Bob Carey
The United States has been fighting tomorrow’s battles with yesterday’s playbook for decades. While America has long been accused of “planning to fight the last war,” nowhere is that seen more than in the arcane policies of military procurement and the ever-changing landscape of artificial intelligence (AI).
With the rapid development of AI the U.S. must prioritize modernizing its outdated systems more than ever.
In July, President Trump released an Executive Order that outlines a plan for strengthening America’s position in the AI race. The Executive Order will require technology companies to develop AI models that are unbiased and consistently produce reliable results. I agree with President Trump and believe this is an important step toward ensuring AI platforms operate at the highest possible level, particular in the defense world.
While we observe warfare revolutionized with drones, precise electronic warfare, and 3D printing, the Pentagon bureaucracy clings desperately to an old procurement system which takes the military decades to deploy new weapon systems. Specifically, this is seen in the Pentagon’s decades-old “requirements approval” process, “lovingly” referred to in the Pentagon as the JCIDS process, upon which tens of thousands of military positions and civil service jobs are dependent to feed the monster of the acquisition bureaucracy, and like most long-term bureaucratic structures, is now simply a chokepoint for innovation rather than a process to fully vet military procurement requirements.
Take the example of the F-35 Lightning II jet, with a first prototype flown in October 2002, the first production airplane flown more than six years later in December 2006, but still not entering operational service until 2015 for the Marines, 2016 for the Air Force, and 2019 for the Navy, fifteen to nineteen years after first flight. Even in 2006, the Government Accountability Office warned about this byzantine procurement process: “the JSF program continues to be risky… [it] has already encountered increases to estimated development costs, delays to planned deliveries, and reductions in the planned number of JSF to be procured that have eroded DOD’s buying power.” Meanwhile, the cost of the F-35 skyrocketed from $89 million per copy in 2010 to $304 million per copy, a 366% increase for a system that took 15 years to field.
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