During Thursday’s Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) questioned Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the Army, about artificial intelligence integration plans.
00:00Senator Tuberville. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, gentlemen.
00:04Congratulations on your recruiting. I know how hard that is in my form of profession,
00:08getting the right people. General, are we keeping our qualifications, discipline, values,
00:13physical requirements when we recruit these people? I think we, I definitely think we are,
00:19Senator. And, you know, one of the things that we have been having discussions is how we're
00:24raising our standards because of what the, you know, what we're having coming in and doing that.
00:30So we've had fewer at the future soldier prep course. We're going to keep that as an option.
00:36We do have times where we have some really brilliant soldiers out there that maybe need to,
00:41you know, spend a couple of weeks getting in a little bit better shape to join our formation.
00:46And that's what that's for. But really pleased with the path that we're on.
00:50As long as we're putting them through that and they can handle it.
00:52Yep. Again, I've been through that before.
00:54You know, a lot of people need to get in better shape.
00:58In Secretary Hetz's memo directing the Army Transformation Initiative,
01:02it states that the Army will begin enabling AI-driven command control by 2027.
01:08Secretary Dreskel, how will the Army be using artificial intelligence to help decision making?
01:16Senator, we think of the Army as kind of two discrete functions when General George and I talk about it.
01:21One is like a large enterprise business that moves people and things across the country and the world.
01:27The other is hopefully an incredibly lethal war killing machine and war fighting machine.
01:33And so I think AI and generative AI will meaningfully impact both spaces.
01:37The first thing we're working on is creating a data layer that basically allows for our people and our things and our sensors to all communicate in near real time.
01:46On the war fighting function, once you can have that occur, you can layer and generative AI for things like fires targeting.
01:54For air and missile defense, it's incredibly valuable.
01:58I would estimate that we'll start to see that at scale in kind of 12 to 18 months.
02:03On the Army as an enterprise business side, we're incredibly optimistic.
02:06We have 200-plus enterprise systems right now that are oftentimes siloed.
02:12Oftentimes we've had software created just for us that we have to maintain that is decades out of date.
02:19And we think generative AI will be able to help us with all sorts of tasks in the coming months.
02:25I'm excited to announce or just give credit to the recruiting team.
02:29They've onboarded to a very common CRM, customer relationship management tool called Salesforce.
02:35Generative AI can be applied to a lot of the things that we do as we recruit soldiers and bring them into the Army.
02:41You know, we're outside the gate at Redstone Arsenal.
02:44Secretary, have you been there yet?
02:45Would you mind repeating that?
02:47Have you been to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville yet?
02:49What state is that?
02:51That's in Alabama.
02:52I have.
02:53Okay.
02:54If you hadn't, we need to get you there.
02:56And by the way, you're making decisions and transforming our military.
02:59I'm good with that.
03:00You're actually cutting some contracts and things in my state.
03:04If it helps, I'm all for it.
03:07And so we'll work with you as much as we can.
03:09But right outside the gate at Redstone, a partnership between Davidson Technologies and D-Wave had completed the assembly of a quantum computer system that should be soon complete, its calibrations and readiness tests.
03:24Secretary, how can the Army leverage these new systems in successfully implementing its transformation and optimize the future the right way?
03:33Secretary, Senator Slocken and I were at a dinner a couple nights ago talking about quantum computing.
03:38And what quantum computing is going to be able to do to how our ability to process information as human beings is otherworldly.
03:45It's something as simple as convoy routes for transportation all the way up to you could probably start to plan out where should you put air and missile defense systems and how would they react in near real time to threats.
03:59And so any sort of innovation like that, we are completely supportive of.
04:04It's a lot of good things going on, especially with AI.
04:09I hope we all understand, too, that for AI and all the future big tech stuff, we're going to need energy big time.
04:17China doubles our energy every three years that we have in this country.
04:21We're way behind.
04:22And we can talk about all these technologies that we want.
04:26Unless we have energy, which is going to be, should be a national security threat, then we're going to have huge problems.
04:33Do you agree with that, Secretary?
04:35Yes.
04:35General?
04:37Yes, Senator, I do.
04:39Yeah.
04:39I would hope we start talking about it a lot more, make sure that, you know, with all these things we've got coming down the pipe,
04:44that we have the availability to, number one, be able to build them,
04:48and number two, have the energy to run all of our data centers and mega data centers in the future.
