Pentagon Uses AI for Budget Policies

As the U.S. military faces criticism for its bloated budget and convoluted policies, the Pentagon has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate the complexities of its annual $816.7 billion budget. The Pentagon’s AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER, was developed to make sense of the hundreds of revisions and limitations included in the Department of Defense budget legislation. These provisions dictate what the Pentagon can and cannot do, but they have become so numerous and convoluted that an AI program was needed to decipher them.

Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, expressed his excitement about using GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding of the budget exhibits. However, experts have criticized the need for such an AI program, citing it as an indictment of how the Pentagon operates. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, stated that the Pentagon’s reliance on adding more policies and spending without making tough decisions is a fundamental problem.

The creation of GAMECHANGER highlights the need for lawmakers to reassess their approach to the defense budget. Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information, believes that the fact that the Pentagon had to develop an AI program to navigate its own policies should serve as a wake-up call to lawmakers who consistently allocate more funding than requested. Gledhill emphasizes that the Pentagon’s inability to properly account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets in a recent audit only compounds the issue.

GAMECHANGER is designed to help military officials navigate the extensive and tedious policies of the Pentagon. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents, which, if read in their entirety, would be equivalent to reading “War and Peace” more than 100 times. The program’s development by the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force, was completed last year, and it has already been used by over 6,000 Defense Department users for more than 100,000 queries. GAMECHANGER is just one of many AI programs funded by the Pentagon, with 686 currently in development.

While GAMECHANGER is seen as an innovative solution, some experts argue that it is merely a Band-Aid for the Pentagon’s policy-making problems. Hartung argues that the focus should be on improving how policies are created, rather than just finding ways to navigate through them. The Pentagon’s use of AI to understand its own policies reflects a need for systemic change in the organization.

Despite the significance of GAMECHANGER, it has received relatively little media attention since its announcement in February of last year. Congress members and the Senate Armed Services Committee have been critical of the Pentagon’s byzantine and labyrinthine policies, but little has been done to address the issue. While the NDAA authorized $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget, there is still a long way to go in streamlining the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and making it more efficient.

In conclusion, the Pentagon’s reliance on an AI program like GAMECHANGER to navigate its own policies reveals a deeper issue within the organization. The bloated budget, convoluted policies, and lack of accountability have led to the development of AI programs to make sense of it all. However, the focus should be on improving the policy-making process itself rather than finding ways to navigate through the existing policies. Only through systemic change can the Pentagon address its operational inefficiencies and ensure a more effective and transparent use of taxpayer funds.