As AI capabilities become a daily norm, officials at the Department of the Navy warn of the need to look back at legacy data while simultaneously creating clean data sets for AI tools to defend against foreign adversaries.
During the AFCEA NOVA Naval IT Day 2023, on Oct 13, Duncan McCaskill, acting chief data officer at the Department of the Navy, discussed the pivotal role that legacy will play in adversary’s capabilities to conduct cyber-attacks on the U.S. with the help of AI and machine learning (ML) technology.
“Legacy data is really, really, really important. And if we don’t think that all of our adversaries are going back and looking through everything that they have for decades on us and using all the things that they have on us, we should be doing those types of things for ourselves,” said McCaskill.
“Looking back all the data that we have been able to go back and market that screen at scale, understand what those data options are, is critically important,” added McCaskill.
During the same panel, Nathan Hagan, Navy CNO deputy data officer, furthered the discussion by adding that the Navy will have a “clear date set, that all Navy data will be categorized and cataloged by the end of fiscal year 2026.”
Hagan sees this as a potential data set that can be used to create effective AI models to meet Navy mission goals.
“The algorithms from an AI perspective that are really tied to use cases will then be able to tap into that well-structured data governance model and pull the data they need to train appropriately and then move forward,” said Hagan.
While AI technology presents some substantial capabilities to advance Navy mission goals, this also comes at a time when a recent memo from the Navy’s acting Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun, warned about the need for “interim guardrail guidance when considering the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Large Language Models (LLM).”
Regardless, McCaskill and Hagan see potential in the new technology and a need to ramp up uses of it, including providing clean data sets for new AI tools.
“Navy’s not going to get there without… some help from Marine Corps and Air Force and cross-pollinating all those types of methods and using each other’s tooling where appropriate,” concluded McCaskill.
