Last year, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll brought together roughly 20 top executives from some of the nation\u2019s leading technology and industrial companies to help the service identify how industry could best support the Army\u2019s push to advance some of its critical artificial intelligence initiatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Army presented industry with a series of operational scenarios, asking companies how they would address the Army\u2019s key challenges in those areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of them really distill down into how do we become more data-centric and reduce cognitive load on operational formations, particularly in priority theaters, where low bandwidth or denied environments are going to be a problem in a large-scale combat scenario,\u201d Deputy Under Secretary of the Army David Fitzgerald told Federal News Network.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do we solve the tyranny of distance in the digital space? That\u2019s where a lot of the vignettes focus \u2014 they were at a classified level, but that\u2019s largely what we were looking at: How do we improve the speed of decision making, reduce cognitive loads on our warfighters through the introduction of best-of-class, frontier-type AI capabilities,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
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Out of that tabletop exercise at the Pentagon came the Army\u2019s Rapid Implementation of Artificial Intelligence initiative, or ARIA, which is organized around three main efforts \u2014 developing a \u201cmodel armory\u201d to deliver AI tools to soldiers at the tactical edge, integrating AI into the Army\u2019s complex planning, programming, budgeting and execution (PPBE) process, and creating a digital twin of the service\u2019s industrial base to enable a more efficient, AI-driven supply chain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
About 20 companies participated in the exercise, and while most remain involved in some capacity, roughly 11 companies are deeply involved in the initiative\u2019s lines of effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of them are unique to one use case. Several of them are cross-cutting. But even the ones that didn\u2019t have a role or a niche on one of the use case teams, a lot of them are helping through enterprise advisory, they\u2019re sort of helping self-organize and syndicate the industry partners,\u201d Fitzgerald said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Automating PPBE process<\/p>\n
Team Gray, led by Col. Patrick Workman, seeks to identify the elements of the PPBE process that are easiest to automate with AI now, while also laying the groundwork for more advanced capabilities in the future. One of the biggest challenges, Fitzgerald said, is the Army\u2019s state of data \u2014 many business systems remain siloed, outdated and reliant on manual data entry. As a result, the service had to spend a lot of time cleaning up its data before starting to leverage AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe needed to move those databases around, collapse some business systems into a cloud-based environment that AI could actually access. And that resulted in a kind of peripheral benefit of sunsetting a number of legacy systems, which has already saved us several million dollars, and we\u2019re retiring 33 more systems, converging another 12, and that consolidation is going to save close to $100 million in fiscal 2026 and about another $70 million in 2027. So this is an exercise that\u2019s kind of self-funding in many respects,\u201d Fitzgerald said.<\/p>\n
Beyond fixing its underlying data, the Army is also trying to address one of the most difficult parts of the PPBE process \u2014 while service officials can see how funds are allocated, they often lack visibility into why those decisions were made or what impact those decisions may have across the force.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Team Gray is working to change that by developing tools that allow senior leaders to quickly run \u201cwhat if\u201d scenarios \u2014 for instance, how changes in end strength could impact munitions purchasing capability. Right now, that kind of analysis is done manually and can take weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cOne vignette of how this has already been utilized is we were able to look at the Army activities and resourcing at one of our contingency locations in Africa to help inform basing decisions. And we did a comparison where we used the AI tool, and it was able to pull that information within a few minutes. By comparison, that took three resource managers and about two weeks to pull the same information, and the results were very similar. The AI was probably a little more accurate in the ultimate analysis. I think that was a real selling point to the enterprise,\u201d Fitzgerald said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Model Armory\u2019<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Team Black looks to deliver AI capabilities directly to soldiers at the tactical edge through a \u201cmodel armory\u201d \u2014 a shared library of tools that troops can access on demand and tailor to specific missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can think of it as an arms room where you go and draw out the weapon that you need,\u201d Fitzgerald said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, a user can request a computer vision model that\u2019s seeking specific friendly or enemy vehicle signatures in a particular operating region with current weather conditions to get better results. And then that model continues to be hosted in that armory so other units can kind of use the best of breed and then tailor for their specific operational requirements,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
WebAI, one of the participating companies, for instance, is helping provide the infrastructure needed to assess the effectiveness of AI models and deliver them to users in the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the biggest challenges is that the cloud over the last 30 years has become the repository for everything. When you don\u2019t have access to the cloud, all of the orchestration services for cloud capabilities are really good in the cloud, but they don\u2019t scale well to the edge. So the ability for us to provide cloud-like services to support things like model orchestration, agentic workflows in denied environments, peer to peer, requires the build out of a totally different network that allows for different topology by which to share and build applications, share and distribute or receive data. The backend infrastructure of this is actually fairly complex, and it doesn\u2019t really exist broadly today in the military or the commercial market,\u201d Jason Rathje, webAI\u2019s president of public sector, told Federal News Network.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat scales well in the cloud does not scale well in the edge. And so you need something that\u2019s built for the edge. Now, the great thing now is that once you can figure out that problem set, it does scale well back up to the cloud,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Transforming supply chain management\u00a0<\/p>\n
Team Yellowstone, led by Col. Matt Alexander, is focused on using artificial intelligence to transform the Army\u2019s supply chain and modernize its aging industrial base by building a digital twin of operations, beginning at Anniston Army Depot. Many of the service\u2019s depots still rely on outdated, manual processes that limit visibility into parts and maintenance needs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The effort aims to organize that data to create a real-time picture of supply and demand, allowing the Army to improve visibility, reduce bottlenecks and make faster \u201cmake or buy\u201d decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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While each team is at a different stage, the effort is being executed in phases, and the teams are expected to deliver full capability within a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere do we go from here? We think of it as sort of sequels and branches, and the sequel is each of those three lines of effort should in a future state, kind of converge into one overlapping effort,\u201d Fitzgerald said.<\/p>\n
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