GenAI Offers Opportunities to Advance Defense

(NewsUSA) - Advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), offer the United States government a unique opportunity to accelerate two key defense goals of preparing for the future character of conflict and strengthening our military overmatch against our international rivals, according to experts at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a bipartisan nonprofit organization.

Although the United States has opened a critical technological advantage over the rest of the world with the recent advances in GenAI, this advantage may be fleeting, and a new report from SCSP outlines four critical areas for the Department of Defense (DoD) to consider as priorities to optimize the United States’ advantages.

Enable Decisional Advantage. GenAI shows great promise as a decision aid, and the DoD should identify was to securely integrate GenAI models to promote faster and better informed decision-making in operations centers and weapons platforms.

Enhance Operations. The DoD is already exploring GenAI for predictive maintenance and certain back-office support functions. However, AI-enabled models have potential in many other areas, including logistics and sustainment, investment and divestment, generation of experimental courses of action, and decisions related to global force deployment management.

Develop Talent. GenAI will create demand for new skill sets in areas of defense. The DoD needs to establish policies to recruit, develop, and retain talented individuals who can develop, evaluate, build, and employ GenAI tools for military effects.

Identify New Defenses. GenAI will pose threats to the United States through many channels, including disinformation, as well as from chemical and biological agents. The DoD should identify potential threats and plan for additional defensive measures, notably ways to counter AI-generated attacks of all types from adversaries.

To help manage the potential benefits and risks of GenAI in the area of defense, SCSP also calls on the DoD to build an automated orchestration platform that can access a range of tools and datasets, and to develop defense-specific AI trained in military terms and jargon, but secured to avoid revealing the terms on which they were trained.

Looking ahead to warfare trends, human-machine collaboration and teaming, software advantage, and empowerment of warfighters in battle situations will be affected by advances GenAI, and the United States must take action to optimize its current advantages and apply GenAI for defense, according to SCSP. 

For more information, visit scsp.ai.