Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan: JAIC Developing AI Models for Military, Emergency Response

Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director at Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, spoke about the use of commercial artificial intelligence technology, C4ISRNET reported Friday. 

He cited the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regimen’s plan to use AI in predicting future maintenance requirements of their H60 aircraft. Based on the regiment’s needs, JAIC developed its first analytics model of a possible “failure mode,” which they sent to the 160th SOAR in March.

JAIC is also in the process of developing an AI-developed model for predicting fires for use in emergency response applications. Road blockages and floods are also on its list of possible situations to which such models can be applied.

According to Lt. Gen. Shanahan, he has “not seen in any case yet [where] you just take a commercial capability and immediately apply it to a military problem,” he said. “You might have a narrow solution to a narrow slice of an overall problem, but what we’re interested in doing is understand how does it fit into DoD systems, DoD workflows.”

When asked about the future, Lt. Gen. Shanahan replied, “We just started on cyber. We’ve got three lines of effort, but we expect to expand that very quickly based on requirements from Cyber Command and others.”