REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. (Feb. 10, 2025) – Artificial Intelligence. Questions abound on what it will do for society – and what it already does.
In 2024, the Army reported that it had invested $50 million in small and nontraditional businesses to develop AI and machine learning solutions. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center is no stranger to utilizing AI but has now consolidated those efforts into its ongoing modernization.
“We are leveraging AI to meet Gen. (James) Rainey's mandate to move faster to field capabilities for our Warfighters,” said Seth Farrington, who leads AI efforts for the Center. “AvMC has a strong history researching and developing AI and ML tools across the Center. Our goal is to pull all those different pieces together and say this is our over-arching, big picture direction and mission with AI.
“Artificial intelligence is a game changer for how we operate our business and engineering processes. I anticipate that it will eventually become embedded in future weapon systems -- in a wide variety of capacities.”
Farrington said that in addition to weapons systems, AI will transform how the Center operates across the board – “making us more efficient and our lives easier with some of the more administrative type tasks.”
As AI becomes a part of the weapon systems the Center supports, AvMC SMEs will need to work in tandem with AI tools to write their requirements. Farrington said that this is a good illustration of how AI will not take the place of human experience as much as it will be used to augment it.
And while AI will never completely replicate humans, one of the most fascinating aspects of AI capabilities is its ability to preserve their expertise. With an aging workforce, one of the challenges facing the Center – and in the acquisition world in general -- is losing its brain trust. But what if it wasn’t lost?
“One of the interesting uses for large language models is their ability to digest, process and interact with the English language,” Farrington shared. “Within the Systems Readiness Directorate, we've started tinkering with a prototype to preserve knowledge and processes developed by a SME after their departure from the Center. We are taking a large collection of documents, reports and some things that a particular person has, or group of people has written over the years and feeding that into a large language model.
Farrington said that instead of losing that institutional knowledge, AI can preserve it for the engineers and scientists of the future to still ask questions.
“Imagine if you didn't have to lose access to your mentor or colleague's expertise after they moved on to their next adventure? What if, instead of having to relearn all the painful lessons they had to experience over their career, you could continue to draw on their knowledge? It's a really exciting idea and one that we think has a lot of promise."
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The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, is Army Futures Command’s leader and integrator within a global ecosystem of scientific exploration and technological innovation. DEVCOM expertise spans eight major competency areas to provide integrated research, development, analysis and engineering support to the Army and DOD. From rockets to robots, drones to dozers, and aviation to artillery – DEVCOM innovation is at the core of the combat capabilities American Warfighters need to win on the battlefield of the future. For more information, visit devcom.army.mil/.
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