The Defense Innovation Unit is looking for generative artificial intelligence tools to help the U.S. military with collaborative planning and war simulation.

DIU on Friday issued a call to industry to support a project called Thunderforge through its commercial solutions contract mechanism.

“The collaborative planning process is complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive. Planners and other staff must synthesize large amounts of information from disparate sources, consider multiple courses of action, and produce detailed operational plans and instructions – often under significant time pressure. As the operational environment becomes increasingly complex and dynamic, collaborative planning capabilities must be accelerated and improved without sacrificing accuracy and human judgment,” the document states.

To solve this problem, officials are trying to develop AI systems “to assist human planners and managers by quickly processing information, creating draft plans, and ultimately helping to develop options.”

Generative artificial intelligence tools can create new content, such as text, images, audio and video, based on the data they were trained with and human input.

The Pentagon leadership had previously expressed interest in multimodal AI.

The DIU’s tender states that the organization is looking for a technology that can quickly capture, process and summarize large amounts of information relevant to military planning from “various source modalities and data formats.”

The wish list includes the ability to identify important insights, patterns and relationships from the data fed into the system and, among other desired features, to create draft operating plans, concept plans and operating orders.

War games are expected to serve as a basis for operational planning and activities.

The authorities are looking for AI solutions that can conduct “automated strategy games for dealing with likely enemy actions” and produce “comparative analyses of the advantages, disadvantages and risks of COA,” the tender states.

To maintain human oversight, the Department of Defense wants to give employees the ability to easily review, modify, refine and compare the products produced by AI.

Responses to the call must be submitted by September 6.

DIU noted that it is looking for contractors who already have experience and authority to work on classified networks, as well as employees who are approved to handle top secret/sensitive information (TS/SCI). In addition, companies whose solutions have been deployed on information systems with Impact Level 6 or higher – or who have an appropriate Authorization to Operate (ATO) – will be at an advantage.

By leveraging its authority in commercial solutions and other transactions, the DIU aims to reduce the red tape associated with the Pentagon’s traditional procurement processes and enable companies to quickly win contracts.

Thunderforge’s RFP noted that contractors awarded other prototype contracts may also receive follow-on production contracts if their technology meets the requirements.

“The follow-on production contract or transaction will be available to one or more organizations within the Department of Defense and therefore the scope of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the OT prototype,” the document said.

DIU’s outreach to industry is the latest expression of the Pentagon’s interest in using generative artificial intelligence to support military decision-makers.

In June, the Army’s Chief Information Officer released guidelines for the development and deployment of the service’s novel AI, including large-scale language models.

“Gen AI models offer unique and exciting opportunities for the Army. These models have the potential to transform mission processes by automating and executing specific tasks with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Commanders and senior leaders should encourage the use of Gen AI tools for the appropriate use cases,” CIO Leonel Garciga wrote in a memo to commands and offices across the department.

Leaders in the Department of the Air Force have expressed explicit interest in using generative artificial intelligence for war games.

The Air Force Futures office at the Pentagon is responsible, among other things, for using war games and workshops to develop strategies and concepts, conduct integrated force design, and conduct operational environment assessments.

During a virtual event in April hosted by the Mitchell Institute, Lt. Gen. David Harris, vice chief of staff for Air Force Futures, mentioned that he recently visited the DAF and Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI Accelerator Hub.

“We’re initially exploring that as part of our war game methodology. And that’s the ability to do thousands of iterations either using an automated assistant or using a knowledge assistant (or) even using something as simple as a quick decision in some of these games. So instead of just having three rounds against an opponent, I can do thousands of iterations in a round to understand what some of the optimal solutions are. Maybe if you deploy your troops in the northern sector instead of the southern sector, another opportunity will emerge. And I think understanding some of that trade space is the area where AI can help us a lot,” Harris said.