Long known for its massive scale and bureaucratic complexity, the Pentagon is slowly transforming itself into a more streamlined organization, much like a Silicon Valley company.
The “fail fast” mentality, once confined to startups, is taking root in the Department of War, previously known as the Department of Defense, thanks to AI and other systems that are revolutionizing the way the U.S. approaches global conflicts, speakers at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit said on Tuesday.
Radha Iyengar Plumb, a former chief digital and AI officer at the Pentagon who is now the vice president of AI-first transformation at IBM, said the Pentagon is in some ways similar to a $1 trillion business. It has about 3 million employees, more ground vehicles than FedEx, and a supply chain three times as large as that of Walmart. Yet for years, the massive amount of data linked to its operations was handled manually and inefficiently.
Analysts would “literally swivel-chair between multiple different computers” to gather intelligence and paste it into PowerPoint slides, she noted.
“When it is the world around you that is changing over time, that swivel chair just gets updated slowly,” Plumb said. “People don’t have full information about the world around them, and that makes it harder to make good decisions.”
Modernizing the Pentagon
However, the government’s more recent efforts are slowly improving this situation. Shannon Clark, a former Pentagon analyst and current head of defense growth at Palantir, cited Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative launched in 2017 to consolidate data and integrate AI into battlefield operations, as a key driver of improvements. Palantir is a government contractor assisting the Pentagon in executing Project Maven.
Still, modernization also requires a new mindset, said Clark. The government and Congress need to take more risks, although they are already making strides, thanks in part to some outside influence, she added.
“They’ve seen what the companies in Silicon Valley are doing,” said Clark. “I think they’re seeing that that’s the only way that we‘re going to be able to forge forward faster, is by watching and failing and then learning from those mistakes, just as much as learning from success.”
Incorporating AI into government has already helped drive results, in part by speeding up how fast the Pentagon can buy and deliver things, said Plumb.
Another positive development over the years has been the emergence of numerous defense technology companies that are helping the U.S. gain an edge over its adversaries, said Clark.
“All of this technology was used for the 12-day war. All this technology was used for the conflict with Russia and Ukraine, and it’ll be used for whatever the next conflict is as well,” she said. “We really need America’s best and brightest to be working on this.”