Pentagon’s Bureaucratic Waste Ensures US Loses Ground to China: Former Chief Software Officer
Summary
He made the comments amid increasing tensions between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concerning the de facto independence of Taiwan, mass intellectual property theft, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere. “We must understand that with the pace of IT, the only answer is continuous learning.” Chaillan said that when he was chief software officer for the Air Force, he would give his team an hour every day to dedicate to learning new concepts. It’s worse than I’ve ever seen.” Chaillan lamented the fact that chief information officers in the DoD weren’t being fully utilized, and were effectively being treated as lottery tickets whose projects may or may not be picked for funding rather than as drivers of innovation. That problem was highlighted in an open letter to the DoD penned in January by Michael Kanaan, director of operations for the Air Force-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, a joint AI research endeavor, in which he flogged military leadership about the fact that its IT professionals were working with computers that were decades old. Likewise, accounting firm Ernst and Young found in 2018 that the Defense Logistics Agency, the Pentagon’s main procurement wing, failed to properly document more than $800 million in construction projects.