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STAFF: Hey, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's press conference on DoD (Department of Defense) artificial intelligence (AI). I'm Lieutenant Commander Arlo Abrahamson, and I'll be moderating today's briefing.
With us today is the Honorable Robert O. Work, vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), and Lieutenant General Michael Groen, the director of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). We'll begin this morning's briefing with an opening statement from both principles, then we'll go to questions. I'll plan to go out to people, out in the phones. We have a few people in the room. Please just identify your name and outlet to the principles before you ask your question.
And with that, I'll now turn it over Mr. Work and General Groen to deliver their opening statements.
VICE CHAIR ROBERT O. WORK: Well, thank you.
And good morning, everybody, those here and also who are following online.
I'd like to start by just two overarching comments.
First, for the first time since World War II, the United States technical predominance, which undergirds both our economic and our military competitiveness, is under severe threat by the People's Republic of China. Dick Burns, who is in his confirmation hearing -- or Bill Burns, Bill Burns, I'm sorry -- Bill Burns in his confirmation hearing as the director of the CIA said that in the strategic competition with China, technology competition is the central pillar, and the AI. Commission agrees totally with that.
The second broad thought is within this technological competition, the single most important technology that the United States must master is artificial intelligence and all of its associated technologies. Now, we believe -- we view AI. much like Thomas Edison viewed electricity. He said, "It is a field of fields. It holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world." Now, it sounds like a little hyperbole, but we actually believe that.
It is a new way of learning which will change everything. It will help us and -- utilize quantum computing better. It will help us in health. It will help us in finance. It will help us in military competition. It is truly a field of fields.
So with that as background, we said, "Look, we are not organized to win this competition." We just are not. We say we're in a competition, which is a good thing. The first thing you have to do is admit you have a problem. So Houston, we have a problem. But we have not organized ourselves to win the competition, we do not have a strategy to win the competition, we do not have the resources to implement a strategy, even if we had one.
So the first thing is we have got to take this competition seriously and we need to win it. We need to enter it with the one single goal -- we will win this technological competition.
Now, what we decided -- the best way to think about this is we are not organized now, we need to get organized. We said by 2025, we should -- the department and the federal government should have the foundations in piece for widespread integration of AI. across the federal government and particularly in DoD.
Now, there are three main building blocks to achieve this vision. First, you have to have top down leadership. You cannot say AI. is important and then let all of the agencies and subordinate departments figure out what that means. You have to have someone from the top saying "this is the vector, you will follow the vector. If you do not follow the vector, you will be penalized. If you do follow the vector, you will gain extra resources." So you have to have top down leadership.
Now, one of the first recommendations that we made is JAIC was underneath the CIO (Chief Information Officer) and it was actually underneath DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), in many ways, administratively. We said if you want to make AI. your central technological thrust, it needs to be elevated, and we recommended that the JAIC report either to the Secretary or the Deputy Secretary. That was actually included in the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and now JAIC reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and that's a very good first step.
But we think the next step is to establish a steering committee on emerging technology. This would be a tri-chaired organization -- the Deputy Secretary, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. They would sit and they would look at all of the technologies, they would drive the thrust towards an AI. future and they would coordinate all activities between the Intelligence Community and DoD, which is a righteous thing. They would be the ones who identify lack of resources, address that problem and also remove any bureaucratic obstacles.
The steering committee would oversee the development of a technology annex of the National Defense Strategy. The last time we had a list of technologies, there were 10 on the list. All 10 of those were very, very important but when you have 10 things as your priorities, you have no priorities. You have to establish some type of prioritization and enforce it. So the technology annex to the National Defense Strategy would do just that. Also, the department should set AI. readiness performance goals by the end of this fiscal year, 2021, with an eye towards 2025, when we need to be AI. ready.
So top down leadership is the first big pillar. The second is to ensure that we have in place the resources, processes and the organizations to enable AI. integration into the force. Now, the commission said you need to establish a common digital ecosystem. The JAIC has established the Joint Common Foundation. There are a lot of similarities between the two, although the commission's view is a little bit broader than the Joint Common Foundation at the point. But the point is that everyone sees the necessity that provides access to all users in the department, to software train models, data, computing and a developmental environment for DevSecOps that is secure.
We recommended that you designate the JAIC as the AI. accelerator. We actually assessed that China is a little bit ahead of the United States in fielding applications at scale. We can catch up with them and we believe that JAIC is the logical place in the department to really be the accelerator for AI. applications at scale.
The department has to increase its S&T (science and technology) spending on AI and all of R&D (research and development). We think it should be a minimum of 3.4 percent of the budget and we recommend that the department spend about $8 billion on AI R&D annually. That will allow us, we think, to cover down on all of the key research areas.
There's all sorts of specialized acquisition pathways and contracting authorities out there. We still continually need to refine them because many of them are not perfectly applicable to software-type things. And I know JAIC is working on this but we have to have an updated approach to the budget and oversight process for these things. So the second big pillar is ensure you have the resources and the processes and the organizations.
And third, you have to accelerate and scale tech adoption. You really have to push this. So we recommend standing up an AI development team at every single COCOM (Combatant Commands), with forward deployable elements and a leveraged, technological knowledge to develop innovative operational concepts and essentially establish a pull for AI-enabled applications that will help them accomplish their missions.
The department should prioritize adoption of commercial AI solutions, especially for all of the back office stuff. There's really no reason to do a lot of research on those type applications. The commercial industry has plenty of them. You just have to prioritize identifying the ones that can be modified for our use and bring them in as quickly as possible.
We think the department should establish a dedicated AI fund, under the control of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (R&E), and that fund would allow the Undersecretary to get small, innovative AI companies across the Valley of Death, and this would be up to the Undersecretary of Defense for R&E, who is the Chief Technology Officer of the department.
Now, the things that undercross all of these are talent, ethics and international partnerships. Let me talk about talent first. We think you have -- we have to have a DoD Digital Corps modeled after the Medical Corps. These are digitally savvy warriors, administrators and leaders, we just need to know who they are, we need to code them in some way and we need to make sure they're in the places that have the highest return on investment. We need to train and educate warfighters to develop core competencies in using and responsibly teaming with machine systems, understanding their limitations, understanding what they should not be asked to do, etc.
And equally, AI and other emerging technologies need to feature prominently in senior leader education and training, with a key focus on ethics, the ethical use of AI, and I'll go right into that.
We're in a competition with authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes will use technology that reflect their own governing principles. We already know how China wants to use AI. They want to use it for population surveillance, they want to use it to suppress minorities, they want to use it to cut individual privacy and trample on civil liberties. That's not going to work for a democratic nation like the United States. And so this is as much a values competition as it is a technological competition.
The way Eric Schmidt, our chairman, talks about this is we're going to employ platforms which bring these technologies. So let's just think about how 5G worked. Huawei's 5G technologies allowed a country, who do this -- or uses it to essentially surveil their population. So these values are very, very critical and an important part of the competition.
And finally, we're not going to succeed if we do it alone. This is a kind of central thinking in U.S. defense strategies. So we have to promote AI interoperability and the adoption of emerging technologies across -- among our allies and our partners.
We are absolutely confident, as a commission, we can win this competition. But we will not win it if we do not organize ourselves and have a strategy and have resources for the strategy and a means by which to implement the strategy and make sure that everyone is doing their part.
Thank you.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL S. GROEN: Good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for participating in this important session.
And first I want to say thank you to Secretary Work and the National Security Commission AI -- on AI team. Just incredible work. I mean, what you see if you've read the report -- if you haven't, I encourage you to go to the website and look at the NSCAI final report.
What you see is like a deep understanding and a deep analysis of down to first principles, bare metal for what it takes for AI integration and preserving our military effectiveness. What they produced is critically important and critically important for us in the department, but is also critically important for our national competitiveness.
In the same breath I -- I'd like to say thank you to Congress and -- and department leadership, both of which clearly understand the importance and the need to innovate and modernize the way we fight and the way we do business.
And I'm happy to report, as the director of the JAIC, positive momentum toward implementation of an AI -- of implementation of AI at scale. We certainly have a long ways to go, but you can see the needle trending positive.
With bipartisan support from Congress, with great support from the DoD leadership, the services are beginning to develop AI initiatives and expand operational experimentation that is taking those first steps. The Defense agencies are reaching out daily to share their best practices with us and with each other.
The combatant commands, especially the combatant commanders, have -- have caught a glimpse of what the future might look like through a series of -- of integrative exercises. They like it and they're eager to gain these capabilities.
With the JAIC now aligned under the deputy secretary, which gives her and the rest of the department leadership access to the tools and processes to reinforce their priorities, underline our ethical foundations, integrate our enterprises and transform our business processes, and we -- we are eagerly looking forward to that work.
Like the NSCAI, we see AI as a core tenet of defense modernization. And when I say "AI," I want to be clear, I'm not just talking about the JAIC, all AI, the -- the efforts of the services, the efforts of the departments and the agencies, rides on the foundations of good networks, good data services, good security and good partnerships. And an important part of the JAIC's business model is to build those as part of our AI infrastructure.
And with lots of budget work ahead, I think -- you know, we'll hear as F.Y. '22 (fiscal year 2022) is relooked and -- and the POM (Program Objective Memorandum) '23 (2023) to '27 (2027) is developed, we'll hear a lot about modern weapons systems and concepts. And it's important that we -- we understand that their potential -- those weapon systems, those concepts, their potential to modernize our warfighting rides on those -- on the foundational data, the networks, the algorithms that we built to integrate and inform them.
We'll have to talk about these technical foundation and architectures in the same conversation that we talk about platforms. Getting AI right and our secure data fabric environment right will be central to our ability to compete effectively with the Chinese and the Russians as well, or any modern threat for that matter. And -- and there's more, actually.
So in an era of tightening budgets and -- and a -- and a focus on -- on -- on squeezing out things that are -- that are legacy or not important in the budget, the productivity gains and the efficiency gains that AI can bring to the department, especially through the business process transformation actually becomes an economic necessity. So in a squeeze play between modernizing our -- our warfare that moves at machine speed and tighter budgets, AI is doubly -- doubly necessary.
So what I'm -- what am I talking about when I talk about AI? As Secretary Work's comments convey, the integration of AI across the -- across the government and the Department of Defense is much more than just a -- than just a -- you know, a facile layer of technology applied. It's not about shiny objects.
You've heard the -- you know, the phrase: amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. Well, in this environment, amateurs talk about applications and professionals talk about architectures and networks. And elevating the AI dialogue in the department so that we are talking about the foundations of all of our modern capabilities is a really important task, one that we're -- that we're -- we're working hard on.
The core business model -- that is: what the department, you know, gives to the American people -- what our mission is doesn't change. But a modernized, data-driven software-heavy organization will do things in a different way. It's a -- it really represents a transformation of our operating model: how do we do the things that we do as the Department of Defense?
And that operating model will have to create a common data environment, where data is shared, data is authoritative, data is available. The data feeds and algorithms across the department will create productivity gains; accelerate processes; provide management visibility, insights into markets.
And if all of that sounds like a modern software-driven company -- you know, you can think -- if you think of all of our tech giants and -- and -- and smaller innovative companies across the -- U.S. economy, it's because it is. It's the same challenge. It's the same problem. And so we have examples, right? There's very little magic here.
It's about making our organization, the Department of Defense in this case, as productive and efficient as any of these modern, successful data-driven enterprises. But there's so much more, because all of this technology applies equally to our warfighting capabilities, our capabilities in the broad range of supporting activities from all the Defense agencies in other places that make up the business of the department.
We've created positive momentum for AI and we continue to build on that now. But now comes the real critical test. In -- as in any transformation, the hardest part is institutional change and change management of the workforce, and practices, and processes that drive -- that drive a business. This step will not be easy, even within the Department of Defense. But it's foundational to our competitive success, our accountability, and our affordability.
As the NSCAI work reveals, we have a generational opportunity here. For AI to be our future, we must act now. We need to start putting these places into place now. So I want to quickly describe our position through two different lenses. One is competition and the other is opportunity.
First of all, with respect to AI competition, I think it's illustrative to talk about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence as a first order. Economic forecasts predict an AI economy of 16 trillion, a $16 trillion AI economy in the next 10 years. And this will -- this could amount to massive GDP increases, 26 percent, as high as 26 percent for China, as high as 15 percent for the United States, that to participate in this competitive AI marketplace. And if we do that, this core economic competitiveness of the United States then needs to be reflected in a core military competitiveness in this space as well.
It's important to note that, you know, while we talk about a $16 trillion market in the next decade, this happens to coincide pretty closely with China's declared and often repeated intent to be globally dominant in AI by 2030. So we look at the transformation of our economy has to be accompanied with close attention to the emerging threats that are taken -- that are there declaring their intention to use this as a point of competition between autocracies and democracies.
Our forces must operate with tempo, with data-driven decisions, with human-machine teaming. Our forces must have broad situational awareness, multi-domain integration. The PRC has a robust entrepreneurial AI environment. You know, we're all familiar with, you know, Ant Financial or Alibaba, Tencent, I mean, these are global companies.
But we're also very familiar with the artifacts of population surveillance, minority oppression, the things that Secretary Work talked about under the Chinese Communist Party's rule. We read about Beijing's large-scale campuses, their tech campuses and their state-owned enterprises that create a pipeline from entrepreneurs and innovators in China to -- through the civil-military fusion that take those capabilities directly into the PLA and military capabilities without intervening accountability or transparency.
Their organizational efficiency, that autocratic rule, they count that as an advantage, is being applied directly to their AI development. And they are surging forward in their capability. This has to give us pause to contemplate. What does -- what does China's dominance in AI mean for us if they intend that dominance by 2030? What does that imply for us?
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STAFF: Hey, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's press conference on DoD (Department of Defense) artificial intelligence (AI). I'm Lieutenant Commander Arlo Abrahamson, and I'll be moderating today's briefing.
With us today is the Honorable Robert O. Work, vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), and Lieutenant General Michael Groen, the director of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). We'll begin this morning's briefing with an opening statement from both principles, then we'll go to questions. I'll plan to go out to people, out in the phones. We have a few people in the room. Please just identify your name and outlet to the principles before you ask your question.
And with that, I'll now turn it over Mr. Work and General Groen to deliver their opening statements.
VICE CHAIR ROBERT O. WORK: Well, thank you.
And good morning, everybody, those here and also who are following online.
I'd like to start by just two overarching comments.
First, for the first time since World War II, the United States technical predominance, which undergirds both our economic and our military competitiveness, is under severe threat by the People's Republic of China. Dick Burns, who is in his confirmation hearing -- or Bill Burns, Bill Burns, I'm sorry -- Bill Burns in his confirmation hearing as the director of the CIA said that in the strategic competition with China, technology competition is the central pillar, and the AI. Commission agrees totally with that.
The second broad thought is within this technological competition, the single most important technology that the United States must master is artificial intelligence and all of its associated technologies. Now, we believe -- we view AI. much like Thomas Edison viewed electricity. He said, "It is a field of fields. It holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world." Now, it sounds like a little hyperbole, but we actually believe that.
It is a new way of learning which will change everything. It will help us and -- utilize quantum computing better. It will help us in health. It will help us in finance. It will help us in military competition. It is truly a field of fields.
So with that as background, we said, "Look, we are not organized to win this competition." We just are not. We say we're in a competition, which is a good thing. The first thing you have to do is admit you have a problem. So Houston, we have a problem. But we have not organized ourselves to win the competition, we do not have a strategy to win the competition, we do not have the resources to implement a strategy, even if we had one.
So the first thing is we have got to take this competition seriously and we need to win it. We need to enter it with the one single goal -- we will win this technological competition.
Now, what we decided -- the best way to think about this is we are not organized now, we need to get organized. We said by 2025, we should -- the department and the federal government should have the foundations in piece for widespread integration of AI. across the federal government and particularly in DoD.
Now, there are three main building blocks to achieve this vision. First, you have to have top down leadership. You cannot say AI. is important and then let all of the agencies and subordinate departments figure out what that means. You have to have someone from the top saying "this is the vector, you will follow the vector. If you do not follow the vector, you will be penalized. If you do follow the vector, you will gain extra resources." So you have to have top down leadership.
Now, one of the first recommendations that we made is JAIC was underneath the CIO (Chief Information Officer) and it was actually underneath DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), in many ways, administratively. We said if you want to make AI. your central technological thrust, it needs to be elevated, and we recommended that the JAIC report either to the Secretary or the Deputy Secretary. That was actually included in the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and now JAIC reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and that's a very good first step.
But we think the next step is to establish a steering committee on emerging technology. This would be a tri-chaired organization -- the Deputy Secretary, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. They would sit and they would look at all of the technologies, they would drive the thrust towards an AI. future and they would coordinate all activities between the Intelligence Community and DoD, which is a righteous thing. They would be the ones who identify lack of resources, address that problem and also remove any bureaucratic obstacles.
The steering committee would oversee the development of a technology annex of the National Defense Strategy. The last time we had a list of technologies, there were 10 on the list. All 10 of those were very, very important but when you have 10 things as your priorities, you have no priorities. You have to establish some type of prioritization and enforce it. So the technology annex to the National Defense Strategy would do just that. Also, the department should set AI. readiness performance goals by the end of this fiscal year, 2021, with an eye towards 2025, when we need to be AI. ready.
So top down leadership is the first big pillar. The second is to ensure that we have in place the resources, processes and the organizations to enable AI. integration into the force. Now, the commission said you need to establish a common digital ecosystem. The JAIC has established the Joint Common Foundation. There are a lot of similarities between the two, although the commission's view is a little bit broader than the Joint Common Foundation at the point. But the point is that everyone sees the necessity that provides access to all users in the department, to software train models, data, computing and a developmental environment for DevSecOps that is secure.
We recommended that you designate the JAIC as the AI. accelerator. We actually assessed that China is a little bit ahead of the United States in fielding applications at scale. We can catch up with them and we believe that JAIC is the logical place in the department to really be the accelerator for AI. applications at scale.
The department has to increase its S&T (science and technology) spending on AI and all of R&D (research and development). We think it should be a minimum of 3.4 percent of the budget and we recommend that the department spend about $8 billion on AI R&D annually. That will allow us, we think, to cover down on all of the key research areas.
There's all sorts of specialized acquisition pathways and contracting authorities out there. We still continually need to refine them because many of them are not perfectly applicable to software-type things. And I know JAIC is working on this but we have to have an updated approach to the budget and oversight process for these things. So the second big pillar is ensure you have the resources and the processes and the organizations.
And third, you have to accelerate and scale tech adoption. You really have to push this. So we recommend standing up an AI development team at every single COCOM (Combatant Commands), with forward deployable elements and a leveraged, technological knowledge to develop innovative operational concepts and essentially establish a pull for AI-enabled applications that will help them accomplish their missions.
The department should prioritize adoption of commercial AI solutions, especially for all of the back office stuff. There's really no reason to do a lot of research on those type applications. The commercial industry has plenty of them. You just have to prioritize identifying the ones that can be modified for our use and bring them in as quickly as possible.
We think the department should establish a dedicated AI fund, under the control of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (R&E), and that fund would allow the Undersecretary to get small, innovative AI companies across the Valley of Death, and this would be up to the Undersecretary of Defense for R&E, who is the Chief Technology Officer of the department.
Now, the things that undercross all of these are talent, ethics and international partnerships. Let me talk about talent first. We think you have -- we have to have a DoD Digital Corps modeled after the Medical Corps. These are digitally savvy warriors, administrators and leaders, we just need to know who they are, we need to code them in some way and we need to make sure they're in the places that have the highest return on investment. We need to train and educate warfighters to develop core competencies in using and responsibly teaming with machine systems, understanding their limitations, understanding what they should not be asked to do, etc.
And equally, AI and other emerging technologies need to feature prominently in senior leader education and training, with a key focus on ethics, the ethical use of AI, and I'll go right into that.
We're in a competition with authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes will use technology that reflect their own governing principles. We already know how China wants to use AI. They want to use it for population surveillance, they want to use it to suppress minorities, they want to use it to cut individual privacy and trample on civil liberties. That's not going to work for a democratic nation like the United States. And so this is as much a values competition as it is a technological competition.
The way Eric Schmidt, our chairman, talks about this is we're going to employ platforms which bring these technologies. So let's just think about how 5G worked. Huawei's 5G technologies allowed a country, who do this -- or uses it to essentially surveil their population. So these values are very, very critical and an important part of the competition.
And finally, we're not going to succeed if we do it alone. This is a kind of central thinking in U.S. defense strategies. So we have to promote AI interoperability and the adoption of emerging technologies across -- among our allies and our partners.
We are absolutely confident, as a commission, we can win this competition. But we will not win it if we do not organize ourselves and have a strategy and have resources for the strategy and a means by which to implement the strategy and make sure that everyone is doing their part.
Thank you.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL S. GROEN: Good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for participating in this important session.
And first I want to say thank you to Secretary Work and the National Security Commission AI -- on AI team. Just incredible work. I mean, what you see if you've read the report -- if you haven't, I encourage you to go to the website and look at the NSCAI final report.
What you see is like a deep understanding and a deep analysis of down to first principles, bare metal for what it takes for AI integration and preserving our military effectiveness. What they produced is critically important and critically important for us in the department, but is also critically important for our national competitiveness.
In the same breath I -- I'd like to say thank you to Congress and -- and department leadership, both of which clearly understand the importance and the need to innovate and modernize the way we fight and the way we do business.
And I'm happy to report, as the director of the JAIC, positive momentum toward implementation of an AI -- of implementation of AI at scale. We certainly have a long ways to go, but you can see the needle trending positive.
With bipartisan support from Congress, with great support from the DoD leadership, the services are beginning to develop AI initiatives and expand operational experimentation that is taking those first steps. The Defense agencies are reaching out daily to share their best practices with us and with each other.
The combatant commands, especially the combatant commanders, have -- have caught a glimpse of what the future might look like through a series of -- of integrative exercises. They like it and they're eager to gain these capabilities.
With the JAIC now aligned under the deputy secretary, which gives her and the rest of the department leadership access to the tools and processes to reinforce their priorities, underline our ethical foundations, integrate our enterprises and transform our business processes, and we -- we are eagerly looking forward to that work.
Like the NSCAI, we see AI as a core tenet of defense modernization. And when I say "AI," I want to be clear, I'm not just talking about the JAIC, all AI, the -- the efforts of the services, the efforts of the departments and the agencies, rides on the foundations of good networks, good data services, good security and good partnerships. And an important part of the JAIC's business model is to build those as part of our AI infrastructure.
And with lots of budget work ahead, I think -- you know, we'll hear as F.Y. '22 (fiscal year 2022) is relooked and -- and the POM (Program Objective Memorandum) '23 (2023) to '27 (2027) is developed, we'll hear a lot about modern weapons systems and concepts. And it's important that we -- we understand that their potential -- those weapon systems, those concepts, their potential to modernize our warfighting rides on those -- on the foundational data, the networks, the algorithms that we built to integrate and inform them.
We'll have to talk about these technical foundation and architectures in the same conversation that we talk about platforms. Getting AI right and our secure data fabric environment right will be central to our ability to compete effectively with the Chinese and the Russians as well, or any modern threat for that matter. And -- and there's more, actually.
So in an era of tightening budgets and -- and a -- and a focus on -- on -- on squeezing out things that are -- that are legacy or not important in the budget, the productivity gains and the efficiency gains that AI can bring to the department, especially through the business process transformation actually becomes an economic necessity. So in a squeeze play between modernizing our -- our warfare that moves at machine speed and tighter budgets, AI is doubly -- doubly necessary.
So what I'm -- what am I talking about when I talk about AI? As Secretary Work's comments convey, the integration of AI across the -- across the government and the Department of Defense is much more than just a -- than just a -- you know, a facile layer of technology applied. It's not about shiny objects.
You've heard the -- you know, the phrase: amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. Well, in this environment, amateurs talk about applications and professionals talk about architectures and networks. And elevating the AI dialogue in the department so that we are talking about the foundations of all of our modern capabilities is a really important task, one that we're -- that we're -- we're working hard on.
The core business model -- that is: what the department, you know, gives to the American people -- what our mission is doesn't change. But a modernized, data-driven software-heavy organization will do things in a different way. It's a -- it really represents a transformation of our operating model: how do we do the things that we do as the Department of Defense?
And that operating model will have to create a common data environment, where data is shared, data is authoritative, data is available. The data feeds and algorithms across the department will create productivity gains; accelerate processes; provide management visibility, insights into markets.
And if all of that sounds like a modern software-driven company -- you know, you can think -- if you think of all of our tech giants and -- and -- and smaller innovative companies across the -- U.S. economy, it's because it is. It's the same challenge. It's the same problem. And so we have examples, right? There's very little magic here.
It's about making our organization, the Department of Defense in this case, as productive and efficient as any of these modern, successful data-driven enterprises. But there's so much more, because all of this technology applies equally to our warfighting capabilities, our capabilities in the broad range of supporting activities from all the Defense agencies in other places that make up the business of the department.
We've created positive momentum for AI and we continue to build on that now. But now comes the real critical test. In -- as in any transformation, the hardest part is institutional change and change management of the workforce, and practices, and processes that drive -- that drive a business. This step will not be easy, even within the Department of Defense. But it's foundational to our competitive success, our accountability, and our affordability.
As the NSCAI work reveals, we have a generational opportunity here. For AI to be our future, we must act now. We need to start putting these places into place now. So I want to quickly describe our position through two different lenses. One is competition and the other is opportunity.
First of all, with respect to AI competition, I think it's illustrative to talk about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence as a first order. Economic forecasts predict an AI economy of 16 trillion, a $16 trillion AI economy in the next 10 years. And this will -- this could amount to massive GDP increases, 26 percent, as high as 26 percent for China, as high as 15 percent for the United States, that to participate in this competitive AI marketplace. And if we do that, this core economic competitiveness of the United States then needs to be reflected in a core military competitiveness in this space as well.
It's important to note that, you know, while we talk about a $16 trillion market in the next decade, this happens to coincide pretty closely with China's declared and often repeated intent to be globally dominant in AI by 2030. So we look at the transformation of our economy has to be accompanied with close attention to the emerging threats that are taken -- that are there declaring their intention to use this as a point of competition between autocracies and democracies.
Our forces must operate with tempo, with data-driven decisions, with human-machine teaming. Our forces must have broad situational awareness, multi-domain integration. The PRC has a robust entrepreneurial AI environment. You know, we're all familiar with, you know, Ant Financial or Alibaba, Tencent, I mean, these are global companies.
But we're also very familiar with the artifacts of population surveillance, minority oppression, the things that Secretary Work talked about under the Chinese Communist Party's rule. We read about Beijing's large-scale campuses, their tech campuses and their state-owned enterprises that create a pipeline from entrepreneurs and innovators in China to -- through the civil-military fusion that take those capabilities directly into the PLA and military capabilities without intervening accountability or transparency.
Their organizational efficiency, that autocratic rule, they count that as an advantage, is being applied directly to their AI development. And they are surging forward in their capability. This has to give us pause to contemplate. What does -- what does China's dominance in AI mean for us if they intend that dominance by 2030? What does that imply for us?
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