Program Agenda

U.S. adversaries are investing billions in AI, further widening the technology gap in their favor and diluting the operational deterrence the U.S. is committed to preserve. What are U.S. adversaries doing with this technology and how can the U.S. leverage the promise of AI and posture itself to compete and regain its strategic advantage?

How the U.S. Army must fight, as an element of the Joint Force, will require communication and computation while on the move in a highly lethal, hyperactive operating environment. What cloud computing technologies, architectures, and infrastructure should the U.S. Army pursue to enable intelligence and targeting capabilities at the tactical edge that are normally reserved for higher echelons?

Modern processing has evolved beyond the single, multi-functional processor to multiple processors for each function. Software and Hardware are being built in parallel to one another requiring an ability to program and engineer custom solutions. How does the U.S. Army achieve this capability when the closer it gets to the tactical edge, the more custom it must eventually be? How does the U.S. Army develop solutions to compute, transport, and store data within range of adversary systems?

There is a massive amount of data available to the military, but it tends to be stored all over the place, and rarely in a format that is easily transferrable into an algorithm. How can the U.S. Army curate, label, and clean data for ingestion and processing? How does the Army integrate ubiquitous sensor and synthetic data into a compatible format? Moreover, how does the Army recruit and train the data scientists necessary to make use of it?

As we evolve from an industrial-age to an information-age, the U.S. Army is turning to industry and non-traditional start-ups for innovative solutions to difficult problems. However, legacy processes and policies overburden any would-be partners. What are the challenges facing prospective partners wanting to do business with the U.S. Army? What lessons can we learn from start-ups and industry to improve the collaboration space for defense innovation?

Talent development remains one of the U.S.’s greatest competitive advantages. In the coming years, competition for highly skilled talent will increase, placing an incredible burden on the U.S. Army to identify and recruit highly sought after human capital. What expertise and capabilities are needed at each U.S. Army echelon? What tasks do we outsource to other areas of the defense establishment? And, how will the U.S. Army attract and retain the AI talent it needs?

Convergence is the rapid and continuous integration of capabilities in all domains employing Cross-Domain Synergy, redundant kill-chains, and Mission Command. MDC2 is a necessary component to realize the level of integration across the joint force unlike anything that is possible today – linking any sensor, to any shooter, through any command and control (C2) node, in near real-time and with the appropriate authorities. The speed and velocity of decision making and capability integration will only be made possible through the use of AI and autonomous capabilities.