Communications of the ACM
Pentagon Is Clinging to Aging Technologies, House Panel Warns
A Congressional task force found that while the Pentagon has been experimenting with artificial intelligence and machine learning, "cultural resistance to its wider adoption remains."
Credit: Josh Smith/Reuters
A bipartisan House panel said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space and biotechnology were "making traditional battlefields and boundaries increasingly irrelevant" — but that the Pentagon was clinging to aging weapons systems meant for a past era.
The panel's report, called the "Future of Defense Task Force," is one of many underway in Congress to grapple with the speed at which the Pentagon is adopting new technologies, often using the rising competition with China in an effort to spur the pace of change.
Most reach a similar conclusion: For all the talk of embracing new technologies, the politics of killing off old weapons systems is so forbidding — often because it involves closing factories or bases, and endangers military jobs in congressional districts — that the efforts falter.
The task force said it was concentrating on the next 30 to 50 years, and concluded that the Defense Department and Congress should be "focused on the needs of the future and not on the political and military-industrial loyalties of the past."
From The New York Times
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