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.
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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.
01:55For 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.
02:02On 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.
02:24I'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?
02:46Would you mind repeating that?
02:47Have you been to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville yet?
02:49What state is that in?
02:51That's in Alabama.
02:52I have.
02:53Okay.
02:54If you hadn't, we need to get you there.
02:55And 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.
03:06And 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
03:14had completed the assembly of a quantum computer system that should be soon complete.
03:20It's 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?
03:33Senator 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
03:56and 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.
04:08I 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.
04:23And 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.
04:33You 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.
04:53Thank you, Mr. Chairman.