US NAVY
that the government cannot match and so yes it is natural to see talent coming in , moving across and sometimes out at a rate that is more dynamic than what we are accustomed to .”
A valuable constant in this equation is the military reserves . Thankfully , because of the ability for former full-time military personnel to become reservists , talent is still retained to a degree . Nevertheless , it ' s a challenge to be dealt with . “ A lot of them , even if they do leave the US Navy , remain reservists and that talent and expertise come back at some point . We keep that pipeline open to be able to recapitalise that experience – the door is always open to welcome them back and leverage their skills as reservists .
“ If I walked into the Pentagon today and ran into a junior officer that was wearing the Navy uniform , and he told me he could code artificial intelligence , 9 times out of 10 that person ' s going to be a reservist . That means they work at Amazon , or at Google , or Microsoft in their civilian jobs and they ' re a navy reservist in uniform . So I can ' t overstress or emphasise the importance of the reserves to our strategy , our designs , and our plans for AI .”
It ’ s worth remembering that the US Navy also has a strong civilian cadre – Vaughan himself isn ’ t a member of the military – and that means lots of people within the organisation are using their industry-learned skills to transform military operations , too . “ On the civilian side , I think we ' re in terrific shape . Our information warfare community has done a terrific job over the last decade of creating and sustaining a vibrant pipeline of civilians that flow into the Navy with what we call critical AI skill sets , like computer science , statistics , mathematics , data science , data engineering , AI and ML ops .”
He says that now , an important part of AI workforce strategy is elevating the uniformed ranks to a similar level of parity . “ We ' re actually today in the process of developing a robotics rating within the Navy enlisted corps , which will be huge . From there , it grows into ‘ how do we advance the Navy rating system to address things like data science and data engineering ?’ – which are skill sets core and critical to effective AI deployment . When we talk about moving something from , say , the lab to the fleet or the field , data engineers are paramount . That ' s one skill set that we ' re really keen to increase the numbers on .”
44 December 2022