The Pentagon is finding ever more uses for the AI-powered command-and-control system called Maven Smart System, including logistics, force readiness, supply chain and budgeting data, the Defense Department’s AI chief said Tuesday.
Maven, which is used by all U.S. combatant commands for intelligence and operations data analysis, drew attention in the early days of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran by facilitating strikes on thousands of targets in lightning-quick succession.
But the war also revealed DOD’s need for a better way to plan operations against a 90-day picture of its munitions inventory, Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington, D.C.
Already, MSS has replaced “six, eight, ten” different IT systems that U.S. military personnel previously used to analyze data, said Stanley, adding that the goal was to build a “golden thread” of data from sensors, to aggregation and visualization, to decision-making and acting based on those decisions.
While MSS started as a tool to bridge intelligence and operations efforts, the department is working to include readiness and disposition of forces, supply chain and budgetary considerations, modeling and simulation to improve decision-making processes—what Stanley called a “horizontal integration” of directorates’ data functions.
Stanley also pointed to GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s main portal for AI tools, which recently added tools from OpenAI and xAI in addition to Google’s Gemini. It’s deploying “real, no-kidding frontier AI algorithms, and the full user experience, inside of a government environment,” he said.
The organizations that have been most successful are integrating AI in new ways and changing how they operate, versus simply automating existing processes, Stanley added. Whereas commanders used to wait hours for new satellite imagery, they now see images complete with target detection in minutes, requiring a rethink of military decision-making processes.
“Basically, we need to make better decisions faster with data,” Stanley said. “Everything seems confusing until you break it down to making better decisions faster.”
He also discussed procurement timelines, noting that recent use of other transaction authorities and marketplaces had shortened the time vendor selection took “from months to single-digit days,” compared to traditional requests for information and proposals at DOD. He recommended vendors use Tradewinds, DOD’s digital marketplace, saying it “satisfies the competitive requirement” with a five-minute video, “way better than writing a bunch of RFIs and RFPs.”
The department is also exploring AI pilot programs for drafting and concluding contracts, as well as legal advice, though humans would remain in the process. Stanley said that “90%” of the language used in other transaction agreements or Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contracts was standard, and AI could often be used to make straightforward updates as needed.
He noted that interim authority to test and authority to operate on department networks were “one of those clear bottlenecks that are really really hard to get around,” and that AI pilot programs were being trialed to speed approval times.
While the full timeline from a broad agency announcement to authority to operate right now “could be 18 months,” his office is “progressively looking at every single piece of that schedule.”
The department was historically “standoffish” about software delivery models like software as a service and platform as a service, but “meeting the industry where they are” would allow the Pentagon to invest in and integrate commercial offerings more readily, Stanley said. He said that DOD would adopt commercial AI models, use its own data to customize them for its own use cases, and build its own bespoke capabilities as necessary.
Instead of owning the software, “I’ll pay a license for that, so you don’t have to worry about development. We can just iterate inside of that license period,” he said. The department is “a commercial-first organization.”
Allies often “are aligned” but “don’t have the resources … the experience … the scale that we do,” Stanley said. DOD is actively working with partners including the Five Eyes (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and “a few” NATO and Asian allies to understand their needs and help them avoid making mistakes DOD has already made, he noted.
Stanley added that “AI in everything” would happen naturally, regardless of DOD’s actions. The department would need to digitize older processes and integrate AI into all decision-making to adapt. “The way we’ve always done it is not the least risky option. The way we’ve always done it is the most risky course of action,” he said.
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