Secretary of Defense Discussion on Artificial Intelligence


Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper speaks at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence public conference, at the Liaison Washington Capitol Hill hotel, in Washington, November 5, 2019.

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Transcript

[Katharina] It is my distinguished pleasure to introduce the 27th Secretary of Defense, Dr. Mark Esper. Thank you so much for your attention.

We’ll let everybody settle down. We still got conversations going on, huh? Must be some good issues out there. Good afternoon and thank you Katharina for that introduction. You know the work this commission is doing in bringing together academia, defense, and business is critically important. I’m gonna scooch around here ’cause I can’t see over here. So thank you for inviting me to speak today, it’s really great to be here. The world around us is changing at a pace faster than every before. New technologies are emerging that are fundamentally altering how we think about, plan, and prepare for war. 28 years ago, I saw firsthand the transformative power of technology during Operation Desert Storm. As some of you know I was a young infantry officer with 101st Airborne Division. I took part in what became the deepest air assault into enemy territory at that point in history. And in only 96 hours the 101st moved three brigades over 350 miles cutting off the Republican Guard. The Gulf War was the proving ground for a new generation of military weapons and equipment, from laser guided smart bombs to stealth aircraft to the first widespread use of GPS. By liberating Kuwait and defeating the Iraqi military in a matter of days, American forces demonstrated that our mastery of the digital revolution and rendered what was then cutting-edge Soviet technology obsolete. Our adversaries took note and since then they’ve been trying to catch up. Five years ago, they surprised the world with how far they’d come. On July 11th, 2014, Ukrainian forces assembled about five miles from the Russian border in Southeastern Ukraine. Coming off recent successes against Russian back forces the Ukrainian Battalions were eagerly preparing a final push to the border. Suddenly they noticed a hum of Russian UAVs overhead, followed by cyber attacks against their Command Control and communications systems. Immediately after a flurry of Russian artillery rained down on them. The whole episode lasted just a few minutes, but it inflicted tremendous damage. Dozens of soldiers were killed, hundreds more were wounded, most of their armored vehicles were destroyed. The Ukrainian offensive came to a devastating halt all in a matter of minutes. The world was quickly awakened to a new era of warfare, advanced by the Russians. It’s clear the threats of tomorrow are no longer the ones we’ve faced and defeated in the past, that is why our national defense strategy hinges on the ability of our forces to adapt to a security environment characterized by new threats from our strategic adversaries. We’re committed to making the investments necessary to accelerate our innovation and technologies that will help us stay ahead of the curve, especially artificial intelligence. Advances in AI have the potential to change the character of warfare for generations to come. Whichever nation harnesses AI first will have a decisive advantage on the battlefield for many, many years. We have to get there first. Future wars will be fought not just on land and in the sea, as they have for thousands of years, or in the air as they have for the past century, but also in outer space and cyber space in unprecedented ways. AI has the potential to transform warfare in all of these domains. The NDS remains the departments guidepost as we adapt the force to this new environment. The NDS prioritizes China first and Russia second, as we transition into this era of great power competition. Beijing has made it abundantly clear that it intends to be the world leader in AI by 2030. President Xi has said that China must “ensure that our country marches in the front ranks when it comes to theoretical research in this important area of AI and occupies the high ground in critical and core AI technologies.” For instance, improvements in AI enable more capable and cost effective autonomous vehicles. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is moving aggressively to deploy them across many war fighting domains. While the U.S. faces a mighty task in transitioning the worlds most advanced military to new AI enabled systems, China believes it can leapfrog our current technology and go straight to the next generation. In addition to developing conventional systems for example, Beijing is investing in low cost, long range, autonomous, and unmanned submarines, which it believes can be a cost effective counter to American naval power. As we speak the Chinese government is already exporting some of the most advanced military aerial drones to the Middle East, as it prepares to export it’s next generation stealth UAVs when those come online. In addition, Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling drones advertised as capable for autonomy, including the ability to conduct lethal targeted strikes. There’s also ample evidence that China’s developing and deploying AI to strengthen its authoritarian grip over its people. All signs point to the construction of a 21st century surveillance state, designed to censor speech and deny basic human rights on an unprecedented scale. Look no further than its use of surveillance to systematically repress more than a million Muslin Uyghurs. Beijing has all the power and tools it needs to coerce Chinese industry and academia into supporting its government led efforts. Equally troubling are the outside firms, or multinational corporations, that are inadvertently or tacitly providing the technology, or research behind China’s unethical use of AI. Cooperation with Beijing has consequences, not just for democracy and UN rights, but also for the strength of our partnerships abroad. If our allies and partners turn to Chinese 5G platforms, for example, it will inject serious risk into our communication and intelligence sharing capabilities. Our collective security must not be diminished by short and narrow sighted focus on economic opportunity. Russia has made its intentions equally clear, calling AI the future of humanity and describing the technology as the key to supremacy on the world stage. Moscow has already demonstrated it’s eagerness to use the latest technologies against democratic nations and the ideals of free and open societies. We shouldn’t doubt their abilities on the battlefield either. I mentioned a Ukraine example earlier and we expect Russia to continue to deploy increasingly high tech AI capabilities in current and future combat zones. The United States on the other hand, will offer a vision of AI that upholds American values and protects our fundamental belief in liberty and human rights. We will harness the potential of AI to create a force fit for our time. We believe there’s tremendous opportunity to enhance a wide range of the departments capabilities, from the back office to the frontline. And we will do this while being recognized as the world leader in military ethics, by developing principals for using AI in a lawful and ethical manner. In line with the INDS we started up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the JAIC. It’s roll is to integrate the power of AI across the many levels of the Department of Defense. Not only are we doing this in areas such as predictive maintenance and cyber defense, but also with more complex applications, like joint war fighting. We don’t approach AI, or any technology for that matter, as a panacea. We also see it as a tool to free up valuable resources and manpower so our war fighters and operators can focus on higher priority tasks in a more efficient and more effective manner. Our ultimate goal is to get the war fighter into the cloud. We must be able to pull our vast streams of data and deliver AI capability out to the tactical edge. This will require the wholesale commitment to modernizing our war fighting systems, cultivating a premier workforce, and strengthening our partnership across the entire sector. We recognize these challenges and we are committed to addressing them. Our success is also contingent upon predictable, adequate, and timely funding from Congress. The ongoing continuing resolution harms military readiness and impacts our ability to accelerate AI development at the speed and scale necessary to stay ahead. Our adversaries are not slowing down and the United States cannot afford to either. Congress must understand that short term budget uncertainty has longterm strategic implications for our nation’s security. Now while technology is constantly changing, our commitment to the law, to ethics, and to duty does not. The department’s history clearly demonstrates our ability to invest in, develop, and deploy systems that reduce risk to our war fighters while increasing our combat effectiveness, for the ultimate purpose of protecting the security of the American people. We will ensure that we develop this technology in ways that uphold our values, and advance security, peace, and stability at the same time. Some in the private sector have raised concerns about working on AI with the United States military. Unlike some parts of the world American corporations have a choice in who they work with, that is the virtue of our free enterprise system. But let me be clear, the questions is not whether AI will be used by militaries around the world, it will be. The real question is whether we let authoritarian governments dominate AI and by extension the battlefield, or whether industry, the United States military, and our partners can work together to lead the world in responsible AI research and application. When America unleashes its collective genius of industry in government and academia, there is no one that can compete with us. I saw this firsthand in the Gulf War and our history is rife with other examples. During World War II the titans of industry, and hardworking patriots answered the call, and transformed Detroit into the arsenal of democracy. After the Sputnik launch we rallied our best and brightest, we created DARPA and NASA, and we took control of the space race. Mastering AI will require similar vision, ambition, and commitment. You and I are no stranger to these sorts of challenges. America has risen to the task before and we must do so again, but we need your help. We need the full force of American intellect and ingenuity working in harmony across the public and private sectors. We need your leadership and you vision to ensure we maintain a strategic edge, and we need forums and commissions, such as these, to pioneer solutions that will deter aggression and provide for our collective security. Thank you for your time and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you.

Thank you Secretary, for the thoughtful remarks. It’s clear that you and the department have been thinking about AI and what it offers to our military. Also how it could be enabling our adversaries, who may not share our values for new and different facts. I’d like to pull upon some of your comments and thank you so much for sharing with us. I’d like to understand how the DOD might be communicating with industry and challenging them to solve our most pressing national security issues.

Well we’re reaching out in a number of different ways. Everything from the traditional way of posting notices and RFPs, and things like that, to forums, to fora, to think tank sessions, to reaching out to academics directly, if you will. You and I were talking beforehand, when I was secretary of the Army we started up the AI task force at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and I spent a whole day out there working with some of the researchers and many of our industry partners showed up for the groundbreaking. We’re trying to reach out at a number of different levels. We need to reach out with regard to industry, not just to the big players on the block, but all the way down to the small innovators. That’s where you tend to find your greatest innovation, your ingenuity. And we need to make sure we do it comprehensively. We gotta tap the best and brightest from across the country, again from all those different sectors, and make sure we can get to the end state quicker than the Chinese and the Russians can.

Oh God bless you. I think those things are, we have had a lot of conversation about speed and I think this is an important conversation to expand on. And I understand you just mentioned the think tanks that you’ve had, the Defense Innovative Board just come in and provide some recommended principals for the ethics, because its not just speed, it’s conforming to our values as a society. What are your thoughts about the DEB report and have you had a chance to think about where these principals might be implemented across the department?

Sure, well as I said in my remarks, we have to, as we always have, conduct ourselves ethically, and legally, and morally. And I was very pleased by what I saw in the DEB report, just came out last week and listed a set of principles. But it terms of going about an applying them to AI it went back and reaffirmed the same principals we apply to other systems we’ve been using for many, many years. I’m very pleased with the outcome of the report for those of you who had a chance to look at it I think it’s very comprehensive. It balances out a number of different things. It talks about the need for continued exploration of these topics to make sure we get it right. This is one we cannot afford to get wrong.

Yes and one of the things that I’m very concerned about and the commission has had a lot of dialog about, which is our human resources and how are we going to attract that talent and institutionalize it into the department. Have you had a chance to think about those concerns and what you might be able to do to attract the right type of talent to be able to do this business in the future?

Yeah I would say that with most things talent is the key, it’s making sure you’re able to access the best and the brightest. You gotta be able to recruit them, and retain them, and keep ’em happy, and busy. And you know we face the same challenge over the past many years with cyber, and I saw this not just from the government perspective, where the Army built the Army Cyber and started recruiting and retaining there, but also from the private sector where we seem to all be, we all being industry and government and academia, all competing for the same handful of people. And because these are very talented, exceptional folks and they have great opportunities to work in the private sector for large sums of money and do those types of things. What we have to do is make sure that we find different ways to attract ’em, because we cannot compete with the private sector when it comes to compensation, but we can offer you the chance to serve your country, to do things that are very, very interesting, maybe do things that aren’t legal in the private sector, (audience laughs) but exciting nonetheless. But is a tremendous part, we tend to bring together a great deal of folks and what I’ve always enjoyed with my time in service, whether it’s in the military or in DOD, you work around a great group of people who are focused on something bigger than themselves, bigger than the bottom line, and you get committed to that. And again I think it seems cliche a lot of times, but this is the space race, I mean whoever gets there first is gonna dominate and we got to set aside Sputnik, we largely got to space first with what ya needed, and we dominated the heavens for decades, and still do, and we need to get there first on AI, and then maintain that lead. So it’s going to be continued investment. And what we’re trying to do now is make sure we leverage authorities that were given to us by congress to make sure we can bring in people, we can recruit ’em, we can use different techniques to bring ’em in mid career, we can bring ’em in with different compensation packages and what not. We’re looking for ways to get outside of our own bureaucratic methods to make sure we can balance all these things out.

Super. It’s so good that you come from a service background and role up into this position. I think one of the things that we’re seeing as a commission is the change of war fighting, and what do you see now that you’re in this position, coming from the Army with all of its challenges in the AI battle. Now that you’re in the Secretary’s position, what do you see that DOD is going to face in the future that’s different with the way AI will implement?

Well, I think I mentioned this in my remarks, AI won’t change the nature of war, but it will change the character of war, which is a major leap forward if it can happen. And AI will transcend everything we do. It’s not just war fighting, but it’s gonna be predictive maintenance, which is one of the areas in the Army at least, that we were trying to get AI involved immediately. You can think about what it does if you can really use AI to optimize your maintenance. You get higher reliability rates, you get fewer breakdowns, you get better efficiency on the system et cetera. But then there’s the other end, the war fighting end, and we talk about speed and decision making. These days if you’re, I wasn’t in the armor, I was in the infantry, but I know a little bit about it, but if your tank platoon leader, or a tank commander if you will, you got people actually looking out on the battlefield and calling out enemy targets if you will, enemy tanks, and you have sensors too. But imagine a world though where you have AI integrating into all your sensors and everything. Where Ais constantly scanning the horizon and it’s immediately, within milliseconds, it’s sorting out what is, what’s a civilian truck and what’s an enemy combatant vehicle, what’s a tank and what’s a fighting vehicle, which one has it’s tern pointed at you and which one doesn’t, which one is the immediate threat. And it can do that so much quicker, it can slew your gun, and it just allows you so much greater reaction to the enemy. And then that’s where the manual loop comes to decide whether you pull the trigger or not. And that’s how we gotta think about AI, enabling quicker, faster decisions, that allow us to be successful in the battlefield and bring our folks home too. And that’s just a war fighting application. We can go toward anything, I mean whether it’s, heck if it’s even doing audits of the DOD.

[Katharina] Yeah.

Which has never been done before. (audience laughs) We’re gettin’ there. But everything, I mean AI runs through everything we do and we gotta be able to make sure we get it. That’s why we’re trying to move as quickly as we can to the cloud.

Excellent. You mentioned during your preliminary notes here about your interest and your energy behind AI, and when you actually went through your confirmation hearing you mentioned it as one of your highest priorities. And you referred to the Joint Artificial Intelligent Committee. What are your thoughts for the future and how do you think your leadership will be able to top down, as well as bottom up draw our department past that bureaucracy that you’re discussing, into that future?

Yeah, well the acquisition system is not as efficient as it should be.

[Katharina] Yes sir.

We’re trying to take advantage of laws give to us and authorities by congress, but its slow. And the biggest problem with DOD, in terms of acquisition is the culture, right, it’s very risk adverse. We gotta change the culture, that’ll take time. You change the laws first and you change the regulations and the practices, and I think the services are moving forward on that at different rates. But we gotta empower the JAIC to be able to cut through these things to make sure we get there quicker and again, we’re in a race, we have to get to the end state quicker than the Chinese can, quicker than the Russians can, and there are a few key technologies out there. I put AI as number one. Two, three, and four look like directed energy and hypersonics, and a few other things like that. But even with those systems, whether its hypersonics, directed energy, AI is still gonna enable them in terms of how you employ them, how you maintain them, all that, so that’s why AI to me pops up as number one.

You mentioned in your conversations here, that issue of bringing the best and brightest. Have you seen some good collaboration between the government, academia, and industry. I recall, or at least I seem to recall, when I was working with you in the Army there were some activities, have you got some examples that we can bring to the forefront, to get people past that risk equation?

That’s a good question, I wish I had some at hand. I mentioned before that we kicked off the AI task force at Carnegie Mellon University and we’re doing some good initial work there and had a number of different players involved. Obviously, the Army is deeply integrated in Austin, Texas with the Army Futures Command, they’re doing a lot of work trying to cut through the bureaucracy, get straight using a cross functional teams to do that. But again, I think all the services are looking for different ways where we can really accelerate the progress because we need to get there, we need to make sufficient investments, and right now DOD is in the final weeks if you will, as you recall, of building its budget for the next year. And again AI is one of those core critical technologies we need to get to, but it’s not just the money, it’s the people. I’d probably put people number one and then all the systems that you need to enable them to do their jobs and do ’em well.

Yeah, you mentioned the talent and trying to recruit it. There’s a pipeline, as you know, that you went and experienced, not just in the Army, but now in the broader context of DOD, where science and technology early research, and that investment is so important. What are your thoughts about the future in that investment and where do you think it might needed in the department?

With regard on the personnel side?

[Katharina] Yes.

Well the biggest thing, one of the biggest things we’re pushing in the Army, and I’m confident that Secretary McCarthy and Chief of Staff McConville still are, is talent management. We had to overhaul the personnel system because it was just holding us back in too many ways. And that’s just for the military side. There’s the civilian side as well that needs looked at too. DOD does great work, we do a number of things really well, but when it comes to talent we’re still working in an industrial age system.

[Katharina] Yeah.

And it’s regulated by the executive branch, it’s regulated by congress, it has a number of constraints put on it, but we’ve got to get beyond that and just be able to think outside the box. Because again, at the end of the day it’s talent and it’s not like we’re in a noncompetitive environment, we’re competing against industry, we’re competing against think tanks. These folks are in high demand and they’re a low density, at least pool of talent, at this point in time.

Yeah, and you have an opportunity here with this community. It’s a mix of academic, it’s a mix of civilian, et cetera. Is there anything that you would call for them to think about that would help you in your problem solving?

I think the more that you can help us point out what are the obstacles we are putting in our own way, right. We have enough challenges out there, external to us, exogenous. What do we need to do better? What are you seeing that I don’t see? I try every month to meet with groups of CEOs or heads of associations and talk about what can we do better? How can we see ourselves better? Because typically what I hear is everything is okay, everything is great, everything is green, you’re no problem. But when you reach out there, you go walk around and visit folks, and talk to companies, and talk to entrepreneurs, you get a different story. And we’re trying to just beat those down one at a time as we realize how we’re not doing this well, or we could, if we make some adjustments to system here we could really up our talent. We’re looking at, I’ll take any problem and if it can allow us to do better, or ideas you have for us to perform, all those things help because this is too important.

Thank you.

Just to treat as anything else.

Yeah. Your remarks and your inputs have been excellent. Is there anything that you would like to share beyond what I’ve asked you? Is there any thoughts that you would like to have for our folks here?

No, well yes, I guess I’ll just keep foot stomping it is, DOD doesn’t have the monopoly on great ideas here or certainly all the talent, so much of it is coming from the private sector. We really need your help and be cautious of what’s happening out there in the world. As I like to tell our NATO allies and European friends, and I was just in Brussels two weeks ago talking to German Marshall Fund, on this topic by the way. I tell ’em don’t write off what we’re saying as United States scaremongering, or in this case DOD scaremongering about China. Don’t think we’re overstating the problem. There are serious issues out there and we’ve been asleep at the switch now for quite some time. And we’re finally waking up here in the past couple years. And the National Defense Strategy is what has pointed DOD in the right direction saying we’re now in an era of great power competition. China is our greatest strategic competitor number one, Russia number two. And we need to be prepared for high intensity conflict across five domains of warfare, five domains, no longer three. And that’s where we’re headed and we need your help to get there. Those are my final remarks.

Thank you so much, very much.

Thank you.

Please thank the Secretary.

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