Jim McAleese, founder of McAleese & Associates and three-time Wash100 winner, reported on Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks speaking about the Department of Defense’s move to create a Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve to facilitate joint warfighting concept development competition across service branches.
McAleese’s new report also highlights the new artificial intelligence initiative and the remarks of top defense officials at congressional meetings focused on the fiscal 2022 budget request for the department.
Hicks, a 2021 Wash100 awardee, said during the Defense One Tech Summit Monday that DOD will offer experimentation funds and incentives to foster a military innovation ecosystem.
“To compete for the RDER [funding], you’ve got to have multiple components involved, you’ve got to be tied in to where we’re heading on our joint concepts,” the deputy defense secretary was quoted as saying by Breaking Defense.
She unveiled the DOD AI and Data Acceleration initiative Monday during her speech at the department’s Artificial Intelligence Symposium and Tech Exchange.
“Its goal is to rapidly advance data and AI dependent concepts, like joint all-domain command and control, to the ADA initiative [to] generate foundational capabilities through a series of implementation experiments or exercises, each one purposefully building understanding through successive and incremental learning,” she said, according to DOD News.
