For Pentagon’s AI Programs, It’s Time for ‘Boots on the Ground’
By Shaun Waterman March 01, 2025
The Department of Defense (DoD) has shifted its focus to practical application of artificial intelligence (AI), moving beyond research and experimentation to prioritize real-world use cases. Recognizing both the opportunities and potential threats in the rapid global advancement of AI, the Pentagon is accelerating its implementation of these advanced capabilities.
Radha Plumb, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, announced the establishment of the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC) at the end of last year. This cell is designed to expedite the implementation of frontier and advanced AI capabilities throughout the department. The focus is on specific use cases and initiatives aimed at delivering advanced AI directly into the hands of warfighters. This approach will enable the DoD to capitalize on technologies like generative AI and invest in the foundational technologies needed for AI adoption across the department.
According to Plumb, deploying advanced technologies on the battlefield ahead of adversaries has provided the United States with a strategic advantage for decades. However, this superiority is now being challenged. “AI adoption by adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is accelerating and poses a significant national security risk,” she stated.
China, in particular, aims to replicate U.S. innovation and export it at subsidized prices that U.S. companies can’t match. Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President, in a recent blog post, highlighted the high stakes of this global competition. Derek Strausbaugh, senior director of the National Security Group at Microsoft, emphasized the need to ethically incorporate AI into critical path use cases without delay to maintain U.S. global superiority. “We are living in the age of AI. You can see the investments being made all over the world, by industry and both by our allies and our geopolitical competitors. We simply need to move faster with clear intent.”
Decision Advantage From the Front Lines to the Back Office
Strausbaugh noted that the AI RCC initiatives include both warfighting scenarios and enterprise management applications. Enterprise management utilizes lessons learned from commercial AI use in areas like logistics, financial management, and software development.
“Planning is one use case DoD has highlighted for the use of generative AI capabilities—incorporating both large language models (LLMs) as well as agentic orchestration of AI workflows,” Strausbaugh said. Generative AI can process vast amounts of external data, including news, weather information, social media and scientific papers to build foundational models. If these models are grounded in domain-specific data from internal communications and military systems, the model is better able to fine tune itself to assist analysts. This grounding allows for a more comprehensive framing of the planning process within the military information domain.
Strausbaugh added that, “If you’re talking about fully developing a complex planning or battle management scenario with all the pertinent information at our disposal and then trying to map out all the possible responses and countermeasures, no human can reasonably be expected to do that in an expeditious fashion.”
A grounded AI can provide human augmentation by generating draft plans for consideration by planners who can then use their insights and experience to build comprehensive plans. Combined with agentic orchestration, the AI planning system can become more responsive, accounting for the changing battlespace. Agents can independently assess new or changing data inputs and publish and collect potential orders. This function could be used to move beyond planning to distributed battle management. Every human planner and commander could then operate from the most current understanding of the battlespace.
Strausbaugh emphasized that these AI systems are designed to augment, not replace, human decision makers. “The planner makes the decisions, and in doing so, they can also provide feedback on the AI inputs that can be used to further improve the model in training and fine tuning,” he said. The AI RCC is also working on other enterprise or business system functions, such as software development and financial management.
Modern Infrastructure for AI
The long period of research has provided DoD customers with a sophisticated understanding of the infrastructure needed for AI operations. This, in turn, is driving a new wave of cloud migration. According to Strausbaugh, DoD customers are seeking to maximize the value of their data to create decision superiority and improve warfighter effectiveness.
In this “cloud 2.0” approach, data and applications are being migrated to the cloud to leverage specific data sets relevant to particular DoD missions. For example, by using data sets in logistics, the DoD hopes to enhance foundational LLMs and generate AI systems that increase productivity and speed up decision-making. “Customers come with sophisticated asks based very much on experimentation and some experience. How do we best organize our data to ensure it retains its value—particularly timely relevance? How do we best perform operations on that data so that it’s AI ready? And ultimately, do you have the right hardware for us to build and retrain models and run performant AI applications on?” Strausbaugh said.
Strausbaugh concluded that the DoD is at a critical juncture with AI. Public familiarity with services like ChatGPT has created interest and willingness within the department to explore how to best leverage these technologies. “I think there’s a shared consensus between industry and government that we should both automate the mundane in an effort to reduce the cognitive load on our warfighters and at the same time keep the human-in-the-loop and on-the-loop where generative and agentic AI systems can be an assistant to improving the speed, quality and accuracy of the decisions being made by our nation’s biggest asset, our people. There is an incredible opportunity and responsibility laid out before us.”
