Pakistan Today (Lahore)

Who will lead the world in artificial intelligen­ce?

- ELAINE MCCUSKER AND EMILY COLETTA Elaine McCusker, a former acting under secretary of defense (comptrolle­r), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where Emily Coletta is a researcher.

Anew report emphasizes why it is urgent that the Department of Defense and Congress work together to modernize the way defense programs and budgets develop, integrate and deploy the latest technologi­es in support of American national security. Released by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligen­ce, a federal body created to review and recommend ways to use artificial intelligen­ce for national security purposes, the report recommends the use of AI to update America’s defense plans, predict future threats, deter adversarie­s and win wars.

Because AI will be “incorporat­ed into virtually all future technology,” it is easy to recognize that national security threats and opportunit­ies posed by AI should be a catalyst for necessary changes to defense requiremen­ts and resourcing processes. In an AI-enabled world, the Defense Department will be unable to modernize the way it recruits talent, trains the force, develops and integrates technology, and funds all of these elements without internal culture shifts and help from Congress.

“Unless the requiremen­ts, budgeting and acquisitio­n processes are aligned to permit faster and more targeted execution, the U.S. will fail to stay ahead of potential adversarie­s.” This blunt recommenda­tion to the Defense Department under the heading “Accelerate Adoption of Existing Digital Technologi­es” makes clear the urgency for cultural and structural updates to the way the department currently does business.

Commission members, who came principall­y from the academic and business communitie­s, further noted in the report that: “The sources of battlefiel­d advantage will shift from traditiona­l factors like force size and levels of armaments, to factors like superior data collection and assimilati­on, connectivi­ty, computing power, algorithms, and system security.”

“Perhaps the most urgent and compelling reason to accelerate the use of AI for national security is the possibilit­y that more advanced machine analysis could find and connect the dots before the next attack, when human analysis alone may not see the full picture as clearly.” Simply put, AI will revolution­ize the practice of intelligen­ce.

The life cycle project management phases used in appropriat­ions categories that govern the defense budget run counter to the trial and error process of AI and other software-based technologi­es. Thus commission­ers recommende­d that the Defense Department should “Modernize the Budget and Oversight Process for Digital Technologi­es.”

The Defense Department should commit to building budgets that invest at least 3.4 percent of the annual defense budget in science and technology and allocate at least $8 billion for research and developmen­t of “core AI.”

To be able to afford the implementa­tion of this last recommenda­tion, the department would have to change its acquisitio­n and resourcing approaches to get more and faster bang for its buck. The commission recognized this by proposing a pilot program to “test mission-focused budgeting and appropriat­ions.” Ideally this would lead to the establishm­ent of “a single appropriat­ion and budget structure for software and digital technologi­es by FY 2023.”

In comparison to China’s ability to move quickly with resourcing decisions, another new report released last week about competing in time notes that the inflexibil­ity of the Defense Department budget process, which dates back to 1961, makes it more difficult to rapidly move money to innovation­s that appear promising. In a good, small step in the right direction, Congress supported the software pilot requested by Defense in its 2021 budget to begin addressing this problem.

Now is the time to harness federal buying power and leverage the potential momentum of this wide-ranging report to break the mold, and (as described in the report) come to the aid of “visionary technologi­sts and warfighter­s [who] largely remain stymied by antiquated technology, cumbersome processes, and incentive structures that are designed for outdated or competing aims.”

The Defense Department can do many things for itself through the use of existing laws and rules governing how it buys things. It can also encourage and train its workforce to take risks, try new things and abandon them if they don’t work rather than wasting money to follow through on programs that will be out of date before being deployed. The department should foster a culture of a creative “what if we…” approach to problem-solving and iterativel­y identify how things connect and can be used differentl­y. Integratio­n and sustainmen­t should not be acquisitio­n afterthoug­hts.

Congress can help by alleviatin­g some of the risks with recommende­d pilot programs to signal support for a more agile approach to both acquisitio­n and oversight. Policymake­rs and the defense workforce should be able to balance creativity, speed, transparen­cy and stewardshi­p.

As the commission­ers concluded, “Many countries have national AI strategies. But only the United States and China have the resources, commercial might, talent pool, and innovation ecosystem to lead the world in AI.”

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Pakistan