Decision Dominance: Army Hopes AI Will Give Soldiers An Information Advantage.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

The Army in recent years has introduced the concept of "information advantage," in which soldiers have the ability to make decisions and act faster than their adversaries. The service now believes artificial intelligence is the key to making the strategy a reality. Artificial intelligence has exploded in popularity and capability, with large language models such as Chat-GPT and other AI systems becoming more readily accessible to the general public. Both in industry and the Defense Department, many are exploring the possibility of utilizing the technology for military applications, and the Army is no exception.

Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said AI has the "highest potential to really, really drive change ... but it also presents for us very, very real challenges as well across the information dimension." Army Maj. Gen. Matthew Easley, the deputy principal information operations advisor in the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy, said the service is undergoing a "migration from our legacy information operations, of how do we combine different information effects to create the synergies we want for our operations" to the new concept of information advantage.

The goal of the concept is to ensure the Army has the "initiative" in the information environment and "can see ourselves, know ourselves and act faster," Easley said at an Association of the United States Army event in June. Information advantage involves five key functions, he said: enabling decision-making; protecting soldiers and the Army's information; educating and informing domestic audiences; informing and influencing foreign audiences; and conducting information warfare.

"All five of those areas can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to some effect," he added.

Easley helped establish the Army's AI Task Force in 2019. But during his time there the team ran into two challenges in adopting AI across the Army, he said: migrating to a hybrid cloud environment and mobile devices.

The Army will "continue to have lots of legacy data centers, but as we need to surge, we need to move around the world--cloud environments make this much, much easier for us to do global operations," he said. For fiscal year 2024, the service is requesting $469 million for its transition to the cloud and investment in its data environment, according to Army budget documents.

Barrett said at the AUSA event: "You do not get to AI and machine learning...