Pacific Commanders: We Need AI to Speed up Decision-Making

Honolulu — U.S. Pacific Forces commanders see artificial intelligence as a revolutionary technology to transform the speed in which they can make decisions.

Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Stephen Koehler told an audience of military and industry leaders at the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference that the pursuit of AI to help his commanders make faster decisions is one of his North Stars when it comes to his priorities.

Indo-Pacific IT leaders in the command agreed at the conference and repeatedly urged the command to prioritize building the foundational elements to harness advances discovered in the commercial sector.

“I think easily the most disruptive technology that we have in our way is artificial intelligence. It is simply impossible for a theater this size and commanders with the areas that they cover to be able to do it the old way,” said Marine Col. Jared Voneida, C4 operations division chief at Indo-Pacific Command J63. “We need to leverage technology in order to speed up our decision cycle.”

AI Sports Car

Veoneida said the U.S. military must see AI as a sports car.

“If you look at AI, machine learning as kind of a sports car, you need to have big, flat, smooth roads with minimal stoplights on them so we can drive fast on it. That’s our transport layer,” he said.

He compared data to the fuel for the car. What makes that fuel premium is standardization.

“That data needs to be standardized, tagged and accessible,” Voneida said. “I don’t want an electric charging station here, diesel here, unleaded here, I’m not understanding how to fill up my sports car. I want access to that data, and I want it to have a fast road to drive on.”

In combat, Indo-Pacific leaders warned that transmitting that data across services and allies will require security and speed to take advantage of AI’s potential. Multiple leaders urged the command to move to a zero trust environment as fast as possible to ease sharing in data centric environments.

Voneida warned that the bandwidth requirements will swell significantly at times of combat forcing the command to ensure data transport is streamlined now.

“We’re just at the beginning stages of really, truly leveraging AI, and that’s going to move a lot of data around this theater,” he said. “We need to have room to grow into that capability and make sure that we are not constrained by those pipes in times of conflict.”

A common theme at the conference has been improving command-and-control amidst the wave of new technologies entering the command, especially unmanned systems and AI. Marine Col. Toby Hlad, commander of Defense Information Systems Regional Field Command Pacific (DISA PAC), pointed out that America’s next war will likely be different than Iraq and Afghanistan and that the U.S. needs to prepare for it, especially if that conflict occurs in the Pacific.

“All of that in the vein of speeding up our decision cycle using artificial intelligence. I think that’s clearly what we’re doing,” Hlad said. “This next battle will be fought on our network because, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, our commanders cannot go out and see the fight.”