WASHINGTON — To truly harness the power of artificial intelligence, US Indo-Pacific Command must work on “setting the theater” in order to support it, according a Marine Corps cyber official.
“Easily the most disruptive technology that we have coming our way is artificial intelligence. It is simply impossible for a theater this size and commanders with the areas that they have to cover to be able to do it the old way [with] PowerPoint slides, [and] getting outbriefs. That information is too stale,” Col. Jared Voneida, head of command, control, communications and computers in INDOPACOM’s operations branch, said Wednesday at TechNet Indo-Pacific in Hawaii. “We need to leverage technology in order to speed up our decision cycle.”
Voneida equated setting these conditions and readying for AI to that of driving a sports car: The transport layer is akin to large, flat, smooth roads with minimal stop lights to drive that car fast. Data is the fuel for the sports car.
“Where is our data? That data needs to be standardized, tagged and accessible. I don’t want an electric charging station here, diesel here, unleaded here, and not understanding how to fill up my sports car. I want access to that data and I want a fast road to drive on,” he said.
The importance of knowing where data is located and having a transport layer that forces are always connected to is critical in the event conflict breaks out in the region because the theater will swell with forces.
Voneida said the joint force will converge in the region during a conflict, with 80 percent of the force that’s currently in the continental US needing to descend upon the INDOPACOM theater.
“That fact alone will make our bandwidth requirements go up significantly,” he said. “Coupled with that, we’re just at the beginning stages of really, truly leveraging AI and that’s going to move a lot of data around this theater. We need to have room to grow into that capability and make sure that we are not constrained by those pipes in times of conflict.”
As the force is beginning to look at harnessing AI, along with speed of decision across all warfighting functions, this should also help drive how to re-architect networks, “a painful, but necessary conversation” for how to command and control in conflict, Voneida said.
He recited a common refrain within the military: The networks they currently have would not be built the same way today if they started from scratch. Those networks are an amalgamation of systems made up from home stations and theater.
“This patchwork quilt of networks that we have together where we’re bending the pipe to make things work, as opposed to purposely engineering it to make it work is a challenge for us,” he said. “I go through a lot of mental gymnastics every day trying to figure out C2 on our network, with all the various services and service cyber components that don’t work for [INDOPACOM Commander] Adm. [Samuel] Paparo in this theater. But their activities have direct impact on his ability to fight in this theater.”
For reference, Voneida said within a 5-mile radius of Pearl Harbor, there are eight major Department of Defense networks, each with their own funding lines, sets of equipment and personnel.
Things are beginning to change, he added, moving towards more unification.
“The question is, are we going to do it in a deliberate, methodical, well thought out manner that’s properly resourced, not cheap, but properly resourced, or are we going to be drug through the knot hole in conflict when we have to do this in a much more compressed timeline?” Voneida asked.