In an effort to secure American military Artificial Intelligence dominance, the U.S. Department of Defense launched an AI Acceleration Strategy that it said would establish the U.S. as the world’s leader in military AI deployment.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the acceleration strategy would further integrate AI into American military forces.
“We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI,” Hegseth said. “We will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.”
The strategy will apply to warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations and will strengthen battlefield decision-making, convert intelligence data and modernize daily workflows, the department said.
The catalysis for the acceleration will be seven Pace-Setting Projects, each with a single leader and aggressive timelines, which will establish new AI execution standards for the entire DoD.
Those projects include Swarm Forge, a mechanism to discover, test and scale novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities; Open Arsenal, a program to accelerate the TechINT-to-capability development pipeline, capable of rapidly turning intel into weapons; and Enterprise Agents, which will build a playbook for transforming enterprise workflows.
“Speed defines victory in the AI era, and the War Department will match the velocity of America’s AI industry,” Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, said. “We’re pulling in the best talent, the most cutting-edge technology, and embedding the top frontier AI models into the workforce — all at a rapid wartime pace.”