I'm Emil Michael. I have the distinct honor of serving as the department's chief technology officer and the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering. My responsibility is to determine where the US military invests in technology so that our warfighters always have an unfair advantage, whether that battlefield is on land, sea, air, space, or cyber. Our warfighters must know that they're equipped with the best technology, and the mission of my office is to ensure that that happens.
That means we set the technology priorities for the department. We direct investments across emerging capabilities and areas. We partner with industry, startups, venture capital, academia. And the goal is to deliver tangible results to the warfighter. And the idea is not to do that in years, but to do that now.
The United States military has always, as you know, had a decisive advantage when we combine American ingenuity with American industry, American capital, with the warrior ethos. And so I want to give you a little history of what R&E, Research and Engineering, was before I started and where I think it is today and where I'd like to take it.
When I started in the organization last May, I inherited an organization that had enormous talent. Great scientists, program managers, engineers. DARPA is a crown jewel of the department and the country, frankly. And people were dedicated. I have a lot of dedicated people who've devoted their lives to the department and to the warfighter.
I also inherited a growing list of priorities. In the two previous administrations, we added critical technologies to a list of critical technology areas that we reported to Congress on and said, 'These are the things we must focus on.' That list was first 10 and then it became 14. And therein lies the problem. If everything's a priority, then nothing's actually prioritized. We have things like integrated network systems of systems, things that people didn't understand. People couldn't walk around every day and say tie what they were doing to those priority areas.
So, like in any good organization, whether it be a company or the government, you want to get those areas of focus into a tangible set that people can almost recite from memory, so they know how their day-to-day work ties into those priorities. So, I did a rigorous analysis, and we studied each of the 14 and looked at the threat environment. And we were able to take those 14 down to six, not for the sake of taking them down to six, but so that we can actually point where the department wasn't working hard enough on those problems.
And that's where we will direct our resources, our talent, and our time over the next few years. The CTAs are our guide. They're not the end-all be-all, but we also need to start moving at a velocity that's more consistent with industry. So, on top of these critical technology areas, we added sprints.
And the idea of a sprint against any of these technology areas is to make sure we have measurable progress, so we can look back in a year, 2 years, 3 years, say, 'Did we hit the milestones we thought we would?' And if we didn't, why not? And if we did, maybe we move this critical technology area off the list because we think we've achieved what we want to achieve and pick up the next most critical technology area. So, trying to move at a different pace, with a different mindset, with different accountability standards.
So, why this matters is, you know, we're at our 250th anniversary as a country, and we've accomplished incredible tasks if you think about the Manhattan Project, the internet, which came out of DARPA, GPS, stealth aircraft. We're on the verge of autonomous vehicles being able to do almost any kind of movement. We projected power through all these different eras of technological dominance, and you could see that in Midnight Hammer and Southern Spear and currently in Epic Fury.
And they showed where our technology edge was, and it's always something interesting and new. And we are learning from other conflicts in the world like Russia and Ukraine what the robot-on-robot wars look like, what a frontline battle in the future might look like. Something like 70% of the casualties have come from drones in that conflict.
And we also have the potential for—we're in the midst of a great power conflict as well. So, thinking ahead not only from what we're seeing on the battlefield today, but what we might see tomorrow. And we know that our near-peer adversaries, they're investing heavily in AI, hypersonics, autonomy, quantum, and their industrial capacity. And they're moving more quickly because of red tape and because of the cost of labor and because of latent industrial capacity.
So, our job at the department is to remove the bureaucracy as much as we can. And because when we do that, if you add the most powerful innovation ecosystem in the world, the most powerful capital markets in the world, then we will maintain and exceed our adversaries in technological dominance.
One of the areas, the critical technology areas I'd like to spend some time on today is the AI, applied AI technology area. We've all become familiar in our consumer lives over the last few years of what a ChatGPT could do. We're starting to become more aware of what AI could do from code writing, what it could do from pattern recognition, what it could do from creating creative projects that create content.
For the department, what we're looking at AI for is how to deploy it across three different manners of work: warfighting, intelligence synthesis, and enterprise operations. So, for enterprise, you could all imagine AI can improve the efficiency of any organization, and we're trying to use that as such. We have a lot of paperwork flowing through the Pentagon, PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, planning documents, reports to Congress, you name it.
The ideal would be to enable humans, not to reduce the number of humans, but to enable them to do more with less, to take the tedium out of the work that they do so they can focus their brains on the higher-order capabilities that we need them for.
On intelligence, we gather an enormous amount of intelligence, but we're limited by human synthesis. So, how do we use AI to synthesize that intelligence so that a human can look at the most important things first and start prioritizing what they're looking at to consume more so that we have more decision superiority at the edge.
And then finally for warfighting, warfighting, as you know, has a lot of logistics, planning, war gaming. There's targeting, there's all kinds of things which have been done by humans for generations that now we could have an assist from an AI capability that makes the warfighter be able to focus on the most critical tasks in their AOR or in their conflict.
And one of the examples that we've been able to show in the last few months, we launched genai.mil, which is where we have Google's Gemini, and we're launching the other AI products for the enterprise capability I talked about. And out of the 3 million people in the Department of War, we've had about 1.2 million people use it in the last 8 weeks.
Prior to that, no more than 80,000 people had ever touched an AI tool from a department system. So, you're talking about a 10-15x difference by just making the tool more readily available and usable. So, you know there's a hunger out there, a thirst out there when there's two or three billion people in the world who've touched it in the consumer world. We had barely touched it at all in the defense world, you know, there's something that needs to be done.
And we're only scratching the surface. We will deploy these AI tools deeper into our classified networks, deeper into our warfighting tools, and you will see a complete transformation, I believe, in the next 5 years of how we think about planning at the Defense Department at enterprise level, how we synthesize it at the intelligence level, and how we use these tools at a warfighting level.
The last thing we did there in the last 6 months, besides the CTAs, besides this AI prioritization, is we realigned the defense innovation ecosystem. So, now under R&E, we have the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. We retained DARPA. We also aligned the Defense Innovation Unit, the Strategic Capabilities Office, the Test Resource Management Center, and the Office of Strategic Capital.
And the idea is to have an end-to-end financing and research and engineering group that could look across those areas for new ideas, new companies, new technologies, match them with funding sources at the right time, at the right place to avoid the valley of death, which I hate the word, but hopefully we won't be using it in a few more years.
And we don't have to have a fragmented ecosystem where vendors have to go knock on 10 different doors, not really know which one's going to answer, not really know which one is going to give them a fast yes or a fast no, so that they can go back to the drawing board if they don't have what we need, or they can be brought in more quickly if they do have what we need.
So, we're continuing to supercharge that innovation system with not only the Office of Strategic Capital on the money side, but we have DIU has money, and AFWERX. So, funding vehicles, organizations, research, science, AI all put together in one organization, so we could truly lead.
You got to think about these as a rainforest of opportunity. And one example that we've had most recently in the CENTCOM theater in Iran is the Lucas drone you may have seen that was developed in R&E. It was an—how do you make a cheap one-way attack drone that's under $100,000? Because we've seen it happen all over the world. It started with an AFWERX bit of funding, and it was recently deployed successfully in the CENTCOM theater after only a few years.
We're continuing to refine that and make that something that we can mass-produce at scale, domesticate the manufacturing of it, and that's sort of the future of what we're trying to do.
I think I'd close with saying that the future really is about not only the addition of mass attritable systems produced at scale with autonomy and AI enablement along with our exquisite systems. The mix shift is changing from all exquisite to a mix of both. Any conflict, as we're seeing now in our legacy and in the future, will require some of each. And the idea is to get better, as Mike Kadanazi spoke about, producing more faster at the exquisite, but then producing many more faster, cheaper, and attritable at the other end of the spectrum.
So, that requires this bureaucratic reform. And we hope to have new entrants come that don't have to come with an army of lawyers, use years of paperwork, file lawsuits, auditors, lobbyists. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to come in. And that really becomes what the arsenal of freedom is. It's a system that has innovators, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors all working in concert with the Department of War. So, with that, I'll thank you for your time and I'm happy to take some questions.
