AUSA NEWS: Army Developing Large Language Models to Enhance Targeting

Laura Heckmann

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Army is evolving large language models into reasoning models that can generate skillsets to free up targeting experts.

“We have to be able to hit the right target at the right time,” said Col. Jonathan Harvey, director of theater fires element for United States Army Pacific. “Thousands of objects we will be able to see. We have to distill those thousands of objects to hundreds of targets, and then choose the right 10 targets to effect at the right time to inflict maximum damage if we end up in a conflict.”

The only way to do this is with technology, he said during a panel at the United States Army Association’s annual meeting and exposition Oct. 15.

The service has been exploring large language models to help, and the one Army Pacific has “moved out the quickest on” is a model sponsored by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in partnership with Project Convergence — “a sufficient joint weapon-target pairing AI large language model that will run inside the kill chain,” Harvey said.

The model began in an Indo-Pacific Command exercise, and “we further advanced it to be able to actually prove and do joint weapon-[target] pairing using the air coordination or airspace or putting instructions in weapons deployment from across the Joint Force to build joint strike packages,” Harvey said.

Now, Army Pacific is moving to evolve the model from a simple large language model to “an actually fully evolved reasoning model that we are modeling after the field artillery warrant officer,” he said. “So, from [chief warrant officer 3] down, we're currently in the process of training a large language model with human machine pairing, with automation, with reasoning decision criteria involved inside of it, to help us build those … rote skill sets that a warrant officer currently does.”

Such a model could free up the warrant officer corps and targeting experts “to do the high cognitive work of actually providing advice, actually providing experience and bringing that to the commander,” Harvey said.