The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is launching a new, marquee program in fiscal year 2020 to use AI for "maneuver and fires," as the organization seeks to bring the quickly evolving technology to the Defense Department's warfighting functions.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the JAIC, said the "AI for Maneuver and Fires" program will be the center's "biggest project" in FY-20. The program will have individual "product lines" focused on different warfighting functions, Shanahan told reporters during a press briefing at the Pentagon today.
The new program represents the center’s first publicly acknowledged foray into developing AI and machine learning tools for direct warfighting applications. Just established last December, JAIC has focused on large-scale but more benign uses for AI to date, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, predictive maintenance, intelligence support and cyber sensemaking.
The maneuver and fires program was not included in DOD’s FY-20 budget request released in February. But Shanahan said he has accounted for the program as part of DOD’s $268 million request for JAIC activities in FY-20.
“I realized very quickly after taking the job . . . it would be insane not to come up with a warfighting operations focused project,” Shanahan said. “We just hadn't put a lot of detail behind it at that point. But we had thought about what the budget needs to look like when you bring in an additional projects like that.”
He said JAIC is still “refining” how much the maneuver and fires projects will cost in FY-20.
Examples of potential applications under the new program include “operations-intelligence fusion, joint all domain command and control, accelerated sensor-to shooter-timelines, autonomous and swarming systems, target development, and operations center workflows,” according to Shanahan.
Shanahan said the maneuver and fires program will draw on Project Maven, a high-profile “pathfinder” effort established by DOD in 2017 to help automate the processing, exploitation and dissemination of ISR photos and video take by unmanned aerial systems.
The project quickly fielded its first algorithms to special operations units in Africa and the Middle East in December 2017, and Shanahan said the Project Maven team is now rolling out its “Sprint Two” algorithms.
Shanahan led Project Maven out of the office of the under secretary of defense for intelligence before he joined JAIC as its inaugural director in January.
“Again, we’ll start relatively small scale,” Shanahan said of the maneuver and fires program. “Maven’s got a head start on the intelligence. What you'll hear is the term ‘smart system,’ which is taking the Maven metadata, the products coming out of Maven, fusing them with other sources of intelligence. And then taking what has been a common operating picture and common intelligence picture and a sensor picture, collapsing those onto one.
“We’ve talked about this for years,” he continued. “We may be seeing the indications in a year or so we actually have a place where ops, intel and sensor information is available to everybody at the same time.”
Earlier this year, JAIC convened representatives from the services and the combatant commands for a workshop to discuss the possibilities for using AI in maneuver and fires, according to Shanahan.
“We thought we were going to get 40 people -- over 130 people showed up,” he said. “We had to turn some people away.”
He said the program team at JAIC just received “tens of thousands” of calls-for-fire records from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“You're reading that data and the more we learn from that using natural language processing and probably some deep learning, how do we get through the fire support coordination process much faster, much more efficiently,” Shanahan said.