Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is very excited to roll out his new AI tool because it is “the future of American warfare” and will somehow “make our fighting force more lethal than ever before.”
No, really. Here’s the official press release:
"There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance. We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America's next Manifest Destiny, and we're ensuring that we dominate this new frontier."
This glob of nonsense comes from Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Michael used to be the chief business officer at Uber, so he knows how to hype a rollout.
Manifest Destiny is, of course, the ethos that President Donald Trump loves to invoke. Of course he adores the idea that the United States of America was just so gosh darn exceptional that God wanted us to expand westward and displace or kill the people already there,
That said, it isn’t clear how AI is our new Manifest Destiny, because what?? But given this is coming from Hegseth and this administration, it basically means “Somehow, we will use AI to kill more people more better.”
Now, the Pentagon already had its own internal large language model for years, but what good is that? Why would this administration use an existing government tool when it can instead throw your taxpayer dollars at the big tech companies seeking to curry Trump’s favor? So now, every DOD employee has mandatory GenAI, which is basically just Google’s Gemini.
Related | Hegseth could have killed troops with Signal chat leak
The rollout of this thing was a typical administration event, long on hype but short on execution. Hegseth did a big video with a bunch of word salad and got a bunch of attention, but at the time of launch, the link to the much-vaunted GenAI.Mil went to an empty website.
Service members learned about this from a weird surprise invitation and, since they had never been told they were getting the exciting gift of a chatbot, thought the invite looked suspicious.
To be fair, even if the invite wasn’t suspicious, it was dumb.
“Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation not antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter,” the missive claimed.
Buddy, it’s a chatbot.
The Pentagon is also hyping this effort with AI-generated posters of Hegseth, a la Uncle Sam, saying, “I want you to use AI.
Truly a stirring call to action.
While all of this is stupid as hell, that doesn’t mean it’s not also a sign of something terrible. Tech creeps like Alex Karp at Palantir are already embracing ongoing U.S. strikes on Venezuelan boats as a business opportunity, a way to better leverage or synergize their technology to help Hegseth do murders.
Related | This tech bro hopes Trump's boat bombings will bring big bucks
Having Hegseth be the face of a technology push is ridiculous, given that when he tried to use the encrypted Signal app as a way to sidestep requirements to keep records, he ended up on a group chat sharing classified information about military actions with the editor in chief of The Atlantic.
What this is really about is building an alliance between the DOD and AI companies so that the government dollars can keep flowing to those companies, along with an assurance that there will be no pesky regulations. And you thought the previous military-industrial complex was bad!
