“The joint planning process is complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. Planners and other staff members must synthesize large amounts of information from diverse sources, consider multiple courses of action (COA), and produce detailed operational plans and orders – often under significant time pressure. As the operational environment becomes more complex and dynamic, there is a need to accelerate and enhance joint planning capabilities while maintaining rigor and human judgment,” the document states.
To get at that problem, officials are looking to gen AI systems “to augment human planners and command staff by rapidly processing information, producing draft planning products, and ultimately aiding in generating options.”
The DIU solicitation notes that the organization is looking for tech that can quickly ingest, process and summarize large volumes of info relevant to military planning from “diverse source modalities and data formats.”
The wish list includes the ability to identify key insights, patterns and relationships from the data fed into the system, as well as produce draft operations plans, concept plans and operations orders, among other desired attributes.Officials seek AI solutions that can perform “automated wargaming of courses of action against likely adversary actions” and produce “comparative analysis of COA advantages, disadvantages, and risks,” per the solicitation.
To help maintain human oversight, the Defense Department wants personnel to be able to easily review, modify, refine and compare products that the AI churns out.DIU noted that it’s looking for contractors that already have experience and authorization to work on classified networks and employees who are cleared to handle top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI). Additionally, companies whose solutions have been deployed on information systems at Impact Level 6 or higher — or have an equivalent Authority to Operate (ATO) — will have a leg up.
