DoD CIO Dana Deasy (left) and the director of the Joint AI Center, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan (right), speak to reporters.

WASHINGTON: A congressionally mandated study warns the Defense Departments current efforts to harness artificial intelligence are significantly challenged by shortfalls in organization, planning, data, and talent, and testing, setting the stage for changes in the next defense policy and spending bills.

The problems RAND identified include a major mismatch between the sweeping responsibilities assigned to the year-old Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and its authority to achieve them, making it exceedingly difficult for the JAIC to succeed. To solve the problem, the RAND reports central recommendation is to strengthen the JAIC a recommendation Congress is now certain to at least consider next year as it drafts the 2021 defense bill.

A word of caution. Its the Joint AI Center director, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who hired RAND to do the report in the first place. (Congress required him to submit a report, but it didnt dictate who should write it). While RAND is highly respected for its independent, in-depth scholarship, its not known for challenging the fundamental premises of the questions the Defense Department asks.

How much AI spending is there for JAIC to coordinate, anyway? Thats actually a tricky question. The long-delayed 2020 appropriations bill last night includes unspecified significant investments [in] artificial intelligence, but weve not seen a specific figure. Any number would be an estimate anyway. AI spending is scattered across the Defense Department under a host of different terms and is often buried in larger projects.

The RAND report includes an annex digging through the 2020 budget, but its not available to the public. The only figure the public version gives for AI-specific activity is $15 million 0.002 percent of the DoD budget. But that doesnt include any AI work done as part of a larger program, such as a weapons system, cloud computing contract, or business software. DoD budgets do not account for AI when it is a small part of a larger platform, RAND says, making it hard to track overall spending.

Strengthening the Joint AI Center

There is evidence to support that DoD has taken the right approach in establishing the JAIC as a centralized focal point for DoDs AI strategy, says the RAND study, released this morning, [but] DoD failed to provide the JAIC with visibility, authorities, and resource commitments, making it exceedingly difficult for the JAIC to succeed in its assigned mandate.

Now, the RAND report doesnt include one recent reform that postdates its drafting. In October, Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist officially designated the JAIC director as senior official with primary responsibilities for the coordination of activities related to the development and demonstration of AI and machine learning, working in tandem with R&D undersecretary Mike Griffins technical director for AI research and development. Its far from clear what this new role actually involves, but JAIC and the R&D shop are supposed to provide an implementation plan by April 2nd.

Even this doesnt give JAIC any authority to control AI spending across the military. The AI center can only provide guidance to the services, not direction.

One option RAND recommends to shore up the Joint AI Center, part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is to give JAIC new legal authorities over budgeting and personnel in the four armed services. But the report admits this would require Congress to pass legislation increasing the power of OSD over the services acquisition programs, reversing the Hills recent efforts to decentralize authority back to the service chiefs.

Brig. Gen. Matthew Easley, director of the Armys Artificial Intelligence Task Force

RANDs alternative plan, cut down to fit within the limits of the current law, would strengthen the existing AI efforts in each of the services of which the Armys AI Task Force is the most developed and bring their chiefs together on a DoD-wide council, chaired but not controlled by the JAIC director.

In either case, RAND recommends JAIC and the services replace their current vague aspirations with clear five-year plans, complete with unambiguous measures of success or failure to judge them against. It also urges Defense Department leadership and the JAIC itself to figure out what the AI Centers mission really is and make that clear to a confused workforce.

In 102 interviews conducted between April and August 59 officials from DoD, nine from other federal agencies, 25 from industry, and nine academics we noted a lack of clarity among our interviewees on the JAICs mandate, roles, and activities[,] how it fits within the broader DoD ecosystem and how it connects to the services and their efforts, RAND said. It points to a lack of clarity about the raison dtre of the JAIC The confusion might not be entirely on the part of the audience. DoD needs to have a clearer view of what it wants the JAIC to be.

Major Recommendations

The RAND reports recommendations go well beyond reorganization. In particular, the report raises major concerns about how the Defense Department handles its data, its human capital, and its test programs to assure AI actually works as advertised. Some key excerpts (emphasis ours) and yes, RAND is pedantic enough to consistently use data as a plural:

Ultimately, the RAND report believes that the Defense Department can make major advances in AI, but it has to be realistic about how long that will take. Business-style enterprise applications like finance, personnel, and data management will be feasible much sooner than operational AI capable of handling the chaos and ambiguity of actual combat. As a rule of thumb, RAND says, investments made starting today can be expected to yield at-scale deployment in the near term for enterprise AI, in the middle term for most mission-support AI, and in the long term for most operational AI.

Shanahans boss, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, welcomed RANDs report as a thorough and thoughtful critique to be considered along with recent recommendations from the Defense Innovation Board and theNational Security Commission on AI.

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