18th Airborne Corps’ 'Tricky' AI Journey
The leaders of the 18th Airborne want to become the Army’s first-ever AI-enabled corps.
18th Airborne Corps officials currently label the corps, known as “America’s Contingency Corps,” as ready to “seamlessly form a joint and coalition task force globally and defeat any adversary.”
To make the artificial intelligence (AI) jump, Brig. Gen. John Cogbill, deputy commanding general, 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty, says it needs to build and develop four things:
- A culture of innovation
- A data-literate workforce
- Data governance and management
- AI-enabled infrastructure
The 18th Airborne Corps adopted the AI-enabled Maven Smart System, which helps sort through reams of targeting data to support long-range fires. Gen. Cogbill gave the system a “C” and said officials would welcome any system that performs better.
But so far, that transition to an AI-enabled corps presents challenges.
“AI is tricky because models can have hallucinations,” said Gen. Cogbill at TechNet Augusta 2024. “There’s all kinds of AI ethics and things that we need to be cognizant of. It could lead you to the wrong conclusion, depending on how the data is input [or] how that algorithm is working.”
To address these inaccuracies, officials with the 18th Airborne Corps conduct disciplined checkups called "1,000 decisions an hour," according to Gen. Cogbill. Every 90 days, members test, change and inquire about retooling algorithms.
“We literally have people stand over top of our analysts as this thing says, ‘This is a tank,’” said Gen. Cogbill. “Analyst [then] says, ‘Yes, that’s a tank.’ And we work our way through that, and we provide that feedback. So we have a baseline from where we started in 2020, and every 90 days, we have another notch, another baseline to measure to. And every time we get better, but we can never take that for granted.”
As the 18th Airborne Corps looks to make this transition, it has also shut down its corps data warfare company. The company, which was established on April 1, 2022, was designed to provide the corps with a foundation of innovative project management and development.
“Chief’s guidance was not to have provisional units,” said Gen. Cogbill. “We don’t have money to innovate. We don’t have RDT&E [Research, Development, Test and Evaluation appropriations]. We don’t have structure to innovate. We need to innovate organically.”
To fight with live data, the general said, the 18th Airborne Corps needs to sustain data teams organized for a purpose, a fused common operating picture, real-time logistics data bridged into the common operating picture, an assessment workbench for evaluation of battle damage assessments and the use of cloud-based enterprise services for agile communications.
At the same time, the corps needs to improve three main components: battle damage assessments, visualization and edge computing capabilities.
