Pentagon looks to AI, other tech to help tackle contested logistics challenges

With U.S. military supply chains facing a growing risk of adversary attack, senior defense officials are keen on using AI and other advanced technologies to address the challenges associated with contested logistics.

Supply chains face a variety of potential threats, including kinetic strikes, cyberattacks, geopolitical instability and infrastructure vulnerabilities.

“Logistics will be sort of the key as we go forward, ensuring that we can produce the mass and scale and really reconstitute all of our capabilities at a time of need and, you know, much faster than any adversary can,” Brent Ingraham, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said Tuesday at GDIT’s Emerge: Battlespace of the Future conference, produced by Scoop News Group.

“It touches everything though now,” he added. “It’s not just the systems that are forward or the exquisite systems. It is everything from the interconnected software, it is transportation nodes, its logistics hubs, it’s fuel, it’s ports, it’s the supply chain all the way down to the critical minerals” that that the military relies on.

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael has designated contested logistics capability as one of the department’s six Critical Technology Areas. Robert Mantz was tapped as the senior official responsible for that portfolio in the research and engineering directorate.

“From an R&E standpoint, we’re really looking at everything from how do you plan to get it there — so planning tools, the actual movers — and then finally, how do we reduce the logistics chains? So those are the three big areas we focus on. But that goes from everything from force projection from a base here [in the U.S.] to that last tactical mile,” Mantz said at the conference Tuesday.

“We’re looking at a handful of technologies. And I don’t think it’ll be a surprise to anyone here that AI tools for planning for logistics are absolutely important, tying into the data lakes that are being generated. What we’re focusing on is how do you take that AI assist and provide a commander with actionable data so he or she can make a decision as to whether … [they’re] logistically supported to initiate their next effort,” he said.

Being able to autonomously deliver materiel is “absolutely critical,” Mantz said, noting that it compounds the enemy’s targeting problem and keeps troops out of harm’s way.

“If we can go with autonomy, that means I don’t have to have people on those boats or ships, and it goes from [point] A to [point] B, or the plane goes from A to B,” he said. “Pick your poison when it comes to autonomous delivery, but those are both multipliers.”

The R&E directorate is also looking at ways to reduce logistics demand, such as hybridization of vehicles or boosting additive manufacturing capabilities so that troops can make parts in forward locations, which don’t have to be hauled in.

Power and energy are also important considerations.

“Right now, there’s a big focus to see … how do we at least initially get small modular [nuclear] reactors onto our bases for energy resilience, and then ultimately, how can we use those in more forward operating locations?” Mantz said.

Ingraham highlighted the criticality of data.

“How we’re going to win in sort of a contested logistics fight is having access to data … and that data really brings a decision advantage to a commander. But they’ve got to be able to see that data, they’ve got to be able to trust that data, and I think that’s one of the things that we got to make sure we figure out how to control is the trust and validity in that data, so that they can make the right operational decisions,” he said.

The military needs to cultivate software expertise among its personnel, he suggested.

“I think having someone in the field that can code software and change software on-the-fly is probably just as important as someone that can turn a wrench right now. And that’s one of the challenges we see from an Army perspective is ensuring that we have the ability in sort of those contested environments to apply the appropriate software tools on all of our systems as we look to move forward,” he said.

Industry is developing tools to help the military address its logistics challenges.

Shannon Judd, global director for global defense partners and mission system integrators at AWS, highlighted the Predictive Analytics and Decision Assistant (PANDA) and Cloud Edge Global Access (CEGA) as examples of capabilities that her company has been working on.

“When we step back and think about 30 years ago when systems were built, there’s assumptions that network connectivity would be available, GPS reliable, and certainly having, let’s say, local logistics safety,” Judd said during the panel. “But I think we all know that that’s not the case anymore, so it’s really all about industry working with our great partners, thinking about how logistics decision-making is really working, especially when everything around you is being attacked. So that means a lot of AI capabilities that are running when connectivity is limited, right, where you have ML capabilities at the edge doing predictive analysis, and certainly a supply chain picture that you have when, you know, let’s say, a satellite link gets jammed.”