Modernizing the Air Force through “Base Camp” & “Tesseract”
How Airmen at Amazon and Delta intend to posture the Air Force for the Age of Artificial Intelligence
By: Major Garrett Hernandez, Education with Industry Fellow
Should the Air Force manage its wide array of aircraft fleets the way Delta manages passenger jets? How can the Air Force educate Airmen in machine learning concepts the way Amazon does for its software developers and machine learning scientists? Would having answers to these questions accelerate the pace that Airmen can develop and employ autonomous robots and other artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to produce Airpower? Possible answers to these questions exist at the core of two proposals crafted by Education with Industry (EWI) Airmen embedded with Amazon and Delta.
Though many are familiar with the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) as the service’s graduate school of engineering and management, few are aware that AFIT also administers the EWI program where Airmen from the officer, enlisted, and civilian ranks are competitively selected by their functional communities for 10-month educational fellowships with corporate partners. This year, over 60 EWI fellows are working at 39 top-tier companies with a pair of goals in mind – gaining hands-on exposure of best practices that can transform the Air Force and building bridges between the military, academic, and industrial worlds. Both Base Camp and Tesseract are proposals that seek to leverage the benefits of the EWI program while targeting specific Air Force problems.
Captain John Radovan and Technical Sergeant (select) Armando Cabrera aim to educate Airmen in AI similar to the way that their enrollment at Amazon’s Machine Learning University helped them in their roles on Amazon’s Prime Air and Robotics teams. As AI becomes more ubiquitous in Air Force enterprise solutions, both Radovan and Cabrera recognized the vital need to institutionalize an organic AI competency and not contract out these skills. The DoD AI Strategy advocates for “partnering with leading private sector technology companies, academia, and global allies and partners.”1 Base Camp is an initiative that addresses the AI education shortfall by tailoring industry and academia AI training best-practices in a way that makes sense for the Air Force. “We would not have been able to frame this type of solution if it weren’t for our EWI experience” commented Radovan.
Base Camp – aptly named in homage to the essential pass-through points before mountain ascents – envisions teams of AI-competent Airmen leading others as they look to employ AI tools. Key among the Base Camp offerings is helping Airmen understand that, once deployed, AI systems can incur massive maintenance costs due to boundary erosion, data dependencies, configuration issues, and monitoring and testing – costs also known as technical debt.2 To keep AI life cycle costs down and AI systems functioning, it is vital for senior leaders to understand the hidden technical debt involved in applying AI solutions to meet current and future defense challenges. Additionally, AI brings unique and new ethical considerations for military applications and operations.3 For this reason, it is imperative that all Airmen receive some level of ethical AI training.
Ultimately, Base Camp’s mission is to develop an organic world-class AI workforce across all ranks and specialties through streamlined, non-traditional pathways. Doing so will involve mirroring industry leaders to accelerate the propagation of AI knowledge across the Air Force. Radovan and Cabrera also recommend leveraging Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) AI experts to mitigate the current the Air Force’s AI subject matter expert (SME) shortfall. Once launched (in tandem with a larger Air Force AI Accelerator at MIT in Boston), Base Camp will offer targeted AI training based on an Airman’s position and function along the spectrum of strategic, operational, and technical (or tactical) effort.
If Base Camp can be classified as an AI educational proposal, Tesseract is a complementary initiative that seeks to enable AI for Airmen in the logistics and maintenance communities. Named for the fictional hypercube at the center of battles between heroes and villans over its limitless energy in the Avengers movies, Tesseract symbolizes an effort to harness the creative energies of logistics and maintenance Airmen that defy entropy through sustaining the readiness of weapon system fleets beyond expected service life.
The former Secretary of the Air Force, Heather Wilson, directed logistics and maintenance leaders to “leverage mature, new, and emerging technology to reduce sustainment costs and improve readiness.”4 To meet that intent, logistics and maintenance Airmen are marching forward in comprehensive Digital Transformation and Flight Line of the Future efforts to rapidly replace pencil and paper with WiFi-enabled tablets, custom-coded apps, and intelligent analytics. Tesseract proposes accelerating these efforts by empowering full teams of Airmen devoted to these projects to operate at the speed of need instead of having to inject new technology through traditional corporate and bureacratic methods.
The industry inspiration comes from the insights of Major Garrett Hernandez and Captain Kelsey Smith. Hernandez (at Amazon) and Smith (at Delta) began to notice that the lessons they were learning from their EWI assignments could be combined to produce profound effects in Air Force logistics and maintenance operations. Smith’s fellowship has focused on learning the story behind Delta’s industry-leading fleet management model and the role of predictive algorithms and data science applications. Taking a closer look, it is easy to see why the Air Force is interested in Smith’s ability to translate how Delta eliminated over 99% of maintenance-caused cancellations while simultaneously cutting almost half a billion dollars in supply chain inventory.5 “I’ve spent almost 10 years working in traditional field-level aircraft maintenance, but it took me coming to Delta to see a different perspective and how we can be better,” commented Smith.
Similarly, Hernandez has focused on how Amazon’s mostly behind-the-scenes transformation of supply chain and distribution operations has enabled the company’s meteoric rise as a global e-commerce giant. While Amazon customers order packages by the millions, few customers are aware of the integration of thousands of autonomous robots and AI-applications in analytics and optimization that make same- and next-day delivery possible.6 “Our leaders at the Pentagon leveraged the EWI program to put us in this position to learn. It’s easy to see how Amazon’s investments in autonomous flying drones, sidewalk robots, and cashierless retail shopping can also apply to the work that goes into launching jets everyday. We wanted to propose a plan for how Airman can build their own tools using these game-changing technologies” explains Hernandez. The plan involves launching a tech innovation foundry and software factory in Atlanta in continued partnership with the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Delta TechOps, Amazon, and other companies and academic institutions as necessary.
Perhaps the most impressive takeaway from learning about Base Camp and Tesseract is that they are just a couple of examples among dozens of insights and proposals coming from the EWI program in 2019. This year’s class has Airmen in companies assigned to traditional companies like Boeing as well as non-traditional defense contractors like SpaceX. “Career Field Managers have tough jobs and see the EWI program as a win-win scenario where they can develop the future of their force while also bringing back industry best practices to solve real problems” mentions Captain Thomas Fister, the EWI Program Manager at AFIT. “In this light, it’s easy to see how the demand for EWI billets has almost doubled in the last two years as functional communities realize the near-immediate return on investment” says Fister.
As Base Camp and Tesseract materialize, they appear to be logical extensions of senior service leader desire to break old paradigms and assign formations of Airmen in non-traditional roles with industry and academic partners.7 Deeper looks at how adversaries like China and Russia mobilize advantages for their militaries on the advances of their civilian economies show the US is serious about maintaining its edge using similar tactics on its own shores.8
