A Department of Defense Office of Inspector General report published Monday uncovered critical deficiencies in how the Pentagon maintains and protects core components of the Army’s land capabilities. The shortfalls, the report warns, could endanger personnel, waste millions, and undermine readiness as the Army attempts to retool its logistical network for conflict across multiple theaters.

Investigators inspected $1.96 billion worth of equipment stored at two distribution centers controlled by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the Defense Department bureau tasked with managing the military’s sprawling supply chains. The DLA’s distribution division, responsible for storing and disseminating materiel, handled a total $3.87 billion of Army ground combat gear as of July 2022, according to the report.

The spare parts stored at these facilities support some of the Army’s flagship land fighting technology, including the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Stryker Armored Combat Vehicle, and the Abrams tank, the report noted.

Two-thirds of the inspected parts — valued at $1.31 billion — exhibited “critical” deficiencies, meaning they were “deteriorating and in immediate danger of moving to a lower condition code,” a measure of utility. In all, investigators determined that $1.8 billion (92%) of the inspected equipment was crumbling or at “increased risk” of falling apart because DLA storage facilities failed to follow Pentagon standards.

Among the spare parts in critical condition were 80 gas turbines, worth almost $90 million, stacked together on a lawn outside of a warehouse. The turbines, meant to be stored indoors, had been there since 2020, investigators learned. Investigators also found tens of millions of dollars worth of tank tracks, vehicle transmission assemblies, and diesel engines stashed away in open-air facilities without proper packaging.

Using appropriate containers and shielding gear from the elements can save millions. Investigators pointed to a case in 2021 when the Army spent $10.92 million to repair engines that had been improperly stored.

Inspectors also warned that cluttered, precarious piles of equipment risked injuring personnel working at the distribution centers.

The inspector general largely blamed the storage pitfalls on poor training and oversight.

“DLA Distribution did not provide adequate guidance to its personnel who are responsible for or support” equipment maintenance, according to the report. Investigators also found that DLA’s distribution division “did not have formalized training for the receiving, packaging, warehousing, or inspection personnel who are responsible for the storage and care of Army [ground combat systems] materiel.”

The report claims Army leaders failed to recognize the gaps in its materiel management because the branch does not “adequately oversee” how the parts of its fighting machine are cared for.

The inspector general issued eleven recommendations, including the implementation of new training regimes and regular inspections from the head of Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command. DLA agreed with them all.

The program, dubbed Data Robot, was part of the Cyber Quest trials held throughout July at Fort Gordon in Georgia. It was previously put through its paces during the Pacific Sentry exercise in Hawaii, officials said.

“We want to give the commanders the right information at the right time so we can impact the enemy. That’s the goal,” Army Col. Brett Riddle, director of the Cyber Battle Lab, told reporters at a Cyber Quest briefing July 28. “And I think Data Robot did show us that we can start to progress forward with that.”

Quickly discerning fact from fiction is critical for forces in the field. And the task is increasingly complex as misinformation floods the likes of Twitter and Facebook and world powers wage online influence campaigns, some more overt than others. A manipulated video surfaced last year in which a poorly edited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia, for example. It was quickly debunked.

The U.S. is now beefing up its information warfare capabilities, a persuasive combination of data awareness and deception aimed at gaining an advantage before, during and after battles. Cyber Quest is organized each year to examine up-and-coming technologies and inform future investments.

“It’s our opportunity to take cutting-edge, newly delivered products from industry, put them into the hands of soldiers and determine if they’re going to work in the field, in the dirt, in the rain, in Georgia, in the hot, humid weather,” Army Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, the commander of the Army cyber center of excellence, said. “We need opportunities like Cyber Quest to work directly alongside our industry and scientific partners so they can make the modifications to existing protocols so that they’ll meet our needs.”

The Data Robot tool required about 90 days’ worth of data to reference before effectively identifying messages pushed by bots, according to Stanton. Pattern recognition and other insights are derived from extensive training regimens.

“Was anyone using artificial intelligence and machine learning? The simple answer is yes,” Stanton said of Cyber Quest. “Social media in the Indo-Pacific doesn’t look like social media in the United States.”

Data Robot could eventually fold into the Command Post Computing Environment to provide snapshots of information, though it will require some troubleshooting, officials said.

The environment consolidates various programs and data streams into a common pane maintained by soldiers. It also provides a software and hardware framework upon which future applications can be built.

“There was a lot of promising work done here at Cyber Quest,” Riddle said. “When we look at information advantage and trying to produce those visual overlays for commanders, it can be done.”

The ninety-minute hearing, convened by the House Armed Services Committee to assess the barriers inhibiting the Department of Defense’s adoption of AI, was framed by bipartisan geopolitical anxieties: how can the U.S. maintain its technological edge over China, and what are the risks of falling behind? Experts said the Pentagon has shown an inability to efficiently identify, acquire, and deploy promising new technology, hurting its bid for AI supremacy.

“One of the challenges in adopting AI in the government, in particular the Department of Defense, is the slow procurement process,” Haniyeh Mahmoudian, an ethicist at the AI platform DataRobot, told lawmakers. “AI is an evolving space and long procurement cycles and delays can lead to obsolete AI tools that will require retraining due to changes in data over time.”

A Government Accountability Office report published last month found that the DoD lacks a “comprehensive department-wide guidance for AI acquisitions.” This oversight, the report said, “could result in acquisition of AI capabilities across the services that does not consistently address the unique challenges associated with AI or the specific needs of the acquiring service.”

The Pentagon piloted an online contract exchange called Tradewind last year to expedite the acquisition of AI technology. Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of data processing company Scale AI, thinks the platform is worth building upon.

“What we need to look towards in the next era of AI is doubling down on some of these fast procurement methods and ensuring that we continue to innovate,” he said at the hearing.

Wang’s firm secured $250 million in DOD funding last January. The contract bankrolls several data-heavy projects across different branches, including Army robotic combat vehicles and vast, department-wide pattern recognition systems.

The Pentagon’s partnership with Scale epitomized recent efforts by American military leadership to translate its abstract commitments to AI integration into concrete policies and programs. The department launched the Chief Digital and AI Office in 2022 to coordinate the agency’s ever-evolving medley of AI-related proclamations, tests and hardware. The GAO estimates that the newborn office oversees close to 700 AI projects.

A top-down redesign of the agency’s acquisition policies won’t be enough to guarantee American victory in the AI arms race, the witnesses cautioned.

Wang spent much of his testimony knocking the Pentagon’s wasteful approach to data usage.

“AI systems are only as good as the data that they are trained on,” Wang told lawmakers. “The DoD creates more than 22 terabytes of data daily, and because of their outdated data retention and management policies, warfighters, analysts, and operators are unable to tap into its full potential because it is not AI-ready.”

Wang and his peers suspect DoD’s poor data processing capabilities could be the product of insufficient AI-specific military spending.

“China is spending between 1% and 1.5% of its military budget on AI, while the US is spending between 0.1% and 0.2%,” according to Wang. “Adjusted for the total military budget, China is spending ten times more than the U.S.”

The expert panel and their congressional questioners also dissected the DOD’s ethical guidelines surrounding the technology. The agency released a broad set of “ethical principles for the use of AI” in February 2020. The next step, DataRobot’s Mahmoudian said, requires making these “abstract” frameworks “practical” by educating personnel and leadership about the technology’s implications.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation subcommittee, painted the consequences of stagnation in stark relief.

“Do we want AI to be leveraged for good and the deterrence of conflict, or evil and the proliferation of it? If the former, the United States must not ‘pause,’” he said in his opening statement. “We must continue developing this revolutionary technology to preserve U.S. technological and moral leadership, and ensure artificial intelligence, and its associated norms and guardrails, are defined by freedom and our ideals, not the CCP’s.”

A U.S. Air Force MQ-9A Reaper drone cannoned into a remote patch of land on the outskirts of the 71st Air Base in Campia Turzii, Romania, July 14, 2022, according to local media reports. A five-month investigation released Thursday by Air Combat Command blamed the accident on the “channelized attention” and poor adherence to “basic airmanship” of the Launch Recovery Element controlling the unmanned aircraft system.

ACC officials say the aircraft, assigned to the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, began experiencing “malfunctions with control systems” shortly after taking off for a training mission at an “undisclosed location” in Europe.

The LRE mishap pilot and sensor operator, tasked with guiding the troubled drone back to base, elected to perform an “emergency engine-out landing” — cutting power to the engine in hopes of safely gliding the aircraft back to the airstrip. The team, misguided by the Reaper’s misfiring warning systems, misdiagnosed the drone’s issue as “stuck [engine] torque.”

The LRE shut down the engine, but the haywire indicators suggested it was still operational. Unaware they’d successfully powered down the aircraft, the crew attempted to abort the landing and circle back around for another attempt, according to the report. The unresponsive Reaper pummeled into the ground.

The only injury caused by the crash was budgetary: The destroyed drone cost $14.6 million. Flight safety analysts have documented 68 MQ-9 Reaper accidents since the model first took to the skies in 2001. A Russian jet collided with a Reaper over the Black Sea in March.

The Air Force began flying MQ-9 missions from Romania in February 2021. Directed by the 25th Attack Group and overseen by the 432nd, the operations are designed to support Romania and NATO allies’ defense capabilities and security objectives in Eastern Europe.

“I think the speed of the joint force and a common goal in the future is what’s lacking right now,” Gen. David Berger said from the exhibition hall of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown Washington. “And we also don’t have the speed, the velocity to get us there.”

Berger’s address headlined the first day of Modern Day Marine, an annual three-day exposition showcasing the Corps’ latest gadgets and end goals. The commandant, set to retire mid-July, spent much of his speech touting his branch’s progress on Force Design 2030, a sweeping revamping of Marine structure, strategy and capability.

“Marines are leading the joint force in innovation, modernization, and that’s exactly what you would expect Marines to be doing,” Berger said.

Berger debuted his new vision for the Marine Corps in March 2020 to a mixture of criticism and celebration.

The plan reimagines the Corps as a trimmed-down, expeditionary force geared for the fast-paced amphibious combat that, U.S. military minds suspect, would be the focal point of a conflict in the Pacific.

Leaders from other branches have echoed Berger’s calls for greater coordination among the joint force: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force and National Guard.

“The current environment requires the joint force to strengthen and integrate deterrence across domains, theaters, and the spectrum of conflict,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley wrote in the Joint Chief’s 2022 National Military Strategy.

Other military branches have unveiled similar modernization initiatives; for many, improving joint force collaboration is a stated priority.

The Army published an “Army Modernization Strategy” in 2021. The plans detailed in the document are, according to its authors, “interdependent and require corresponding updates to global force posture, facilities, and policies to ensure the Army’s modernization efforts remain synchronized over time and with the rest of the Joint Force.”

The Navy’s 2022 “Navigation Plan”— and its corresponding Force Design 2045 plan — highlighted its plans to coordinate with the Marine Corps on developing littoral combat units and other initiatives to “support Marines in contested areas.”

Future Marine operations will hinge on effective cooperation with assets and teams from the Navy, Berger stressed, as the Corps focuses again on being a “naval force.”

A corollary “Joint Force Design” plan that “says this is where we need to be five, six or seven years into the future,” Berger said, would help facilitate this alignment.

“I think what would help would be a common aim point,” he added. “But I’m not here to judge the other services.”

The company unveiled its new three-letter moniker, RTX, in a LinkedIn post on Monday. The rebranding comes three years after Raytheon merged with aerospace manufacturer United Technologies Corp. to form Raytheon Technologies. Since then, the company’s stock has traded under the RTX ticker symbol.

RTX “is a nod to the past and a nod to the future,” Greg Hayes, the company’s chief executive, said at an investor meeting Monday. He noted United Technologies’ ticker symbol was UTX; Raytheon’s was RTN.

Last summer, the conglomerate announced it would move its headquarters to Arlington, Virginia. Earlier this year, it announced plans to reorganize into three brands: Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon.

In a call with analysts in April, Christopher Calio, RTX’s chief operating officer, said the restructuring is meant to better align the company’s businesses with customer priorities, improve performance, and to better use company resources to optimize investments and cost structure.