Data is “Ammo in AI Warfare,” and the Pentagon May Be Running Low

Posted: July 25th, 2023

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — “During the daily battle rhythm, the DoD [Department of Defense] creates more than 22 terabytes [equal to 22 trillion bytes with a byte being eight digits long] of digital data daily, and because of their [DoD] outdated data retention and management policies, warfighters, analysts, and operators are unable to tap into its full potential because it is not AI-ready [Artificial Intelligence-ready]. These potential insights are wasted.”

That was Alexandr Wang, founder and Chief Executive Officer of ScaleAI, testifying last Tuesday before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation on “Man and Machine: Artificial Intelligence on the Battlefield.”

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