In March 2020, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) when the pandemic hit. His agency’s mission is to provide indications and warning on crises like these, and he has just sent 75% of his workforce home. Now he has 25% of his workforce working on a no-fail mission with critical questions from the workforce to answer, like “how does this end?”
In the 36th and final year of his US Army career, COVID challenged his leadership. He relied on building trust and transparency across the Defense Intelligence Agency. In one incident, it was as granular as turning up the temperature of water in the bathroom sinks so people would keep their hands under the water for the recommended minute plus—a small, thoughtful touch that reassured his people that he had their back during one of the more extraordinary challenges in our nation’s history.
Fast forward to 2024, when now-retired Gen. Ashley joins Primer’s Advisory Board. His COVID leadership experience and his lifelong leadership principles come full circle in the promise and process of artificial intelligence—a technology that relies on trust and transparency while helping to answer questions like, “how does this end?”
Getting to the root of how the IC operates.
In a recent talk with Gen. Ashley, he discussed the complexities of evaluating strategic risk in today’s rapidly evolving global environment and expressed optimism about the caliber of emerging leaders and how they have access to greater information—and greater tools—compared to previous generations.
The key in challenging situations is to first understand what you’re trying to accomplish. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Do you understand this problem? And have you asked the hard questions? This discovery will provide the foundation for your analysis.
“Our job in the IC is really about informing decisions, not making decisions. And we’re trying to reduce uncertainty,” Ashley explains. “At a strategic level, you have time to think about it. On an operational level, time starts to get compressed. We’re not predisposed to any outcome or any course of action. Our task is to look at the information as it exists and deal in uncertainty. We, the IC, must be agnostic to the decision otherwise we risk adding bias to our analysis”
He goes on to add, “there are some things we deal with that are truths, yes. But more times than not, the IC is speaking in terms of probabilities and confidence levels. Many times, we are not dealing with absolute truths.”
Getting to the root of how AI operates.
Recalling his time at DIA, Gen. Ashley recalls that there was more and more publicly available and commercially available information. “We were just getting into machine learning and looking at publicly available information to provide indications and warning and then layering that in with the classified stuff to the point where we could actually do an alert, write a report and disseminate it without a human in the loop.”
Again, trust and transparency come to the forefront, forming a common ground between AI and the IC. When it comes to AI and national security, you can’t just take a leap of faith. You want to know how the algorithms are trained and where they’ve gotten that information. I can’t just push the ‘I Believe’ button,” says Ashley. “I need to understand the technology, the methodology, and the sources. And so, as you see a lot of the discussions that happen around artificial intelligence, you also see a lot of discussions around transparency.”
Bringing AI and the IC together for the most important reasons of all.
Now that Gen. Ashley is retired, why is he still invested in this to the point that he became involved as an advisor with Primer? “I’m interested in this for my grandkids, for my kids, for my friends that are still in uniform, and for their kids that are in uniform. Because I want any US service member or civilian to go into a fair fight, and I always want our adversaries to go into an unfair fight. This will save lives. This will help us. This will help us make decisions at speed and scale when people are in harm’s way. Why would you not want to be able to do that or be part of a team that is doing that?”
To learn more about the technology Gen. Ashley is referring to, visit Primer.ai and see how trust and transparency play into creating the IC’s most dependable, hallucination-free decision support AI.
