Under Secretary of War Emil Michael: War Department Placing AI ‘into People’s Hands’ to ‘Keep Our Country Safer'

Under Secretary of War Emil Michael said during a Breitbart News policy event that the Department of War has dramatically expanded access to artificial intelligence across the department as part of its AI acceleration strategy, with roughly 1.7 million people now using the technology for enterprise, intelligence, and warfighting purposes.

Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle asked Michael about the AI acceleration strategy rolled out by the Department of War in January and where its implementation currently stands.

“AI is changing a lot of things. Most of the people in this room have one of these AI apps on your phone, right? So the consumer adoption of AI was happening in the world incredibly fast, but at the Department of War, out of three and a half million people, we had less than 70,000 people using it for just basic business functions,” Michael said.

“It turns out it just wasn’t accessible. So you had the same people using it in their personal lives, but not using it for work reasons,” he continued.

Michael said the department sought to make AI available across a range of functions because of the size of its workforce and bureaucracy.

“And we have a lot of reasons to use that. We’re literally the biggest bureaucracy in the world with the biggest number of people in the world. So we figured out a way to get AI on people’s desktops, on their phones, for enterprise use cases like the things you use to make any business efficient, for intelligence use cases, and for warfighting use cases,” he said.

Michael said adoption has increased substantially in recent months.

“And in the last six months, eight months, we’ve gotten 1.7 million people using it, which is a big difference in that amount of time,” he said. “And so that was just step one, which is get it out in people’s hands, have them start using it, and see how better it makes them at their job.”

He said the department is now working to expand how personnel use AI, including for military and intelligence applications.

“And now we’re trying to go deeper and teach people how to use it for things like fighting conflicts, for taking all the intelligence that we get as a nation and real-time synthesizing it, so we keep our country safer, and we’re more successful in battle,” Michael said. “So that was the idea behind acceleration.”

Boyle then asked Michael about GenAI.mil, including where the platform stands in terms of implementation and adoption and how he would explain it to a broader audience.

Boyle then asked Michael about GenAI.mil and where the platform stands in terms of implementation and adoption.

“The last administration left us with this 70,000 sort of very limited AI capability, and so when Secretary Hegseth said, ‘Now we’ve got to go big,’” Michael said.

Michael described GenAI.mil as the department’s centralized way of giving personnel access to artificial intelligence models within Department of War systems, including systems that must account for classified information.

“Just think about it as the place you go on the internet, Department of War, because we have classified systems, right? So not everyone could just walk in and get on a laptop and put it in your phone right now here,” he said.

Michael said the platform currently includes Google Gemini and is expected to add additional artificial intelligence models.

“So that’s where we have Google Gemini and soon-to-be Grok from SpaceX and soon-to-be ChatGPT from OpenAI, and that’s where they get to choose the model based on what they’re doing, and it’s just our way of accessing these frontier AI models,” he said.