army to be more efficient and productive is an area that Bush said he expects “to go very fast because industry’s already moving there.”
This follows a similar sentiment from officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency who earlier this year told reporters the agency would look at using AI as a “digital concierge” that could help its workforce on tasks like back office work. But operationalizing AI is where things can get tricky, Bush said.
“For example, an intelligence AI tool that helps us do targeting. We have to understand how that was developed, what data set it was trained on, what its biases might be. Because ultimately, an intel system like that, for targeting, is going to get linked eventually to the use of lethal force. And that is not something we are in a position now and our current policy is not to turn that over to a computer.”
Meanwhile, the Army is getting ready to release its Field Manual 4.0 “soon,” Gen. Gary Brito, commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command, said. It will focus on logistics and sustainment and will serve as a guide connected to the service’s warfighting functions. FM 4.0 will follow the Army’s October publication of FM 2.0 focused on intelligence and last year’s FM 3.0 focused on multi-domain operations.
