Developed by Ask Sage, the generative AI platform will be implemented onto the Army’s cloud environment known as cArmy. According to a company press release, the capability leverages Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI — a suite of artificial intelligence services that allows users to apply OpenAI models onto preexisting data. The platform will be available to users up to an Impact Level 5 environment often used for highly sensitive military information, according to the firm.

“It’s a great privilege to bring Generative AI to the cARMY cloud at IL5, where it is the most needed, and where leaders have been truly visionary in their focus on tangible, secure use cases for the technology,” Ask Sage CEO Nic Chaillan said in a statement. “The announcement is just the beginning of Generative AI’s momentum in the DoD — dozens of defense and civilian agencies are set to follow the U.S. Army’s lead and accelerate their Generative AI adoption.”

Generative AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on. The Army’s deployment of the tool will begin with 400 new user accounts, with a goal to expand to enterprise-wide use, according to Ask Sage.

Organizations across the Defense Department continue to experiment with and adopt these types of capabilities, ranging from day-to-day to tactical operations. Recently, the Air Force launched its own experimental chatbot powered by generative AI — dubbed NIPRGPT — as a way to test the technology on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet).

The Army’s integration of generative AI in its cloud environment comes just after the service issued a new directive in June on how the service should develop, deploy and use large language models. Signed by Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga, the memorandum provides guidance to military personnel and generative AI developers on how they should use the emerging technology, as well as the potential risks in doing so.

“Gen AI tools have been widely adopted due to their high performance and ease of use. However, they also present unique challenges in terms of data privacy, security, and control over the generated content. Therefore, their use should be carefully evaluated and monitored,” the directive stated.

The Army has also been improving its cloud environment and recently introduced a new version of the infrastructure in response to demand for more cloud services. Known as cArmy 2.0, the follow-on capability looks to integrate new features made possible by recent cloud modernization efforts and introduce automation and simplicity into the environment.

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The new version of the Army’s cloud services infrastructure — dubbed cArmy 2.0 — aims to build upon the foundations of recent cloud modernization efforts and make key improvements to them, Army CIO Leonel Garciga said Tuesday during a webinar broadcasted by Federal News Network.

A new landing zone for cArmy 2.0 will be available in April, he said.

The move to the revamped environment comes after the Army took a “tactical pause” over the last couple of months to reevaluate its cloud delivery model, he noted.

“Like most traditional folks in enterprise’s big move to the cloud, we raced in some areas, we made some mistakes, we did some things that made sense at the time that don’t make as much sense now,” Garciga said. “And as new cloud services have become available in the regions across all of our [cybersecurity service providers], it’s really caused us to rethink some of the technical work that’s been done.”

As part of a larger push across the Defense Department to embrace the cloud, the Army stood up its Enterprise Cloud Management Office (ECMO) in 2019 and introduced cArmy the following year. According to the service, cArmy is a multi- and hybrid-cloud ecosystem that provides tenants with common cloud shared services in a secure ecosystem. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure currently serve as services providers for the cloud environment.

After evaluating how cArmy has performed over the last three years, the Army wants the follow-on version to offer more agility for users — especially as the department continues to experience more demand for cloud services.

Garciga said a key goal for cArmy 2.0 is to introduce automation and simplicity into the cloud architecture to improve overall delivery.

“Those core services that tenants are receiving are going to be way easier to execute moving forward, as opposed to right now where it’s a little clunky,” he said.

The Army also wants to use automation to streamline onboarding services for new customers, as well as making sure to provide as much critical information to users as soon as possible, Garciga noted.

“What does the environment look like? What do our images look like? What baseline managed services are we delivering as an Army to you, the tenant? Getting that out is hugely important,” Garciga said. “Our focus is going to be making sure that we make that available to all the folks that are coming into the environment.”

In addition, cArmy 2.0 will focus on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud deployments — rather than infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Doing so reduces the overall delivery timeframe, he said.

Along with the new version of cArmy, Garciga also emphasized that his department is still embracing the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) as it pivots away from using the Army’s own cloud service provider reseller, known as Cloud Account Management Optimization (CAMO). At the moment, the Army has two contracts moving through the JWCC pipeline, he said.

“We continue to use this mix of [Commercial Cloud Enterprise] on the intel side and for some workloads, and definitely CAMO for unclassified workloads and our existing workloads as we really get that footprint set up in JWCC,” Garciga said.

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“We got to be careful about not overcomplicating something. I’d push back on the notion of tactical cloud, because, again, where we don’t want to look at things is strategic, operational and tactical,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, said at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia chapter’s Army IT Day conference on Thursday. “We want to look at a hybrid cloud architecture that includes our tactical formations that are deployed, right, that allows us to leverage the power of the cloud. But really the implementation of cloud capabilities and all that comes with the security and the benefits and the operational benefits you get from containerization and virtualization, etc., right? That’s what we want to get after.”

The Army is pursuing a multi-cloud, multi-vendor hybrid approach. Moreover, its unified network concept stresses the need for a single global network eschewing the paradigm of years past of a theater-centric network that was bifurcated between the enterprise and tactical spheres.

“We have a very well thought out strategy that is premised on a hybrid, multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment. And the Army’s global cloud in cARMY is the foundation of our digital transformation that enables, in many ways, that seamless data sharing between tactical and enterprise system — promoting interoperability by sharing common services and of course, reducing the time that is required to develop software solutions that are needed by our warfighters,” Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo said at the AFCEA event.

The Army plans to invest over $290 million in cloud migration over the next year, he noted.

Morrison explained that there is a tactical implementation that the Army has to flesh out.

“The work that we must do from an Army perspective are what are those key capabilities that we want to maintain on-prem, I’ll say. And on-prem can be whether we’re doing it at the strategic and operational levels back in garrison, or on-prem could be what we’re keeping in a cloud environment is in the tactical space,” he said. “We’ve got to work our way through that and quite frankly, that’s a journey we’re just beginning.”

The Army doesn’t want to put all of its data in one place where the adversary can disrupt it.

“We, the United States Army, are not going to push all those capabilities into the cloud and go, ‘We’re now going to go into a contested and congested environment and we’re going to rely on everything that’s up in the cloud.’ There’s got to be that balance and that balance is what we’re trying to strike,” Morrison said.

The balance includes what needs to be resident in the command post at echelon, he said, adding that the days of pushing everything to a brigade combat team are long gone.

The Army must have a smart layering of capabilities and data at echelon, which it is working through.

“As you do that layering, quite frankly, we pushed masses of bodies down into the BCTs to aligned all the capabilities we had pushed down. As we raise that complexity up, we’ve got to go back in and rebalance the people so we aligned them appropriate against where the complexity and the capabilities really reside,” he said.

Exercises such as Project Convergence and others in the Pacific, along with operations, have demonstrated the hybrid cloud architecture as the end goal for the Army, Morrison said.

“We’re starting pretty pragmatically. We’re going to focus on the corps is that integrator for the joint fight from an Army perspective and figure out what that looks like,” he said. “Then we’re going to enable the division to really be that unit of action and enabled division maneuver. And then we’ll figure out what the lower echelons need. But the capabilities and the complexities have got to be layered appropriately.”

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