Without delay, humans also must translate between systems made by different manufacturers. One soldier may need to manually rotate a camera to go searching a base and see if there’s a drone threat, after which manually send details about that drone to a different soldier operating the weapon to take it down. Those instructions may be shared via a low-tech messenger app—one on par with AOL Fast Messenger. That takes time. It’s an issue the Pentagon is attempting to resolve through its Joint All-Domain Command and Control plan, amongst other initiatives.
“For a very long time, we’ve known that our military systems don’t interoperate,” says Chris Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and principal advisor to Senator John McCain, who now works as Anduril’s chief strategy officer. Much of his work has been convincing Congress and the Pentagon that a software problem is just as worthy of a slice of the defense budget as jets and aircraft carriers. (Anduril spent nearly $1.6 million on lobbying last 12 months, in keeping with data from Open Secrets, and has quite a few ties with the incoming Trump administration: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has been a longtime donor and supporter of Trump, and JD Vance spearheaded an investment in Anduril in 2017 when he worked at enterprise capital firm Revolution.)
Defense hardware also suffers from a connectivity problem. Tom Keane, a senior vice chairman in Anduril’s connected warfare division, walked me through an easy example from the civilian world. In the event you receive a text message while your phone is off, you’ll see the message once you turn the phone back on. It’s preserved. “But this functionality, which we don’t even take into consideration,” Keane says, “doesn’t really exist” within the design of many defense hardware systems. Data and communications could be easily lost in difficult military networks. Anduril says its system as an alternative stores data locally.
An AI data treasure trove
The push to construct more AI-connected hardware systems within the military could spark one among the most important data collection projects the Pentagon has ever undertaken, and corporations like Anduril and Palantir have big plans.
“Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating,” Anduril said on December 6, when it announced it will be working with Palantir to compile data collected in Lattice, including highly sensitive classified information, to coach AI models. Training on a broader collection of information collected by all these sensors will even hugely boost the model-building efforts that Anduril is now doing in a partnership with OpenAI, announced on December 4. Earlier this 12 months, Palantir also offered its AI tools to assist the Pentagon reimagine the way it categorizes and manages classified data. When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey told me in an interview in October that “it’s not like there’s some wealth of knowledge on classified topics and understanding of weapons systems” to coach AI models on, he can have been foreshadowing what Anduril is now constructing.
Even when a few of this data from the military is already being collected, AI will suddenly make it rather more useful. “What’s recent is that the Defense Department now has the potential to make use of the information in recent ways,” Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow on the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, wrote in an email. “More data and skill to process it could support great accuracy and precision in addition to faster information processing.”
The sum of those developments may be that AI models are brought more directly into military decision-making. That concept has brought scrutiny, as when Israel was found last 12 months to have been using advanced AI models to process intelligence data and generate lists of targets. Human Rights Watch wrote in a report that the tools “depend on faulty data and inexact approximations.”
“I feel we’re already on a path to integrating AI, including generative AI, into the realm of decision-making,” says Probasco, who authored a recent evaluation of 1 such case. She examined a system built throughout the military in 2023 called Maven Smart System, which allows users to “access sensor data from diverse sources [and] apply computer vision algorithms to assist soldiers discover and select military targets.”
