There have been directives from top levels of Army leadership to cut down on business systems and automate capabilities where possible.

“It’s a big push right now from the secretary and the chief is, hey, do we need all of these systems, why do we have them?” CIO Leonel Garciga said during a presentation Wednesday at the Potomac Officers Club’s Army Summit. “A lot of it is a process. Lot of it is, ‘we’ve had it for the last two decades, sir.’ Some of it is really old.”

Unveiled at the end of April, the Army Transformation Initiative is a top-down effort to improve how the service operates by shrinking headquarters elements, becoming leaner, slashing programs that aren’t efficient and changing how money is spent.

The goal is to cut obsolete programs and systems that don’t contribute to success on the modern battlefield.

“The Army is trying to change as fast as we are seeing the operational environment change as well as the technological environment change. Army Transformation Initiative is actually our response to that and how can we go about doing that,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of staff, G-8, said at Wednesday’s summit. “You’re going to start to see what we are trying to do and how we are trying to move faster to respond to that operational environment. No longer can we wait for the next [Program Objective Memorandum], for the next budget cycle. We have to be able to change now and change at the pace that is required of us as a force … It’s also about structure, and what we’re trying to do is eliminate waste and obsolete programs. You’re going to see a lot of different change inside of our equipping programs. You’re going to see a lot of different change inside of our force structure. We’re paying for this, largely, mostly ourselves.”

Garciga noted that for him as CIO, ATI means rethinking the way they deliver capability across the board, but officials are still working through that.

Secretary Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George have both asserted that the Army wants to buy commercial where possible and try to get out of the paradigm of developing long-yielding programs of record — all in an effort to speed capability to field.

“The model is going to change and I think that’s — I keep stressing this idea of our traditional model of full stack, bespoke capabilities, just going to tell you that’s pretty much dead,” Garciga said. “There’s very few areas where it’s like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, we should probably do that. Almost holistically, across the board, as we triage just functions that are happening across the enterprise, more and more, what we’re seeing is, hey, we can just do this here, let’s go get that done. Starting to think about what that model looks like, it’s really, really important.”

Garciga also noted that the undersecretary recently signed a memo directing major Army organizations to submit three human-intensive processes to the CIO to focus on how to either automate them, augment them with artificial intelligence or machine learning, or get rid of them entirely.

“Lots of cuts, dynamic workforce shaping, it’s a little different right now. How do we make up for some of those losses and still provide capability and take this opportunity to actually relook and rethink things that we’re doing in the Army right now to deliver capabilities?” Garciga said. “I think this is really important, long time overdue. It really took the stress on the system to get really serious about, oh my god, we still have to do the mission, how do we really look at doing this more efficiently? Big push, so next 20 days, we’re going to see a lot of churn on that.”

These new initiatives could provide big opportunities for the defense industrial base to support the Army, Garciga said, charging audience members to start thinking about how their organizations can contribute.

Members of Congress, on a bipartisan and bicameral basis, have been frustrated so far with the Army regarding the rollout of the broader transformation initiative. While there has been widespread support for the underlying notion of the effort, service leaders have yet to transmit any documents related to ATI, to include analysis for how the decisions to cut programs were made, or how officials will make funding and program decisions in the future.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense earlier this week that in the next 10 days, lawmakers can expect to see documentation.

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LLMs, which can generate content — such as text, audio, code, images, videos and other types of media — based on prompts and data they are trained on, have exploded in popularity with the emergence of ChatGPT and other commercially available tools. Pentagon officials aim to leverage generative AI capabilities, but they want solutions that won’t expose sensitive information to unauthorized individuals. They also want technology that can be tailored to meet DOD’s unique needs.

“Definitely looking at pushing out guidance here, hopefully in the next two weeks, right — no promises right now, because it’s still in some staffing — on genAI and large language models,” Army CIO Leo Garciga said Thursday during a webinar hosted by AFCEA NOVA. “We continue to see the demand signal. And though [there is] lots of immaturity in this space, we’re working through what that looks like from a cyber perspective and how we’re going to treat that. So we’re gonna have some initial policy coming out.”

The CIO’s team has been consulting with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology as it fleshes things out.

“We’ve been working with our partners at ASAALT to kind of give some shaping out to industry and to the force so we can get a little bit more proactive in our experimentation and operationalization of that technology,” Garciga said.

Pentagon officials see generative AI as a tool that could be used across the department, from making back-office functions more efficient to aiding warfighters on the battlefield.

However, there are security concerns that need to be addressed.

“LLMs are awesome. They’re huge productivity boosters. They allow us to get a lot more work done. But they are very new technology … In my view, we are definitely in an AI bubble. Right? When you look kind of across industry, everybody’s competing to try to get their best, you know, LLM out there as quickly as possible. And by doing that, we have some gaps. I mean, we just do. And so it’s very important that we not take an LLM that is out on, you know, the web that I can just go and log into and access and put our data into it to try to get responses,” said Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software.

Doing so risks having the Army’s sensitive data bleed into the public domain via the internet and training models that adversaries could access, she noted.

“That’s really not OK, it’s very dangerous. And so we are looking at what we can do internally, within, you know, [Impact Level] 5, IL6, whatever boundaries, different boundaries that we have out there … And we’re moving as quickly as we can. And we definitely want tools within that space that our folks can use and our developers can use, but you know it’s not going to be the tools that are out there on the internet,” she added.

The forthcoming policy guidance is expected to address security concerns.

“I think folks are really concerned out in industry. And we’re getting a lot of feedback on, you know, just asking us what we think the guidance is going to look like. But we’re going to focus on putting some guardrails and some left and right limits … We’ve really focused on letting folks know, hey, this space is open for use. If you do have access to an LLM, right, make sure you’re putting the right data in there, make sure you understand what the left and right limits [are] … Don’t put, you know, an [operation order] inside public ChatGPT — probably not a good idea, right? Believe it or not, things like that are probably happening,” Garciga said.

“I think we really want to focus on making sure that it’s a data-to capability piece, and then add some depth for our vendors where we start putting a little bit of a box around, [if] I’m going to build a model for the U.S. government, what does it mean to for me to build it on prem in my corporate headquarters? What does that look like? … What is that relationship? Because that’s going to drive contracts and a bunch of other things. We’re going to start the initial wrapping of what that’s going to look like in our initial guidance memo so we can start having a more robust conversation in this space. But it’s really going to be focused around mostly data protection … and what we think the guardrails needs to be and what our interaction between the government and industry is going to look like in this space,” he added.

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