Automation Affection: The Defense Department Is Learning to Love Bots.

• Author: Carberry, Sean
• Position: AUTOMATION

Bots have a bad name in no small part because of their role in Russian information warfare. However, the Defense Department is finding that when deployed for good, bots can liberate humans from repetitive tasks and allow people to perform higher-level work.

To respond to the growing complexity of threats and warfare, the Pentagon must find ways to get more out of a finite supply of personnel. Creating software applications--robots, or "bots"--to perform time-consuming and repetitive tasks is a way forward, said Winston Beauchamp, deputy chief information officer of the Air Force, at the UiPath Together conference in Arlington, Virginia.

"We don't have enough people to do the work that we've been doing the way we've been doing it," he said on the sidelines of the conference.

Older workers "remember fondly the days when we had rooms full of clerks who processed this stuff for us. That's not the case anymore. And so, they recognize the imperative to change," he said.

Change means the automation of business and administrative tasks as well as developing bots and artificial intelligence for warfighting functions.

One example is the permanent change of station, or PCS process, he said. Moving from one base to another involves volumes of papers and checklists to turn in equipment, sign out of barracks and offices and sign into new ones. It can be so onerous that some people choose to leave the military rather than fight through it, he said.

"There's certainly some that is base unique, but a lot of it is common and probably should be," Beauchamp said. "So, trying to put some order to that chaos is one area," that automation can help.

Another area ripe for automation is military logistics. "You can imagine the scheduling of just-in-time maintenance on aircraft requires thousands of parts and lots of moving parts--pieces that have to come together at just the right time from depot maintenance as well as field maintenance," he added.

Having the right testing equipment and tools on hand for aircraft maintenance, checking tools in and out and tracking and maintaining accountability for tools are also time-consuming tasks for the Air Force.

"All of these together are areas where we think we could dramatically improve efficiency of manually intensive processes," he said.

According to data presented at the conference, the Air Force has saved more than $20 million by letting bots take over business processes.

The Air Force is achieving that through a hybrid...