SCSP calls for DOD 'Strategic Compute Reserve' to ensure adequate AI infrastructure

The Special Competitive Studies Project has offered a proposal for establishing a "Strategic Compute Reserve" at the Defense Department to ensure adequate computing power is available to the military for artificial intelligence-powered operations in a crisis. “In a world moving at the speed of data, slower queues and greater downtime translate directly into strategic disadvantage -- and speed of preparation translates directly into strategic advantage. America enters this competition with assets no rival can match: the world’s leading AI companies, the world’s largest cloud infrastructure, and a proven tradition of harnessing commercial strength for national defense,” according to the July 30 post by SCSP’s Andreas Theodoropoulos. “What remains is to connect them,” according to the post, titled “The Department of War Should Establish a Strategic Compute Reserve.” SCSP was founded by AI investor and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “A Strategic Compute Reserve would do exactly that, ensuring that the extraordinary computing power America builds in peacetime stands ready to serve the nation in war. It is the insurance policy the Department of War needs -- and one the United States is uniquely positioned to create,” the post says. According to the post, “Modern warfare is increasingly constrained not by the availability of weapons, platforms, or personnel, but by access to the computing power needed to connect and employ them at speed. The recent conflict with Iran made this vividly clear.” “During Operation Epic Fury, American forces leveraged AI tools such as the Maven Smart System to identify, prioritize, and strike 13,000 targets in the first 38 days of combat -- an unprecedented degree of speed and scale in the history of warfare,” Theodoropoulos writes. However, he notes “compute is a resource in fierce demand” and that major private sector firms “plan their compute needs five to ten years in advance.” “The lesson from the commercial sector is unmistakable: organizations can no longer assume compute will be available when they need it, in the quantities they need it. Those who prepare today will hold the advantage tomorrow,” the SCSP post says. “The compute constraints facing the commercial sector should sharpen the Department of War’s focus, given its own rapidly growing appetite for data-driven military systems,” SCSP says. “The Pentagon has confirmed that Maven Smart System usage during Epic Fury surged month-to-month by 38 percent on unclassified workloads and 89 percent on classified workloads. By token volume, top daily usage surged by 4,425 percent, hitting a peak of 20 billion tokens a day.” And, Theodoropoulos says, “Surging demand is only half the picture; the Department’s current classified compute base is strikingly small by commercial standards.” The post notes that DOD “recognizes the gap,” seeking $30 billion in its fiscal 2027 budget request “to transition from ‘scattered clusters’ of GPUs to an integrated AI infrastructure portfolio. That candor is welcome -- and it underscores both how far the Department has to travel and how decisive America’s commercial compute base will be in closing the distance.” “As dramatic as these figures are, they would pale in comparison to the scale required to prevail in a major war against a peer competitor like China,” Theodoropoulos writes. According to the post, “Three lines of effort would put a Strategic Compute Reserve within reach”: Reevaluate the Requirements for Classified Compute Pre-Build Security Into Commercial Data Centers Fortify Against Major Computing Security Threats On classified compute requirements, the SCSP post says, “The Department should reimagine its regulatory frameworks around risk-based accreditation, identifying which rules still make sense in a cloud computing environment and which are obsolete. In a full-scale war, the Department cannot wait months or years while additional classified compute resources are certified and inspected.” “The moment to reduce these unnecessary burdens is now,” SCSP says, “while there is still time to make deliberate reforms rather than deferring difficult decisions until the imminent approach of war forces the issue. By finally delivering on years of promised reforms, the Department can ensure that warfighters have the compute they need if called upon to ‘fight tonight.’” On pre-built security, it says, “Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google have all developed the technology to virtually protect and separate commercial and sensitive military data below the Secret level, and the Department can work with providers to integrate this logical separation for classified workloads.” On “fortifying,” it says, “not every cybersecurity risk associated with commercial data centers can be remediated in advance. Facilities that operate as commercial or unclassified environments will contain hardware, networking equipment, or other components that cannot be fully trusted if repurposed for classified military workloads.” “For these cases,” the SCSP post says, “the Department should develop a rapid conversion model that accepts some equipment may need to be removed rather than converted. This approach allows the Department to distinguish between security requirements that can be pre-built into commercial data centers during peacetime and those that must be satisfied through wartime reconstitution before a formerly commercial facility connects to classified networks.”