WASHINGTON — In a triple-barreled barrage on Monday evening, the Pentagon released three major policy memos from Secretary Pete Hegseth, aiming to overhaul and accelerate the department’s technology efforts.
“The old era ends today,” Hegseth declared in his latest “Arsenal of Freedom” tour stop at SpaceX’s Brownsville, Texas factory that same day. “We’re done running a peacetime science fair while our adversaries are running a wartime arms race.”
The memos unveil a battery of new AI initiatives, from the break-up of the sprawling Advana database system to a new AI simulation “foundry” named after sci-fi icon Ender Wiggin. They also continue an ongoing consolidation of independent innovation organizations — which proliferated during the Obama, Trump I, and Biden administrations — under the control of the Defense Department’s chief technology officer, Under Secretary for Research & Engineering Emil Michael.
“Our innovation ecosystem remains a tangle of overlapping organizations and confused authority — workarounds built to bypass now-obsolete systems,” one of the Hegseth memos [PDF] declares. “Multiple organizations fight for the same mission. Industry faces a maze of competing front doors. Councils proliferate while accountability diffuses….Today, we end the confusion. The intent and policy are simple: unify the innovation ecosystem led by a single Chief Technology Officer.”
In his Texas speech, Hegseth pointed out Michael in the front row before making clear he was the new sheriff in tech town. “Emil will set the technical direction, lead the innovation ecosystem that will welcome progress from anywhere it resides, and he’ll tell me face-to-face every day, and frankly, whether we are gaining or losing the technology and innovation competition,” Hegseth said. “He’ll have the decision authority and will lead through rigorous evaluation with a focus on real measurable outcomes.”
In August, Michael announced his big six tech priorities and took control of both the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Pentagon-based Chief Digital AI Office (CDAO). Hegseth’s reorganization plan reinforces those changes. It also reestablishes DIU and the formerly independent Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) as departmental “Field Activities” under the CTO’s “overall supervision.” They join what the memo calls the “Department of War (DoW) innovation ecosystem” alongside three other organizations already reporting to the CTO: the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC); the new Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) created just last August; the obscure Test Resource Management Center (TRMC); and the world-famous DARPA.
It also moves additional innovation offices under Michael’s supervision and dissolves three overlapping oversight bodies — the Defense Innovation Steering Group, the Defense Innovation Working Group, and the CTO Council — in favor of a single “Action Group,” also led by the CTO.
In his comments in Texas, Hegseth announced he was appointing Owen West, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict from 2017 to 2019, as DIU director come March. Hegseth also announced that Cameron Stanley will serve as the next Pentagon Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer.
Some bureaucratic question marks remain. By law, DIU reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and SCO to the Deputy Secretary, and — as both Hegseth’s memo and an official Pentagon press release acknowledge — the Secretary can’t change that, only Congress. But those reporting chains are a residue of long-gone personal relationships: Both offices were created and championed by the late Ash Carter, SCO in 2012 when he was Deputy Secretary and DIU in 2015 when he was Secretary. So while DIU and SCO can still try to bypass Michael, at least on paper, in practice Hegseth and his deputy Steve Feinberg are unlikely to be sympathetic.
The changes “look pretty good on paper, [but] I have concerns,” said Jack Shanahan, a retired Lt. Gen. and founding director of Pentagon’s Joint AI Center. “I remain cynical about execution, given how the building operates. Are commercial companies with good ideas supposed to go to the CAG, the CTO, one of the six organizations, all of the above?”
“What jumps out at me is the blurring of lines between CTO and DIU, SCO, and CDAO,” Shanahan continued in an email exchange with Breaking Defense. “I like the alignment rationale, but given my ample experience in the building I predict friction ahead.”
“Could not agree more,” added Mike Groen, Shanahan’s successor as director of JAIC before it was subsumed by the CDAO. “The day we stop writing org charts and start writing code will be one to celebrate.”
New AI Initiatives
Two additional memos released late Monday give at least part of the purpose behind Hegseth’s reorganization: to jumpstart an ambitious array of AI programs while streamlining an older one.
The broader of those documents is a six-page “Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War” [PDF], centered on seven high-priority “Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs)” to be spearheaded by the CDAO.
One of those priority projects was already public: GenAI.mil, launched last month to bring secure versions of popular Large Language Models to all three million of the Department’s military, civil service, and contractor personnel. Even here the memo adds a new wrinkle, explicitly saying that GenAI.mil’s models, currently cleared only for “sensitive but unclassified” data, will ultimately be available “at all classification levels.”
The six previously undisclosed projects get only brief and broad descriptions:
Swarm Forge will develop “novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities.” While the memo gives no examples, one possibility that’s seen a lot of R&D already is using AI command-and-control to orchestrate defense against incoming missiles and drone swarms at superhuman speeds. Swarm Forge will also be “combining America’s elite Warfighting units with elite technology innovators,” implying field experiments where Silicon Valley nerds work alongside Special Ops “snake-eaters.”
Agent Network will develop semi-autonomous algorithmic “agents” for “battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to kill chain execution.” Using AI to streamline staff work like the sharing of targeting data has been a major focus of Pentagon AI.
Ender’s Foundry, a reference to the Orson Scott Card classic Ender’s Game, will develop “AI-enabled simulation capabilities.”
Open Arsenal will link intelligence collection to development of military capabilities, “turning intel into weapons in hours not years.” This may be a reference to rapidly updating weapons’ software and “mission data files” to incorporate countermeasures to newly discovered enemy technologies.
Project Grant, the most mysteriously described initiative, will “enable the transformation of deterrence.”
Enterprise Agents will develop AI agents for the Department’s back-office “enterprise” systems.
While these seven new programs race ahead, Hegseth is breaking up an older Pentagon AI project that became a victim of its own success.
What’s now called Advana — short for “advancing analytics” — began in 2019 as an effort by the Pentagon comptroller’s office to wrangle incompatible databases into a coherent whole so it could do a proper fiscal audit. While the Pentagon still hasn’t passed an audit, Advana’s data-management proved so useful that more and more officials began using it for more and more purposes, ultimately causing it to strain under the weight.
Hegseth’s third Monday night memo divides Advana into three, separating the core financial management functions from other Defense Department data — now called the “War Data Platform (WDP)” — and from underlying, widely applicable “application services.”
Even as he trifurcates Advana, however, Hegseth is putting new teeth into Biden-era “data decrees” requiring defense organizations to share their data with the CDAO. “Effective immediately,” the memo said, “denials of CDAO data requests must be justified to the USW(R&E) [i.e. Michael] within seven (7) days, who will remediate or escalate to the Deputy Secretary.”