May 27, 2022
Artificial Intelligence’s Role in Trusted National Security Supply Chains
U.S. economic prosperity and national security is at risk due to a dependency on the resiliency, diversity, and security of global supply chains. The U.S. government established Executive Orders, Acts of Congress, and Federal Task Forces that champion the dire need for supply chain reform to protect all aspects of national power. The American public has felt the impact of consumer product availability and have witnessed how unprecedented world events can impact their personal comfort. A less evident aspect of concern is the inherent risk to national security when the totality of Defense Industrial Base (DIB) supply lines is not understood. For top-level policies to be effective in addressing this national security concern, they must be backed with pragmatic Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to verify trusted suppliers.
Major technology companies, including IBM, have introduced supply chain AI workflow solutions that support lower costs, regulatory compliance, and product tracking. This technology also has the potential to “self-heal” during the massive shock of an unforeseen pandemic, natural disaster, or cyber-attack. It is critical that AI adoption also evolve in the name of national security resilience to identify multi-tier trust of the companies involved in the process. The current visible paradigm of supply chain management is oriented on point-to-point transactions between top-level suppliers and buyers. The vulnerable sub-tier, or upstream, supply chain network is more opaque, largely due to organizational hesitancy to share information that can compromise competitive position, reveal compliance posture, or highlight security concerns.
U.S. economic prosperity and national security is at risk due to a dependency on the resiliency, diversity, and security of global supply chains.
The illusive picture of full-tier supply sources available to regulators and national security agencies can be exposed through machine learning (ML) platforms produced by emerging AI companies like Altana Technologies. Altana’s mission is to find truth in the global supply chain by pioneering a new technology, federated learning, to bring ML computation directly to siloed data that can never be pooled directly due to concerns over privacy, intellectual property, and sovereignty. The result is a living, intelligent model of global supply chain suppliers on top of a federated network of protected data.
Read more from Air University.
More from CNAS
-
Hellscape Taiwan: A Porcupine Defense in the Drone Age
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks It is 2029. General Secretary Xi Jinping has given the order for the People’s Liberation Army to forcibly take Taiwan...
By Stacie Pettyjohn & Molly Campbell
-
Negotiations With Iran Are Likely 'DOA,' Says Wasser
Video
President Donald Trump is telling Iran it "better get serious" about negotiations, but Becca Wasser, defense lead for Bloomberg Economics and adjunct senior fellow at the Cent...
By Becca Wasser
-
Video
Defense / Middle East Security
CNN: 1,000 Army Paratroopers Deploy to Middle East in DaysBecca Wasser, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security joins CNN to discuss the deployment of troops to Iran and the status of negotiations.Watch the fu...
By Becca Wasser
-
Commentary
Defense / Middle East Security
What It Would Take to Reopen the Strait of HormuzThe strait is about 140 miles (225 kilometers) long and only 25 miles wide at its narrowest point, meaning ships have little room to maneuver and are easy targets for attacks ...
By Becca Wasser
