Title: Department of Defense Efforts to Acquire Artificial Intelligence 

Description: Artificial intelligence could transform national defense
and security. The Department of Defense has designated it a top priority
in its modernization efforts. What are DOD's plans to gain AI technology
and capabilities? We'll learn more from GAO's Jon Ludwigson.

Related GAO Work: GAO-23-105850, Artificial Intelligence: DOD Needs
Department-wide Guidance to Inform Acquisitions 

Released: June 2023

[Music]

[Jon Ludwigson:] AI is a very important capability. It offers a great
deal of promise. The challenge is that developing AI is hard.

[Holly Hobbs:] Hi, and welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report. Your source for
fact based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office. I' m your host, Holly Hobbs. Artificial
intelligence could transform national defense and security. So much so
that the Department of Defense has designated it a top priority in its
modernization efforts. So what are DOD's plans to gain AI technology and
capabilities? We'll learn more from GAO's Jon Ludwigson, an expert on
defense modernization and acquisitions. Thanks for joining us.

[Jon Ludwigson:] Thank you for having me.

[Holly Hobbs:] So Jon, maybe we can start with a basic question. Why is
artificial intelligence so important to national defense? 

[Jon Ludwigson:] One of the great opportunities is that eventually AI
can do things faster than people can do them, because it gets very good
at identifying data from routine data streams. So when you look at what
DOD has to do in protecting the nation, pursuing national interests,
those kinds of things, sometimes information is available in great
quantities. You would have to deploy thousands of personnel in order to
cull through imagery or a recording in order to identify the object of
interest. Whereas the computer through AI can do that very, very
quickly, and provide that information to decision makers in the
Department of Defense or the President to make key decisions in real
time.

[Holly Hobbs:] What's sort of the current status of AI in national
defense?  

[Jon Ludwigson:] DOD has made investments over the years to try to
develop the capability to have machines do things that currently
soldiers, sailors, airmen and guardians are tasked with doing. Things
like examining photographs, pictures taken from a variety of conditions,
allowing them to identify objects of interest, say identifying a tank
from a picture of the forest from above. And that can be very helpful
because that means that you don't have to have allocated a precious
soldier, sailor, airman or guardian to do that task and frees them up to
do something else that only people can do.

[Holly Hobbs:] We've looked at DOD's efforts to acquire more AI
technology, and some of the challenges for DOD. What did we find? 

[Jon Ludwigson:] I think one of the challenges with acquiring AI is it
is quintessentially different than building a tank or a ship or a
satellite. Those kinds of things are difficult, don't get me wrong.
Building any of those things is hard, and we have specific processes for
doing that. But we've got more experience doing it. AI is more similar
to developing software, except it's more complex. And so what we've
tried to do is to help DOD identify ways that they can get better at
developing AI. The challenge with AI is you are writing software that
does a thing, but then you're also have to recognize that AI is about
learning to do it better. So the initial task set out for AI is to
identify a tank in the forest. But in order to do that, you'd need to
write the code to identify a tank, and then show it a lot of pictures of
tanks. It's that data, learning from the data on -- yes, that's a tank;
no, that's a car-- kind of an experience that the AI has to go through.
But once it gets in place, the AI can get better and better and better
at identifying tanks in a variety of different scenarios.

[Holly Hobbs:] How does DOD's efforts compare to what we might see when
private entities or companies try to buy AI? 

[Jon Ludwigson:] Private companies are also trying to figure out how to
do things, have AI do things that that they have people currently doing.
Things like examining records or identifying potentially nefarious
transactions in bank records, those kinds of things. So private
companies have developed a toolkit for applying AI to some of these
situations. We identified a number of different processes that private
companies go through, including things--like understanding the mission
need, developing a business case, tailoring the acquisition approach,
and a couple of others --that we think can be very helpful for DOD when
it goes to develop and acquire AI, because the process of acquiring the
technology is going to be somewhat similar. Private companies, for
example, are very concerned in making sure that the intellectual
property is clearly outlined in the contracts that they enter into so
that they don't get bound to a single vendor, or they don't give all
their data to the vendor, and then the data is no longer theirs to use.
Those kinds of things are very important for the Department of Defense.

{Music}

[Holly Hobbs:] So Jon just told us that Artificial Intelligence is
important because it could be potentially transformative to national
defense efforts. And that the DOD could use lessons learn from the
private sector to improve its own acquisition efforts. So Jon, moving
forward, what more do we think DOD and the military departments could be
doing to improve their AI acquisition efforts?

[Jon Ludwigson:] We think that DOD can harvest some of the lessons from
these private companies and use that to develop DOD-wide guidance and
some guidance at the service level in order to help position DOD to be
more successful in acquiring AI that does what it needs at a reasonable
cost. So the recommendation that we end up making is that DOD should
develop AI acquisition guidance and that the services should develop
guidance for acquiring AI within each service, because each service is a
little different in the acquisition process is specifically delegated to
the services.

[Holly Hobbs:] And last question, what's the bottom line of this report?

[Jon Ludwigson:] AI is a very important capability, it offers a great
deal of promise. The challenge is that developing AI is hard. So
acquiring that capability--being able to have it, and then also being
able to consistently have access to it at a reasonable cost--is really
center for us. And we think that the department can harvest those
lessons from the private sector in developing reasonable guidance so
that they can be in a better position long term. 

[Holly Hobbs:] That was John Ludwigson talking about GAO's new report on
DOD's artificial intelligence acquisition plans. Thanks for your time,
Jon.

[Jon Ludwigson:] Thank you, Holly. I appreciate the time today.

[Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog report. To
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