AI/ML in the DOD’s New Fulcrum IT Advancement Strategy

AI/ML in the DOD’s New Fulcrum IT Advancement Strategy

Last month, DOD released a new strategy: Fulcrum: The Department of Defense Information Technology Advancement Strategy, which details the DOD CIO’s IT goals for FY 2025-2029. This strategy is intended to enable other DOD department and supporting IT strategies. Fulcrum is centered on four lines of effort (LOE), to, “drive sustainable growth, enhance operational effectiveness, and deliver superior value to the Warfighter.”

1. Provide Joint Warfighting IT capabilities
2. Modernize information networks and compute
3. Optimize IT governance
4. Cultivate a premier digital workforce

Given the strategy’s objective to drive IT transformational change in the defense sector, artificial intelligence plays a key role in equipping warfighters with accelerated, reliable and visual data for enhanced decision-making. Specifically, the first line of effort within the strategy calls for two measures of success in AI/ML:

Apply AI/ML to real-term warfighting decision processes.

Automate strategically relevant manual processes using robotic process automation or AI/ML

Understandably, with the increasing rate and complexity of data, the application of AI is needed to process information at increased speed and accuracy for decision advantages. The AI goals outlined above align with the increased AI spending among Defense agencies and military components in the last three fiscal years.

Sources: Deltek, FPDS

Outside of the Army, AI spending incrementally increased all three years at each agency. At the Army, AI spending peaked in FY 2022 due to a large COVID-19 related task order.

Additional observations:

• Collectively, defense spending totaled $3.7B from FY 2021 to 2023, increasing 38% in the three-year period.
• Marine Corps (Navy) AI spending jumped from $2M in FY 2021 to $26M in FY 2023.
• Washington Headquarters Service led spending under Defense agencies with $879M in the three-year period, followed by DISA with $497M and DARPA with $288M.
• Top defense sector programs represented in the three-year obligations include:
  • JAIC Joint Warfighter Decision Support
  • Technology Synchronization of Business Operation on DOD’s Advana Platform
  • Design and Development of Novel Approaches to AI Algorithms
  • BAA for testing scalable, end-to-end AI data platform solutions across nation security missions

Based on the above top programs, the Fulcrum strategy’s renewed push to strengthen warfighter capabilities with AI and data will take hold and drive future AI spending in the defense sector.

Stay tuned as Deltek publishes the Federal Artificial Intelligence Market report at the end of August. The report will focus on additional historical spending trends, AI initiatives, strategies and spending at agencies, as well as key drivers and priorities influencing federal AI use.