With AI hype outrunning reality, DoD AI chief Craig Martell told lawmakers his office is "building what we're calling a maturity model" to assess what generative AI really can and cannot do.
Plumb, the current deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, has held high-powered jobs from Google to the National Security Council.
As threats evolve, the winning model ties digital engineering to manufacturing capacity and a reindustrialized supply chain.
2023’s Global Information Dominance Experiments were a race to field a “minimum viable” version of CJADC2. The 2024 GIDEs will open up to more input from the services, the Five Eyes allies, and a wide range of contractors.
The US military can quickly kludge together custom solutions for urgent problems, said Pentagon AI chief Craig Martell. But it needs a more systematic approach to turn those quick hacks into stable, enduring AIs that can actually talk to each other.
“No vendor is going to label your data for you,” CDAO Craig Martell said. “So it's incumbent upon us as a centralized supporter of AI in the department to give you the tools, abilities, and consulting, to be able to build that labeled data so that you can hand it to industry, and they can build a model that works for you."
"But I think it’s going to be the led by the new Chief [Digital] and AI Officer, Craig Martell, who comes to us from industry and has a very good technical background," Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said. "Hopefully he’ll be able to help pull it together. But there's a definite need to do that."
On today’s battlefield, mobility isn’t optional - it’s mission-critical.
“So any business that we want to do on behalf of the department, that’s our place to duke it out, to collaborate, to really get the feedback from all the different stakeholders we need in the organization before we bring that to the deputy," Margaret Palmieri, deputy CDAO, said Tuesday.
"We're not going to change bureaucracy as a whole," CDAO Craig Martell said. "We need to find the right gaps, the right places where we can leverage value and then that value is going to drive a virtuous cycle of change."