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Monday, September 25th, 2023

Pentagon’s Budget is so Bloated That it Needs an AI Program to Navigate it

Author:     Ken Klippenstein
Source:     The Intercept
Publication Date:     September 20 2023 | 12:35 p.m.
 Link: Pentagon’s Budget is so Bloated That it Needs an AI Program to Navigate it
Stephan:  

The United States Congress manipulated by the corporations that make up the military-industrial complex that routinely rents its members has a budget larger than the next seven high budget nations on earth. We can’t feed our children, we can’t educate them properly, we have the worst healthcare system amongst developed nations. But, by God, we have a defense budget so large that the Pentagon has had to develop an AI program, as this article describes, just to keep track of it all.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is seen on a monitor while testifying during a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing in Washington, D.C.  Credit: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.

Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER. 

“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year. 

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” […]

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