Anastasia Obis<\/a><\/p>\n\n April 13, 2026 6:29 pm <\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
When Defense Department officials reviewed the state of AI inside the Defense Intelligence Agency in\u00a02024, they found a problem the government is too familiar with \u2014 while numerous AI initiatives were underway, most efforts were siloed, bespoke and impossible to scale across the enterprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also had an inspector general report at the time that had done an investigation under the hood, as well as where we were at. I went back to [then-DIA Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse], and I told him I don\u2019t think we\u2019re aligned correctly and we\u2019re at risk \u2014 if we don\u2019t get this right \u2014 of driving ourselves into irrelevance in a short period of time,\u201d Maj. Gen. Robert Kinney, DIA\u2019s chief AI officer, said on April 9 during Special Competitive Studies Project\u2019s ai+intelligence conference.<\/p>\n
The review\u2019s findings prompted DIA to launch a one-year initiative known as Task Force Sabre to provide the agency with \u201cfoundational, enterprise-wide AI capabilities while accelerating adoption.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The task force consisted of roughly two dozen personnel organized into cross-functional teams focused on capability delivery, governance, planning and programming, partnerships and workforce training.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOne of the things we wanted to prove was that not only that DIA was in business, and it wasn\u2019t just for DIA. We wanted to do this for the nation, for the warfighters, for the people at the edge that are doing the war fighting for us,\u201d Kinney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sabre leveraged Other Transaction Authority, or OTA, an increasingly popular contracting tool across the Defense Department and other agencies used to quickly move innovative technologies into production \u2014 something DIA had never used before.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the past year, the task force has executed six OTAs. In one case, the process moved from request for information to contract award in just 40 days.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only did we want to demonstrate to the building and the organization that we can move quickly, we wanted to demonstrate outward as well,\u201d Kinney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re partnered with some other entities that advertise that we can go even more quickly than that, so we\u2019re serious about staying ahead. The thing that I talk to the team about \u2026 is I want you to move like somebody\u2019s on your heels and they\u2019re about ready to eat you,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Building on the lessons from Task Force Sabre, DIA stood up a permanent \u201chub-and-spoke\u201d organization in March called the Digital Modernization Accelerator, or DMA \u2014 also known as the \u201cMaverick Accelerator\u201d \u2014 to scale AI across the agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis accelerator is larger than Task Force Sabre, it\u2019s part of the official organization. We\u2019re building it out as we speak. It\u2019s just a few weeks in inception. it\u2019s a little more difficult in some ways because with a task force, we could move out quickly, get around a lot of processes. When you start becoming part of a formal organization, it gets a little more difficult to do some of those things,\u201d Kinney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The centralized hub oversees governance, funding and technical expertise, while mission-focused teams across directorates and combatant commands identify and develop use cases aligned with operational needs.<\/p>\n
The agency already has several AI capabilities in the pipeline, including \u201cChatDIA,\u201d its first large language model deployed on the top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System network. The tool has already \u201csaved hundreds of hours,\u201d according to Kinney. \u201cI could say that authoritatively.\u201d<\/p>\n
DIA\u2019s next goal is implementing agentic AI. \u201cOur intention is to take the applications we\u2019re building, tie them together and build agents\u2026 I would say that we\u2019re moving very rapidly towards the deployment of agents within the classified fabric,\u201d Kinney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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