The U.S. military is considered the best in the world. With a budget larger than the next nine militaries combined, the Department of Defense (DOD) outspends, out-equips, and out-trains its competitors. It is also an industrial-age, hardware-centric organization that has the most, the biggest, and the best large capital investments: tanks, ships, aircraft, satellites, and everything in between. Unfortunately, in today’s world, hardware is “old-school” – low-margin, commodity products that are manufactured, stored, shipped, consumed, and discarded. The DOD accomplishes many incredible things, but it also shares with almost all other federal agencies the common trait of lagging woefully behind the commercial software industry’s state of the art in everything from automating back-office functions to providing digital warfighting services to its customers.

Fortunately, the DOD has a monopoly on the nation’s warfighting functions, which insulates it from the usual forms of market competition. Yet this very monopoly is also the root cause of many of the worst problems when it comes to the DOD’s failure to adopt new technologies, change its legacy workflows and processes, and design and experiment with new operating concepts. Within the U.S. government, the DOD does not experience the kind of brutal, capitalist, Darwinian journey by which incumbent organizations face off against hungry new start-ups and risk getting pushed to the side. Equally problematic, the massive DOD bureaucracy struggles with the kind of periodic “tech refresh” that has been instrumental to commercial industry success. While it is insulated from market competition within the U.S. economy, the DOD is not immune from the kind of revolutionary, secular, and wide-ranging technological changes happening outside the government. Nor is it immune from the threat of competition with other militaries around the world. Either the DOD will change itself, or its competitors will force it to change. After it might be too late.

For the United States military to retain its dominant position in the future – which is not a guaranteed outcome – the DOD needs a new design and architecture, based on technology, that will allow it to be far more flexible, scale on demand, and adapt dynamically to changing conditions. And it must do so at a dramatically lower cost. The DOD’s systems will need to support dramatically faster decision-making and execution speeds; allow for rapidly updating and modifying systems; lower the cost structure of building and deploying these systems; and upend the marginal cost and speed of delivering new functionality.

It is extremely important for DOD to begin the transition from an industrial-age, hardware-centric organization to a digital-age, software-centric one. To address the challenges of doing so, the two of us, one with over 26 years of experience in Silicon Valley and the other who served for 36 years in uniform, wrote “Software-Defined Warfare: Architecting the DOD’s Transition to the Digital Age.” In the computer industry, “software defined” is a broad architectural concept that drives different core design decisions. These design decisions turn a lot of disconnected hardware products into an integrated whole that can be operated and managed as a single platform. It also takes control and complexity, which is typically distributed all over the place, and centralizes it where it can be simplified, managed, and scaled. In military terms, this is a version of centralized direction and decentralized execution: the best of both worlds.

We describe how lessons and experience from the commercial tech industry’s journey can help inform breakthrough solutions to big problems in the DOD and other federal government organizations. The best principles and practices that emerged in commercial industry over the past few decades on how to design computer software and systems for squeezing out the maximum performance at lowest costs, are directly transferrable to the DOD. We outline nine concepts and present an overall architecture recommendation that we consider crucial for accelerating the transition to a software-centric future.
Our paper is not a so-called “recipe for success.” It is a framework, a blueprint for change at a crucial period in the Department’s history. We do not claim that hardware has become irrelevant. It is as important as ever. Yet the principles we outline are designed to make hardware far more effective, to allow much more agility and rapid adaptation during future crises and conflicts. We also do not claim that machines will displace people. The approach described in our report opens up incredible new opportunities for human-machine teamwork, in which the roles of humans and machines are optimized based upon what each does best.

War is the ultimate human endeavor. It is both art and science. The art side of the art-science equation remains as important as ever. With the proliferation of new technologies and a shift to a data-centric environment, the science part of the equation is becoming increasingly consequential. In future crises and conflicts, the side that adapts faster and demonstrates the greatest agility may well gain a significant tactical and operational advantage. As stated in the recently-published Strategic Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) report, titled Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness, “A military’s ability to deploy, employ, and update software, including AI models, faster than its adversaries, is likely to become one of the greatest determining factors in relative military strength.” That is a powerful and bold statement. We agree with it. The stockbroker’s warning that past performance is no guarantee of future results applies as much to warfighting as it does to investing. There is no time to waste for the DOD and the rest of the federal government to begin the transition to a digital age.

Nand Mulchandani was the first Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). He is now the CTO for the CIA. Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.) was the inaugural Director of Project Maven and the JAIC.

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Many questions remain about how Maven and its complex components will function and scale once that transition is completed early next month. But at this point, one thing is clear: This shift marks a significant waypoint in the project’s evolution and will likely influence the military’s ability to win future wars with AI and associated advanced technologies.

“I think it’ll be hard for me to overstate the importance of this transition. How this transition goes will speak volumes about whether the DOD and intelligence community can really get to speed and scale on AI,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan told DefenseScoop in a recent interview. 

During his 36 years of service in the U.S. Air Force, Shanahan accumulated more than 2,800 flight hours. He went on to work in DOD’s I&S directorate, before DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) was formed in 2018 and he was named as its inaugural director.

Its genesis was partially inspired by the creation of Project Maven in April 2017, which the lieutenant general also played a key role in establishing. 

In simplest terms, Project Maven was created to enable the military to apply computer vision — an aspect of machine learning and deep learning that autonomously detects, tags and tracks objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.

Technological advancements, higher stakes global competition and many other factors influenced Maven’s origins. But Shanahan said a primary motivator was the need to make sense of the “staggering” amounts of data that were coming off of technology platforms monitoring conflict zones in the Middle East. 

By the end of its first year in existence, “we had our first models in combat operations,” Shanahan explained. Those initial efforts did not unfold without some publicized controversy, but by the time he retired from the Pentagon in 2020, Shanahan said that the capabilities were being applied in “all the key” Middle Eastern countries where combat was unfolding. To him, the project marked a monumental early AI-driving win for DOD. 

In February 2022, the JAIC was among multiple organizations absorbed into the then-established CDAO. Two months after that, the Biden administration proposed restructuring the organization and responsibilities associated with Project Maven and assigning new leads.

“Maven was the ‘Big Bang,’ and at some point, you’re so far away, you forget where the light came from,” Shanahan said. “But it was the Big Bang and I hope that we get a universe called ‘the AI-enabled Department of Defense’ out of that Big Bang.” 

Blurry vision

Still, the initiative’s future organization and functions remain at this point unclear.

When Maven’s transition was first announced in the spring, it was generally billed as operational control being fully transferred to NGA. 

But in August, on a trip to government technology facilities in the Midwest, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told DefenseScoop about her aims to help DOD make a drastic move from a hardware-centric to a software-centric enterprise. She said the CDAO was established under her purview to become a sort of “technical architect” in this work.

“We brought in world-class talent into that CDAO and we’ve paired [its fresh leadership] now with folks like the Maven community that we’ve pulled into CDAO, [who] understand how to connect at a more tactical operational level to the AI-data-level talent,” she explained. “And they’re going to be really focused on creating that integration layer at the software level.”

At this point, however, only a few details about how Maven will function and be steered in its next phase beyond that have been widely shared. The project is currently designated as part of “defense critical infrastructure,” which might partly contribute to why officials are tight-lipped.

Spokespersons from the CDAO and NGA recently confirmed to DefenseScoop that their organizations are considered “mission partners” in the work. Lines of effort associated with Maven’s GEOINT functions — meaning those that analyze geospatial intelligence, or signals and data of specific locations — will move to NGA by the start of fiscal 2023. 

“CDAO is responsible for continuing development on the non-GEOINT lines of effort until such time as they are ready to transition to follow-on mission partners,” which will be fully moved over by fiscal 2025, statements from the press officials said. They also noted that “ongoing work post-transitioned will be overseen by [I&S,]” and that “details of that oversight function are still being established.”

When asked for further clarity regarding which of those organizations is responsible specifically for AI governance, scaling and other major tasks in Maven’s near future, the spokespersons from CDAO and NGA referred DefenseScoop to I&S.

A press official from that office did not respond to DefenseScoop’s repeated requests for more information by deadline.

To Shanahan, this shift represents “maybe the single most important transition in the next couple of years.”

Having been there since its very beginning, he said he admires Maven more than perhaps any other person. But despite his team’s work to enable the use of its assets across the military, for now it still encompasses just one AI program within DOD.

“If it doesn’t transition successfully, Maven could be just seen as another fantastic individual siloed project. We never saw it that way. In fact, the one thing that I didn’t think it would ever be called is siloed,” Shanahan said. 

The CDAO, NGA and I&S must cooperatively embrace their duties to take this project to the next level, he added — “because if this doesn’t go well, it’s not a good signal for the rest of the government.”

The ‘vision of the future’

Currently, Project Maven capabilities are being used operationally in Europe.

“And that’s about all I can say, because I’m not day-to-day tied in, in terms of classified sources — but I know it’s being used and being used effectively. So, I think they’ve sort of pushed the envelope almost as far as they can go by Maven itself,” Shanahan said. “Now it’s time to get this to the entire Department of Defense and the entire intelligence community.” 

Looking back, he noted that Maven started with a focus on the “most basic problem,” which was object detection, classification and tracking. Over time, Shanahan and the team built-in more capabilities, he said, to help military analysts address questions like “what kind of vehicle? What kind of building? Was the person carrying a weapon, or not carrying a weapon? Can we get to [identifying] an adult and child? Yes, we could. Could you [track] an adult carrying a weapon? Yes, you could.”

Training the AI to properly denote the likely expressed gender of humans that were spotted was “a tougher problem to solve,” the retired military executive said.

Eventually Project Maven’s components became more and more sophisticated with additional classes of identifiable objects and capacity to function across imagery from both day and night. 

To Shanahan, one of its most important abilities allowed analysts to easily trail back across forensic data of crucial events. 

“So an [improvised explosive device attack] happened. I want to know where that vehicle came from in the last 24 hours. It would take an analyst forever to do that. The machine? Boom — there it is,” Shanahan said. “I mean, eventually, you get to the point where you’re saying ‘I want to look just for this vehicle — this red Toyota Land Cruiser, or white Toyota Hilux’ — whatever it was. It’s a hard problem to do it, especially, across 24 hours and all the way back. But it’s doable, and we showed it was doable.”

Layers of AI and machine learning continue to be built on Maven. But to Shanahan, some of its early uses were part of “the beginning” of human-machine teaming for military missions. 

“In this case, it’s a coder working with an operator saying ‘what do you want to know? How? How do I tell you when I really want you to focus over here?’” he explained. “So the idea of the machine doing what the machine does best — like getting through as much data as you could possibly get through and finding a signal out of noise. Because it’s noise, noise, noise — it’s combat, everything’s happening simultaneously. Bad shit. People all over the place. Tell me what I need to focus on and what’s really important to me.” 

Maven continues to encompass new and different types of computer vision and advance in its offerings, but inherently, it has really always been intended to help analysts and computers to work together. 

“To me, that’s the vision of the future,” Shanahan noted.

The former Maven leader briefed DefenseScoop on multiple occasions for this piece. In the most recent conversation, he expressed more hope than in previous chats about Maven’s ongoing transition and ultimate future. 

Shanahan said he “completely agrees” with Hicks’ recent intent on pushing DOD’s emerging technology pursuits to their next iterations. 

“So her focus is on what I would also say is appropriate — now it’s about experimentation and wargaming, and trying this stuff out creatively. Because the innovation will never ever, ever, ever come from the Pentagon, it will come from the people using this technology in new and unexpected and creative ways,” he noted.

If service members can’t “play around” with the capabilities, or are forced to try them, the solutions could potentially be disregarded. Going forward, he’d like to hear about more experimentation with Maven’s functions in the military’s pre-deployment training, fleet and bomb exercises, and combatant commands.

If that happens in the next couple years, it could lead to “an explosion of ideas that no one knew about because they weren’t being tried out at the so-called tactical and operational” levels, according to Shanahan.

Though a little skepticism remains, in the most recent conversation with DefenseScoop, he also explicitly pointed out that he feels “more optimistic than ever” about this point in Maven’s transition, because he has heard that new NGA director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth has made Maven “his priority project.”

“Really what I wanted to hear is that he was going to embrace this. Maybe he changes the name — it doesn’t matter to me. But he understands how damn important it is to make this work,” Shanahan said.

Editor’s note: This piece is the first of a series that DefenseScoop is reporting on Project Maven. Have a tip? Email Brandi.Vincent@defensescoop.com.

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With its partners in the Army Contracting Command-Rock Island and the Indiana Innovation Institute (IN3), the CDAO is targeting the first quarter of fiscal 2023 to “go-live” with the minimum viable product of this new “Tradewind Solutions Marketplace.”

Between now and Sept. 30, officials involved are crowdsourcing suggestions from industry, academia and government agencies on the concept and framework underpinning that hub and how such organizations could help “shape” it.

After that date, some comments received may be shared publicly. But those behind the emerging vendor space also plan to continue to collect feedback and engage interested parties throughout the existence of the Marketplace initiative.

In early 2021, DOD’s former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) — which was recently absorbed into the CDAO — and the Army awarded an Other Transaction agreement to IN3 to create a business process and online environment called “Tradewind,” that would drive more efficient AI acquisitions for the U.S. military. Last month, FedScoop reported that the partners recently updated the tradewindai.com website and it is being tested as a modern channel to announce new AI-aligned challenge competitions.

On Aug. 26, the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace announcement was posted there and on the SAM.gov federal government contracting site. Both link to the Tradewind Exchange Challenge Summary landing page where responses are to be submitted.

Specifically, officials want feedback on how they might best provide a venue where defense and military insiders can search for the technologies of interest, and a single location to interact with external organizations that can deliver them through an established rapid contracting pathway.

A 10-page, attached “teaser” draft of the marketplace open call also provides details behind the evolving, and subject to change, notions informing the making of this new online shop — as well as some information about how it will operate.

“The Solutions Marketplace serves industry and academic organizations by providing a forum to showcase relevant research, products, and services to prospective government customers, and serves DOD by providing a forum to access data, analytics, digital and AI/ML solutions and rapidly ingest game changing technology solutions,” the document said.

Envisioned as “a digital environment of competed video pitches,” the marketplace will be designed as a venue for customer organizations “to search, view, review, compare, contrast, contact, negotiate, and procure data, analytics, digital and AI/ML” technologies.

The overarching idea is that once video pitches of capabilities pass through a deep assessment to ensure compliance with federal requirements, and they are approved for the marketplace, they will then be made available for funding via Other Transaction agreements or procurement contracts. 

“Thus, the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace serves as the DOD’s digital environment of post-competition, readily awardable, technology solutions,” the document said.

Video solution pitches will have to address one or more topics on a list of strategic focus areas that will also change over time based on the Pentagon’s needs.

Initially, those areas are: improving situational awareness and decision-making, increasing safety of operating equipment, implementing predictive maintenance and supply, streamlining business processes, assuring cybersecurity and discovering Blue Sky technology applications.

The latter essentially refers to future-facing domains where “real-world” applications are not immediately apparent. The CDAO’s press office did not provide further information by FedScoop’s deadline about what capabilities those involved want in that case.

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This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.

“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson.

New hires include: 

• Chief Digital and AI Officer – Craig Martell
• Deputy CDAO – Margaret Palmieri
• DCDAO for Acquisition – Sharothi Pikar
• DCDAO for Policy, Strategy and Governance – Clark Cully
• DCDAO for Enterprise Platforms and Business Optimization – Greg Little
• DCDAO for Algorithmic Warfare – Joe Larson
• DCDAO for Digital Services – Katie (Olson) Savage
• Chief Operating Officer – Dan Folliard
• Chief Technology Officer – Bill Streilein
• Chief of AI Assurance – Jane Pinelis

Diane Staheli was also recently tapped to lead the CDAO’s Responsible AI (RAI) Division.

Several of these officials have already made waves within DOD, including founder and former director of the Navy’s digital warfare office Margaret Palmieri, and Joe Larson, who previously served as deputy chief for the Pentagon’s Project Maven.

In these new roles at the CDAO, the officials will help steer the Pentagon’s strategy development and policy formulation for associated solutions; enable data access and AI adoption within appropriate institutional processes; establish a strong digital infrastructure and services to support military and department components’ AI- and digital-driven deployments, and more.

The CDAO is targeting October 1 for the full administrative alignment of personnel and resources, the spokesperson told FedScoop.

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In this role, Staheli will help steer the Defense Department’s development and application of policies, practices, standards and metrics for buying and building AI that is trustworthy and accountable. She enters the position nearly nine months after DOD’s first AI ethics lead exited the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), and in the midst of a broad restructuring of the Pentagon’s main AI-associated components under the CDAO.

“[Staheli] has significant experience in military-oriented research and development environments, and is a contributing member of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence AI Assurance working group,” Sarah Flaherty, CDAO’s public affairs officer, told FedScoop.

Advanced computer-driven systems use AI to perform tasks that generally require some human intelligence. The Pentagon has increasingly adopted AI-based technologies in recent years to enable functions spanning the back office to the battlefield. But with all these benefits AI offers, the technology also poses the potential for risky unintended consequences that could result from its uses. 

U.S. defense and military officials are being strategic about getting ahead of such possibly harmful implications.

Formed in 2018, DOD’s JAIC works to help DOD deploy and scale AI capabilities as warfare evolves to be increasingly digital. A National Defense Authorization Act provision the following year in part prompted the Pentagon to craft custom ethical guidance to inform its AI implementations, and the JAIC was tasked with leading that development.

The JAIC’s first responsible AI chief, Alka Patel, joined the department in early 2020 — not long after its ethical AI principles were formally adopted. She departed the role after 20 months in October. Several weeks after her exit, DOD announced a hefty organizational restructure that placed the JAIC, as well as the Defense Digital Service and the department’s chief data officer organization under the newly established CDAO. 

Pentagon officials noted at the time that this reorganization was a necessary point in the department’s technological evolution that marked a critical next step to help integrate AI across the massive enterprise.

“Staheli comes to the CDAO from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and has vast expertise in AI ethics and research, data analytics, and technology development,” Flaherty also told FedScoop.

At MIT, Staheli headed pursuits focusing on human-centered AI. 

She has master’s degrees in software engineering and human factors, and her main professional interests include human-AI interaction, explainable AI, decision science, autonomy, socio-technical systems, and user-centered design. 

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Martell has also held machine learning and AI roles at Dropbox and Linkedin. His professional experience with the U.S. military is limited to his service as a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specializing in natural language processing.

“Advances in AI and machine learning are critical to delivering the capabilities we need to address key challenges both today and into the future,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. “With Craig’s appointment, we hope to see the department increase the speed at which we develop and field advances in AI, data analytics, and machine-learning technology. He brings cutting-edge industry experience to apply to our unique mission set.” 

The Department of Defense announced the creation of the Chief Digital and AI Office last December to centralize oversight of data and AI initiatives under one official at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The CDAO reports directly to the deputy secretary of Defense.

The CDAO launched with initial operational capability Feb. 1 and plans to reach full operational capability by June.

The Pentagon office of the Chief Information Officer transferred the Joint AI Center to the CDAO’s leadership. The new office will also oversee the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service and the chief data officer units.

Last month, the Department of Defense announced Margaret Palmieri as deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Palmieri was special assistant to the vice chief of naval operations and previously founded and directed the Navy Digital Warfare Office.

While the CDAO sits separately from the office of the CIO in the Pentagon’s reporting structure, the two offices will operate closely together to support the DOD’s core IT and digital mission sets.

CIO John Sherman has been serving as interim CDAO since February. He told FedScoop last month that the job of the incoming CDAO will be to “raise the waterline” for AI and digital development across the military services and commands. That will require “tapping into all of the department’s data and then leveraging that for really at-speed analytics to be able to give commanders, decision makers — all the way from Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin to a combatant commander to a leader in the field” — the capabilities needed to stay ahead of China, which is the Pentagon’s “pacing challenge,” Sherman said.

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Protecting the government’s intellectual property is one example of an area where improvements have been made, according to Lt. Gen. Michael Groen.

In the past “lots of vendors started to come on board and …  [were] charging us a lot of money for things that we, you know, that we didn’t need to be paying for,” he said during a virtual conference hosted by C4ISRNET.  

“We have less, but still some, you know, folks in the department who are just giving government data away, right, and then buying it back from a vendor,” he said. “Hey, we’re not doing that shit anymore, right. Like government intellectual property, we know how to protect that … and we’re teaching everybody how to protect that so that we get the benefit.”

Additionally, the JAIC has “pulled together” a number of different contract vehicles such as blanket purchase agreements or other transaction authority agreements (OTAs) where a consortium of vendors bid on projects, he noted.

In the past, the JAIC was “cranking through these investment vehicles” and then working closely with Army Contracting Command to actually implement them.

Now, the JAIC is “very close” to having the ability to implement these contracting vehicles on its own without the assistance of other agencies, he noted.

“We’ve got lots of tools now that are in place,” he said.

OTAs, which are designed to cut through bureaucratic red tape and help the Pentagon pursue new technologies faster, have helped connect the DOD with nontraditional vendors.

“That also helped us open up our environment to small vendors. So, a small vendor with, you know, maybe one small capability … that meets a need that we have in the department. We have the ability now to not just work with big primes, but also work with small companies that maybe don’t have a lot of experience working with the Department of Defense and can’t afford, you know, the overhead that it takes to get into the defense business,” Groen said.

He continued: “We’ve tried to make it really much easier for people with good ideas and good capabilities — small or large companies — to work with us and help us build capabilities. And that’s actually going really, really well.”

In December, the position of chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAO) was created to oversee the JAIC, Defense Digital Service and the Pentagon’s chief data office. In March, the DOD announced the appointment of Sharothi Pikar as deputy chief CDAO for acquisitions. Pikar will oversee the development, acquisition and procurement of capabilities with the department’s industry and academic partners.

“As our acquisition executive gets on board and starts to function in that capacity, we’re going to be able to execute that, you know, even better. And we’ll be able to do it ourselves … with Congress’ approval,” Groen said.

Contracting will be critical as the Pentagon moves to integrate its AI capabilities.

Just a few years ago when the JAIC was first stood up, “we were building sort of demonstration AI projects just to illuminate right across the department, ‘Hey, this is what AI kind of looks like,’” Groen said.

In three years, the Pentagon has moved from AI “discovery” to AI adoption to now focusing on AI integration, he said.

“Now we’re thinking about with every service having, you know, a fairly robust AI capability … that’s under construction,” Groen said.

Each of the services will be pursuing a variety of AI efforts, and they may involve hundreds of projects “whether those are, you know, pure AI plays or if it’s AI integrated into a system or a … platform architecture,” he said.

The DOD needs to be able to “federate capabilities across the enterprise,” the JAIC chief said. To do that, operational data sources will need to cataloged and available so that they can be “stitched” into algorithms.

For example, if somebody in the Navy builds a good AI capability, another DOD agency or component could tap into that catalog and tune it for a different application.

“We need to have that kind of environment where we can share data readily and we can share a platform environment readily. That gives us resilience and … we’d be competitive with anybody when we are operating at that scale,” Groen said.

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“Why is software so important? Because the next battles will be fought based on software supremacy. They really will be,” said Schmidt, the former chair of the Defense Innovation Board and a major advocate for the U.S. military’s adoption of modern software practices and AI. “And you understand this — you’ve heard it. But you don’t have it yet.”

Speaking at the Air Force Association’s Warfare Symposium, Schmidt offered direct, blunt criticisms about the DOD’s continued struggle to innovate and adapt to the increasingly digital nature of defense. It’s something the Defense Innovation Board grappled with repeatedly under his leadership, during which time it produced a Software Acquisition and Practices (SWAP) study for the department.

“If I look at the totality of what you’re doing, you’re doing a very good job of making things that you currently have better, over and over and over again,” he said, adding that the DOD and military services often ritualize processes and systems as “God-given” without considering innovative alternatives.

He continued: “If I’ve learned anything in my now 45 years of innovative tech companies, it’s that rules can be changed with focus, with cleverness and with some real buy-in. And I would suggest that if we look at the things that are missing in terms of technological innovation, they’re precisely the things that we need to actually change the system to account for.”

In pockets across the military, though, this is happening, Schmidt said, pointing to the Air Force’s approach in developing the B-21 Raider. And it needs to be applied to “things other than bombers,” he said. “Like let’s try to do the same thing for software” and concepts like Joint All Domain Command and Control and “actually get it in your hands, get it working, get it now.”

But there are several challenges at play across the DOD as the department looks to buy software. The primary issue, Schmidt said, “is you don’t have enough software people. And by software people, I mean people who think the way I do, you come out of a different background, and you just don’t have enough of these.”

On top of that, the military doesn’t yet understand that “software is never done,” he said. “So if you’re a person who accounts for something that has to be done,” as the military tends to think about acquiring weapons systems, “you’re always unhappy. Because software is never done. It’s a process of continuous improvement.” And what that tends to result in is “every time you try to do something in software, one of these strange scavenging groups within the administration takes your money away,” Schmidt said. “It’s insane.”

Schmidt’s points about software are largely in anticipation of the DOD’s need to more rapidly adopt AI.

“AI is a force multiplier like you’ve never seen before,” said Schmidt, who spent several years as chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. “It sees patterns that no human can see. And all interesting future military decisions will have as part of that an AI assistant.”

Still, the same cultural and resourcing challenges remain, Schmidt said, urging for more attention to this space.

“To be very blunt, you don’t have enough people. You don’t have the right contractors. And you don’t have the right strategy to fill in this,” he said. And while the DOD has fought tough battles to stand up the AI resources it currently has, like the Joint AI Center, that’s not nearly enough. “We need 20, 30, 40 such groups, more and more. And as that transformation happens, the people who work for you, the incredibly courageous people will have so much more powerful tools.”

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William Streilein, a staff member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, has joined the JAIC to fill Mulchandani’s vacancy.

A Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, Mulchandani took the CTO role in June 2019, about a year after the JAIC was created. He also served as interim director after Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the JAIC’s first leader, left the team in mid-2020.

“Nand Mulchandani has been an extraordinary patriot, technologist and friend. As a serial-entrepreneur, his expertise in systems implementation and application brought a welcome set of perspectives and connections that have really accelerated the department’s efforts,” Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the JAIC, said in a statement. “His passion for technology, industry understanding, and business acumen helped to mature the JAIC from a nascent organization to one that supported COVID response, wildfire suppression, autonomy platforms and a wide range of capabilities. Nand is a true patriot, stepping in to join the JAIC with a focus on ‘giving back’ to our warriors.”

During his time at the JAIC, Mulchandani also played a part in scaling the JAIC from a small office in the Pentagon to a larger organization, now under the leadership of the Department of Defense’s newly installed chief digital and AI officer. 

“I’m glad to see the ‘startup’ JAIC transformed into the CDAO, which is part of the normal journey for any great technology organization, and happy that the Department is starting to embrace the power of technology to transform the way it operates and to retain our competitive edge,” Mulchandani wrote on LinkedIn. “While there is no question we have some big challenges ahead of us, I don’t think we have ‘lost’ the race to peer competitors.”

In his leadership roles at the JAIC, Mulchandani spoke frequently about injecting responsibility and ethics into AI, the importance of public-private partnerships in developing AI and how critical the technology will be to the future of combat.

Mulchandani is leaving the door open for a possible return to public service later down the road, he said. “There is a strong chance that I might pop back up in another part of the US Government focused on national security and technology, and hope to share that news soon. Given everything going on in the world today and where things are headed, I don’t want to be sitting this one out.”

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The most recent cohort of participants started taking an “AI 101” course in early February through a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while another recently entered an AI coding bootcamp. The range of educational offerings from the AI-accelerator is designed to eventually be transitioned to other DOD institutions for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people to learn about AI, Greg Allen, the JAIC’s head of policy and strategy, told FedScoop.

“We are running training pilots to really test,” Allen said. “We partner with the broader department of defense … to help them deliver education materiel at scale.”

Allen added that “ultimately there is going to be hundreds of thousands of folks” getting some form of AI training, out of the DOD’s nearly 3 million employees and service members.

The work stems from a congressional mandate for the JAIC to develop an AI workforce and education strategy in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The JAIC is now implementing that strategy through educational pilots, Allen said.

In that strategy, the JAIC identified six archetypes of AI learner: Lead AI, Drive AI, Create AI, Employ AI, Facilitate AI and Embed AI. Each type of DOD employee needs a different level of detail on AI, so the JAIC is leaning on different platforms to teach them.

For general and flag officers at the highest ranks of the military, Lead AI is an in-person seminar on the basics of what AI can do and how it will impact the capabilities they oversee. On the other end of the spectrum is Create AI, a group of coders that will be developing machine learning models for the military and need specialized training in developing machine learning models.

One of the adjustments the JAIC has made to its offerings for the Create AI category is a new coding bootcamp on the Python coding language that is often used to develop AI.

“These are folks who actually need all the skills to meet their current and future operational needs,” Allen said.

By 2023 the JAIC hopes to have all these lesson plans transitioned to other organizations, like the Defense Acquisition University or the Air Force’s Digital University.

“The No. 1 thing that brings the most joy to us is when we hear back from past participants … they put what they learned to practice in their jobs,” Allen said.

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