The commandant of the Marine Corps said the service needs to make some big changes in a few short years to stay ahead of China’s growing military capability, but one of the biggest hurdles he sees is a lack of trust in the new unmanned and AI systems he wants to invest in.
David Berger envisions a Marine Corps that leverages AI to shorten the sensor-to-shooter cycle and quickly take out adversaries that could threaten Marine forces.
“We have programs right now, capabilities right now that allow for fully automatic processing of sensor-to-shooter targeting, but we don’t trust the data.
“How do you cut downtime on sensor-to-shooter, rely on artificial intelligence, build trust, have resilient other nodes so if they sever any one of them the information’s moving still quickly to who can engage.
Berger said, “we have got to move at an uncomfortable pace in unmanned systems.”
Berger made clear that the Navy needed to start experimenting with these kinds of unmanned and AI tools now so they can answer these kinds of questions in the coming years, to allow for the Marine Corps to be fully transformed by the end of the decade.
He said in response to a USNI News question that the Fiscal Year 2021 budget cycle indicated to him that lawmakers are on board with the general direction the Marine Corps is moving in, and that legislation not only supported some of their spending requests but also specifically praised the Force Design 2030 plan guiding all these changes.