10 The United States Department of Defense (DOD) and its defense industrial base is beginning a once-in-a-century transformation to modernize its military. This transformation has become more urgent over the past decade due to growing inefficiencies within the DOD and defense industrial base, which arose from a complex array of factors, including long-term consolidation in the US defense industrial base,11 domestic political gridlock, an excessively “risk-averse” acquisition culture, 12 and a degrading unipolar geopolitical environment in which the United States must increasingly navigate a gradually emerging multipolar global power distribution.13 In this context, Generative AI is among a number of technologies that the DOD is now positioning itself to acquire and integrate more effectively in order to facilitate the bipartisan mandate for transformation. The DOD’s enterprise and mission functions within the military are critical to understand in the context of Gen-AI, because not all of the DOD’s activities have first-order linkages to warfighting (‘mission’ functions), but are profoundly impacted by Gen-AI and are nonetheless critical for the military to operate. Recruiting, education and training, administrative support, finance, supply chain management, infrastructure engineering, and many other facets of the DOD involve ‘enterprise’ functions, and these areas host roles that stand to be impacted significantly by Gen-AI tools. We acknowledge that enterprise and warfighting functions are not always mutually exclusive, but a simplified delineation helps to understand the overall system. Figure 1 attempts to capture select examples of this by showing how the military’s various activities break out across these functions, and how Gen-AI technologies could impact each area: UNDERSTANDING GEN-AI IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT OF THE DOD Generative AI Adoption in the US Military