The Defense Department is urging Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies to configure their artificial intelligence tools to operate inside the military’s secret networks…. The pitch goes something like this: America’s next war will be data intensive. Troops will face a digital deluge of satellite imagery, radar data, sensor readings, weather forecasts, maps, emails, chat logs, and intelligence reports.
The Pentagon wants AI to help make sense of it all. The rationale for AI inside the military’s most secure networks, as laid out in this government report: ‘Enabling the secure integration of leading-edge AI technologies, such as those from GenAI, into DoD networks, will enhance the ability of military personnel to understand the increasingly complex environments in which they must operate.
This effort will create a centralized system of AI tools accessible to personnel with the necessary clearances and privileges, making them more effective and efficient.’ The Pentagon has already begun experimenting with GenAI technology in a system called GenAI.mil.
The company wrote about the effort on its website: ‘As an example, a person would need to spend many hours going through a few thousand intelligence reports to find critical information. ChatGPT can take the same reports and, in less than a second, generate a summary of the content of the reports and highlight reports that are most likely to be of interest to the person searching them.’
The Defense Department is pushing forward with AI integration. As its National Defense Science and Technology Strategy put it: ‘The Department must rapidly develop and transition AI applications to strengthen its operational posture, maintain technological advantage, and prevent erosion of its military capabilities.
This will require aggressively building and sustaining core technological expertise and leveraging promising research and development from all sectors.’ The U.S. military is not the only force expanding its AI capabilities. China and Russia are both building out their own AI-enhanced militaries, according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
‘Like nuclear weapons before them, AI-enabled systems will offer tremendous advantages to those who first gain operational experience with these emerging technologies,’ said the report.
There’s a paradox here. On the one hand, AI is meant to clarify. On the other hand, AI introduces a new level of uncertainty. It’s faster than any human analyst but it can also be so sure of something that is not true. If AI makes a bold but inaccurate statement to you about a meal recipe, that’s not the end of the world. But if AI does that in a national security context, we have a problem.
Some of the tech companies themselves are acknowledging this. They are taking steps to prevent their AI from being misused. And there is an increasing battle between Silicon Valley and the military about how much autonomy to permit. This is like giving someone a very fast sports car while secretly wondering if the brake works. From the military’s perspective, however, this is a choice.
If another country is doing it, the United States can’t simply ignore it. If we fall behind in this technology, it will have enormous implications for the balance of power. There’s a human dimension to this that isn’t part of the AI discussion. These are people — soldiers, analysts, scientists — who are working in an environment that’s changing so rapidly, no one fully understands it.
Some are optimistic. Some are worried. Most are probably a mix of both. And maybe this is the reality. AI isn’t coming with flashing lights and a news headline. It’s just quietly seeping into the fabric of what our military does. It won’t replace humans, but it will be another tool. Whether that makes us safer or less safe is something we’re all going to discover together.