WASHINGTON — After a year-long push to rationalize its previously uncoordinated AI efforts, the Defense Intelligence Agency is institutionalizing its new, more centralized and more efficient approach, the DIA’s chief AI officer said Thursday.
“One of the things that we were serious about was getting out capabilities quickly,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Kinney at SCSP’s ai+intelligence conference here. “[When] I talk to the team … I reinforce this frequently: I want you to move like somebody’s on your heels, and they’re about ready to eat you.”
Those reforms include a new “hub-and-spoke” organization centered around the Digital Modernization Accelerator (DMA), created on March 1 as the permanent incarnation of the ad hoc Task Force Sabre, Kinney said. Nicknamed the “Maverick Accelerator,” it is already helping the DIA consolidate scarce expertise and push out technical support — not just to the agency’s own directorates, Kinney said, but also to the four-star theater Combatant Commands around the world.
Kinney, officially DIA’s mobilization assistant, was tapped as chief AI officer by then-director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse. “I found out pretty quickly was that we had a number of AI initiatives underway, but … they were bespoke capabilities [and/or] siloed,” Kinney recounted. “I told him [Kruse] … ‘we’re at risk if we don’t get this right, of driving ourselves into irrelevance in a short period of time.’”
That dire report led DIA to stand up Task Force Sabre, a tight team of just 25 people with a 12-month mandate to jumpstart reform.
One tool Sabre embraced was contracting through the streamlined Other Transaction Authority (OTA) process — a shortcut in wide use across the Defense Department, but something DIA had not done “in years,” Kinney said. By contrast, he went on, “we’ve done in the last year, [through] Task Force Sabre, six OTAs. The last one went from RFI [Request For Information] to award in 40 days.”
That race to deliver new technology also brought the agency its own classified generative AI, called ChatDIA, the first such chatbot to run on the top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System network. ChatDIA was first deployed on a smaller scale last fall and then ramped up in December, Kinney said.
The DIA has also started sending out small “mission integration teams” of three or four AI experts to the Combatant Commands, helping COCOM not just to use new tech but to reorganize their staff processes and workflows to take better advantage of AI.
“We did this as a pilot in INDOPACOM in January, and it was a huge success,” Kinney said. “We’ve deployed them in STRATCOM, and we’re moving out and building out several teams to [support] the warfighters at the edge.”
Kinney’s next ambition is to implement agentic AI that’s able to act as a semi-autonomous assistant to humans, he said. “Our intention is to take the applications we’re building, tie them together and build agents,” he said. “We’re moving very rapidly towards [deploying] agents in the classified fabric.”
