During a House Armed Services Committee hearing held before the congressional recess, Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) questioned Military officials about AI innovation for military use.
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00:00Great. Gentlemen, time's expired.
00:01Chair, now I recognize a gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Desjardins.
00:05Thank you, Chairman.
00:06I'd like to get through a couple questions with General Calavelli.
00:11Or Calavelli, I'm sorry.
00:13General, last month the Defense Innovation Unit announced that UCOM and INDAPACOM would be the first to receive new generative artificial intelligence capabilities under the Thunder Forge Initiative for operational planning and decision support.
00:26From the command-level perspective, how do you envision this technology enhancing UCOM's capabilities?
00:32Oh, it's going to be fantastic if it works out the way it's supposed to, Congressman.
00:36It's an ability to use artificial intelligence to do complex models and then to run scenarios in it.
00:46So effectively, to do the sort of war gaming that used to involve a bunch of majors hunkered over a map in the middle of the night arguing back and forth,
00:55we'll be able to automate that and do thousands and thousands of iterations.
00:59It'll really help clarify some of our planning.
01:02What kind of guardrails are you putting in place to ensure that it augments rather than replaces human judgment, especially in high-stakes or escalatory scenarios?
01:11Well, I expect my subordinate officers to come to me with the decisions and the recommendations, not the computer.
01:17Yeah, no, it's going to be an integral part of our staff process of the way we do them now.
01:23It could conceivably help to replace some manpower, but in the beginning, it's designed to enable manpower.
01:31Okay, and General Cavoli, I appreciate you raising the alarm about the roughly dozen European ports near or co-located with logistic hubs that have significant Chinese investments.
01:40I think this is a critical issue that doesn't get the attention it deserves in Washington.
01:45What's your assessment of the risk this poses in a crisis?
01:49And when you bring these concerns directly to our allies, are they receptive to your concerns?
01:55Yeah, the concerns are obvious, sir.
01:57You know, we could lose access at a critical time to a port.
02:01In our exercise program, we're very careful and very deliberate to exercise a wide variety of different port facilities so that we understand the way they work and their ownership and everything, and so that we exercise our rights to use them.
02:18When we talk to our allies about them, they almost always immediately respond if we have concerns about the ownership.
02:27In some cases that we could talk about in closed session, allied governments have intervened and stopped a tender because it was going to put a critical piece of infrastructure potentially into the wrong hands.
02:41And you also pointed to CCP-linked 5G infrastructure across parts of Europe as an area of concern.
02:49Beyond diplomacy, what tools do we have, either bilaterally or through NATO, to mitigate the surveillance and influence risks this poses?
02:57Beyond diplomacy, sir, I think I'd do best to answer that in closed session.
03:03Yes, sir. I yield back.