U.S. Department of Defense plans workforce to be AI Ready by 2025

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) is outlining its path to becoming “AI ready” by 2025, according to the U.S. Government and Accountability Office (GAO). The office seeks to ensure the U.S. military is sufficiently staffed and skilled with artificial intelligence experts to “outcompete adversaries like China and defend against artificial intelligence-enabled threats”, reports DefenseScoop.

The one problem: the GAO is sounding the alarm that they do not have sufficient data on its current workforce to understand what the current or future state of its staff needs to be.

Now, the GAO is urging the Pentagon to clearly define and identify its AI workforce to meet a deadline just over a year away. The Pentagon must understand the current baseline of its existing workforce for AI and emerging technology expertise. Then, work to implement and fill any gaps across branches and agencies—otherwise, implementation could potentially vary drastically across components.

“Since 2018, DOD has made organizational changes and is investing billions of dollars to incorporate AI technology into its operations. The Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) and other staff offices within the Office of the Secretary of Defense have taken some steps to define and identify DOD’s AI workforce. However, the DOD has not formally assigned responsibility and does not have a timeline for completing the additional steps required to fully define and identify its AI workforce, such as coding the work roles in various workforce data systems, developing a qualification program, updating workforce guidance, and any other actions DOD may identify,” officials wrote in the GAO report.

DOD Pursuing Semi-Autonomous and Autonomous AI Capabilities

As modern warfare continues to evolve and the use of drones, satellite reconnaissance, and multi-domain attacks (air, sea, land, space, and cyber) proliferate, the DOD is looking to push the envelope forward.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) explicitly required the GAO to review the DOD’s AI workforce initiatives. The latest report from the GAO outlines the DOD’s intent to pursue AI capabilities for warfighting that largely focus on recognizing targets through reconnaissance and surveillance analysis, providing recommendations to operators on the battlefield, and increasing the autonomy of uncrewed systems.

The GAO is recommending that the CDAO “assigns responsibility to complete the additional steps necessary to fully define and identify the DOD’s AI workforce,” and establish a clear timeline for the effort.

The Pentagon has reportedly agreed to the recommendations made by the GAO of its AI workforce efforts, with explicit revisions.

The overall effort is in conjunction with DOD strategic programs such as Replicator which seek to build, deploy, and sustain thousands of autonomous systems in multiple domains within the next 2 years to deter and counter China.

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, the calls for a “strategic pause” in artificial intelligence are over.