JOIN THE REBEL ALLIANCE
DDS x AI Village for DEF CON 31
By: jinyoung englund
OUTGOING Acting Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Directorate for Digital Services & DDS DIRECTOR / INCOMING CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, CDAO ALGORITHMIC WARFARE DIRECTORATE (AW)
We JUST RETURNED FROM DEF CON 31, aka Hacker Summer Camp, WHERE WE FELT right at home. Did you know that DEF CON is military speak for “Defense Readiness Condition?” This is the military’s way of ranking defense readiness for a potential nuclear attack – like the false alarm in 1979 that unintentionally coincided with and then legitimized the plot for the 1983 classic, War Games, where a high school student accidentally hacks into a military supercomputer and starts a game of Global Thermonuclear War.
Spoiler alert: The hacker in a hoodie saves the day by cleverly tricking the AI to play itself, resulting in the AI realizing that all possible outcomes are bad and so, “the only winning move is not to play.”
Had the hacker not succeeded, nukes would have been launched and ended all humankind.
Dr. Craig Martell speaks on DEF CON’s main stage: "Shall we play a game? Just because a Large Language Model speaks like a human, doesn’t mean it can reason like one."
Today, integrating AI in defense is no longer science fiction and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has an imperative to ensure the responsible and secure development and implementation of AI in the Department of Defense (DoD). It’s serendipitous that this year, as part of the newly formed CDAO, DDS partnered with AI Village to build a “Hacking LLM’s 101” web app as well as a mini rover robot workshop “Chatbot Take the Wheel” to support the Generative AI Red Team Event where hackers get access to large language models built by Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability to find bugs so that they can be built more securely and responsibly.
DDS and CDAO team members work together to run workshops in AI Village. Dr. Craig Martell successfully hacks an LLM with a prompt injection.
This year’s theme was “The Future Will Prevail.” We believe that the future of how humans and machines co-exist is ours to shape, but we’re only going to be successful if policymakers, practitioners, and hackers work together. In our pursuit of this interdisciplinary approach, DDS, and now the greater CDAO, serves as a revolving door for top-tier technical talent between government and industry.
Since DDS was founded as the original digital talent management pilot in DoD by the late Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in 2015, about a third of us have continued on to leadership roles throughout the U.S. Government. From the White House to the Department of Homeland Security, elsewhere within the Department of Defense to academia and the defense industrial base, we have expanded to become the Rebel Alliance.
DDS Alum who have moved on to leadership roles throughout DoD, USG, and the DIB.
Today, I join that cadre of DDS alum and start in my new role as the inaugural Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) on the executive leadership team in CDAO’s Algorithmic Warfare (AW) Directorate. As CSO, I will work with CDAO directorates, DoD at large, and the industry to develop and align a strategy for the successful implementation of CDAO’s data, analytics, and AI platform components to deliver quality data and responsible and secure AI capabilities for the warfighter.
It has been my honor and privilege to lead the extraordinary humans of DDS through our “Series A” injection where we joined forces with the former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Chief Data Office (CDO), and Advana to become the CDAO. When I took on this role seven months ago, the first thing Dr. Martell, the Chief Digital and AI Officer, said to me was, “The rebels won.” The challenge now was to find a way to scale DDS culture and talent throughout the Department. Over the last several months, our team did the work necessary to prepare DDS to pivot for scale.
How we work – interdisciplinary product teams who practice user-centered design principles, agile product development, and agile talent management, will remain. What we deliver will now have a lasting, institutional impact because the CDAO is uniquely equipped and empowered to rewrite policy, upgrade our acquisitions process, institute modern technology processes at scale, and recruit the right talent.
Jennifer Hay will be taking the helm as the fifth Director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) in the Directorate for Digital Services (CDAO-DS). She brings to DDS nearly 20 years of experience in the Department, including being on the ground floor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when DDS was founded. I am confident her recent experience in the private sector ensures DDS will continue to lead with industry best practices while her experience in navigating the Department will ensure we impart lasting institutional change.
While some people think that DDS has a monopoly on top-tier talent, the truth is, talent exists everywhere and it’s our collective responsibility to find one another. In my nearly four years with DDS, I have come across exceptional civilians and service members throughout the crevices of DoD and USG, doing their best to hack the bureaucracy on their own. I’m telling you now – you are not alone. Together, we are the Rebel Alliance and we want to work with you. Especially if you’re working towards the mission of enabling data, analytics, and AI at scale at DoD. It is critical we get this right. Our future depends on it.
When asked why top-tier technical talent would want to work for DoD, the late Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said, “I can’t offer them money, I can’t offer the fanciest kind of circumstances and glamor, but we have a mission.”
