The Space Between Program Offices and AI Tinkerers
While it’s important for officers to earn their master’s degrees in AI from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), it’s also crucial that the rest of the Marines workforce familiarizes itself with the technology. Soldiers don’t need to understand the algorithms underpinning a deep learning neural network, but they should know how to tinker with AI capabilities.
“We aren’t going to compete with the program office that needs to focus on enterprise capabilities,” Clark said. “We need to focus on the area that is potentially disposable code, disposable analytics that is going to be adaptable on the battlefield, and have those Marines embedded within the mission space to be able to understand those mission problems, make code in an agile manner, use it and move on to the next objective.”
These are the problems DXTs are focused on, though many of the workforce parts remain missing, Clark said.
To that end, NPS and the Air Force partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an AI fellowship, where Marines spend five months gaining experience and skills working on a project approved by a senior officer. The first fellows projects included one building AI agents to automate significant portions of the acquisition process, with the first class that graduated in mid-January considered a “huge success,” Clark said.
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“Now that we have these teams, how do we build those talent pipelines?” Clark said.
Talent also needs to be placed appropriately within fleets after receiving training from, say, the U.S. Marine Corps Software Factory, Clark said.
Humans on the AI Loop, Not in It
Fortunately, the Marines are seeing a lot of AI buy-in from senior leaders and general officers, who are positioned to advocate for further infrastructure and workforce needs, which in turn improve talent retention, Clark said.
Part of this is because the Navy has identified five areas where AI is boosting the speed at which it learns from data and adapts: system updates, system use, strategy and operational planning, training and exercises, and emergent capability development, said Stuart Wagner, the Navy’s chief data and AI officer.
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