New Tech Means New Acquisition Strategies for DoD

With more and more battles being fought in cyberspace, the pace of warfare has accelerated. However, the systems that support our warfighter were not designed to support the speed or types of products and services needed for modern defense. This year's AFCEA West Conference is focused on ensuring acquisition and readiness are on pace to meet global security demands. Ensuring our warfighters get the tools they need when they need them is a critical effort requiring evolution and reform of defense acquisition.

Improved Private Sector Coordination

A congressional hearing in late 2023 discussed the need for the Department of Defense (DoD) to tap into the innovation taking place in the private sector to stay competitive with global adversaries. A draft of the national defense industrial strategy stated that the defense industrial base "does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale." Continue reading

DoD’s Efforts to Make Emerging Technology Established Technology

The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) shift from a focus on counterterrorism to one of near-peer rivals has highlighted the need to incorporate emerging technologies into the DoD faster than ever before. To keep up with the technological advances of peer nations, it is critical that the DoD speed the time to the field of technologies that can give our troops an advantage in terms of intelligence, data sharing, and visibility. But in this need for speed, the security and the reliability of these solutions cannot be ignored.

DoD is successfully striking the balance of speed, innovation, and reliability with several recent implementations of emerging technology. Continue reading

The Government Case for Generative AI

Generative AI is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that produces content. That could be a story, an image, or an audio file, and is a shift from traditional AI usage, which is focused on completing a task based on predefined rules. Generative AI utilizes existing data to produce this new content based on a prompt such as "write a blog post on government use of generative AI." Disclaimer: generative AI was not used in the creation of this blog post.

Balancing Act of Generative AI

Like traditional AI, generative AI holds great promise for automating highly manual tasks in many areas of government. A recent report found that three-fourths of agency leaders said their agencies have already begun establishing teams to assess the impact of generative AI and are planning to implement initial applications in the coming months. Continue reading

Ensuring Equity in AI

Improving equity for citizens is a key goal of the Biden Administration. At the same time, agencies across government are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to better use data for a variety of tasks and decision making. Seeing the increasing role of AI in day-to-day operations, the government is looking for ways to ensure that the technology is used fairly and safely without impinging on the innovation being felt by AI adoption in government.

AI as an Administration Focus

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a blueprint for a "Bill of Rights" to provide some guidelines for the development and use of AI in government. It details the roles various agencies need to play to ensure that AI tools align with privacy rights and civil liberties. Continue reading

Balancing AI’s Power with Privacy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has incredible potential to speed decision-making and unearth connections between data to inform government services and programs. AI is being implemented across government and private industry with very little policy or regulation as to its development or use. In many ways, this lack of oversight is driving exciting innovation, but as this innovation leads to new uses, the risks of infringing on citizen rights and privacy increase.

Peter Parker (Spiderman) was warned, "with great power comes great responsibility." Similarly, AI developers need a voice providing gentle guidance as they figure out how best to use AI's power for good. In the fall of 2022, the White House released the AI Bill of Rights, designed to address concerns about how, without some oversight, AI could lead to discrimination against minority groups and further systemic inequality. Continue reading