BRITT GILLETTE
On January 9th, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote a memo which included the following:
“President Trump makes clear in Executive Order 14179, "It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." In the national security domain, AI-enabled warfare and AI-enabled capability development will re-define the character of military affairs over the next decade. This transformation is a race - fueled by the accelerating pace of commercial AI innovation coming out of America's private sector. The United States Military must build on its lead over our adversaries in integrating this technology, established during President Trump's first term, to make our Warfighters more lethal and efficient. To this end, aligned with America's AI Action Plan, I direct the Department of War to accelerate America's Military AI Dominance by becoming an "AI-first" warfighting force across all components, from front to back.”
According to Hegseth, the United States is engaged in a race to develop A.I.-enabled warfare and A.I.-enabled capability development, and "We will become an 'A.I.-first' warfighting force across all domains."
To do this, the Pentagon is taking a wartime approach to delivering these capabilities, with an emphasis on three areas – warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations.
A.I.-Focused "Pace-Setting Projects"
The means to implement this acceleration is the launch of seven Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs), each with a single accountable leader and aggressive timelines.
According to the Department of War, these seven PSPs will establish a new A.I. execution standard for the entire Department. They are as follows:
1) Swarm Forge: Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test, and scale novel ways of fighting with and against A.I.-enabled capabilities – combining America's elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.
2) Agent Network: Unleashing A.I. agent development and experimentation for A.I.-enabled battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to kill chain execution.
3) Ender's Foundry: Accelerating A.I.-enabled simulation capabilities – and sim-dev and sim-ops feedback loops – to ensure we stay ahead of A.I.-enabled adversaries.
4) Open Arsenal: Accelerating the TechINT-to-capability development pipeline, turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.
5) Project Grant: Enabling transformation of deterrence from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure with interpretable results.
6) GenAI.mil: Providing Department-wide access to frontier generative A.I. models, like Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, for all Department of War personnel at Impact Level (IL-5) and above classification levels.
7) Enterprise Agents: Building the playbook for rapid and secure A.I. agent development and deployment to transform enterprise workflows.
In the end, these initiatives will integrate A.I. into every aspect of the Department of War, from weapons on the battlefield to the Department's back-office systems.
In the process, will these PSPs transform the world?
I don’t know.
However, I do know this…
Their pursuit is a sign of the times in which we live – a transformative era of rapidly developing military technologies.
These technologies will radically alter the global power structure, eventually resulting in one nation (or a coalition of nations) establishing a global empire.
Rapid Innovation and Exponential Change
The Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how much the modern battlefield has changed. Conventional military hardware, and some cases even soldiers themselves, have been rendered obsolete in the face of drone warfare.
Meanwhile, the types of drones deployed and the methods of their deployment rapidly evolve on a weekly, if not daily, basis as lessons learned on the battlefield are integrated into the next generation of drones.
This is what the Open Arsenal PSP hopes to address.
To understand just how rapidly the world is changing, look at the stated purpose of Open Arsenal.
It’s to accelerate the technology intelligence-to-capability development pipeline, “turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.”
Let that sink in.
“Turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.”
This is a radical transformation of the old order.
Not only does this translate into fielding superior weapons on the battlefield, but it means the adoption of a whole new method of defense procurement.
Most conventional weapons systems are obsolete in the face of A.I.-enabled drone warfare, but so too are the days of conventional weapon systems development, where it takes 10 to 15 years from initial design to appearance on the battlefield.
The Pentagon is aiming to reduce that timeline to hours.
Decentralized Drone Swarms
Even the drone warfare of the last few years is becoming obsolete in the face of A.I.-enabled drone swarms.
In the Forbes article, "Swarm Forge: Pentagon’s Mass-Drone Test Signals Near-Term Deployment," we read:
“The Nemyx distributed swarming engine runs as an app on each of the drones,” says Meier. “They communicate with each other and organise themselves to attack targets in priority order.”
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