{"id":19007,"date":"2019-11-15T20:54:14","date_gmt":"2019-11-15T20:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/uncategorized\/2019\/11\/15\/one-way-for-the-pentagon-to-prove-its-serious-about-artificial-intelligence\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T18:08:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T18:08:48","slug":"one-way-for-the-pentagon-to-prove-its-serious-about-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/artificial-intelligence\/2019\/11\/15\/one-way-for-the-pentagon-to-prove-its-serious-about-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"One way for the Pentagon to prove it\u2019s serious about artificial intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Department of Defense officials routinely talk about the need to more fully embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence, but one leader in the Marine Corps said those efforts are falling short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not serious about AI. If we were serious about AI we would put all of our stuff into one location,\u201d Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, said at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter lunch Nov. 15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smith was broadly discussing the ability to provide technologies and data that\u2019s collected in large quantities and pushed to the battlefield and tactical edge. Smith said leaders want the ability to send data to a 50-60 Marine cell in the Philippines that might be surrounded by the Chinese. That means being able to manage the bandwidth and signature so that those forces aren\u2019t digitally targeted. That ability doesn\u2019t currently doesn\u2019t exist, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He pointed to IBM\u2019s Watson computer, noting that the system is able to conduct machine learning and artificial intelligence because it connects to the internet, which allows it to draw from a much wider data pool to learn from. Military systems aren\u2019t traditionally connected to the broader commercial internet, and thus are limited from a machine learning sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have stovepipes of excellence everywhere from interagency, CIA, NSA. The Navy\u2019s got theirs, Marine Corps\u2019 got theirs, everybody\u2019s got theirs. You can\u2019t do AI when the machine can\u2019t learn from one pool of data,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown noted that he was not speaking on behalf of the entire department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pentagon leadership has come to similar conclusions. Top officials have noted that one of the critical roles the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program will do is provide a central location for data. <\/p>\n\n\n\t