Norquist spoke before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his priorities around modernization and AI.

“Different people put different things as number one, for me it is AI,” Esper said. “It will likely change the character of warfare.”

The House and Senate are each proposing a new assistant secretary (or higher) position to boost recruitment of a digital workforce in the DOD.

The head of the Pentagon's new artificial intelligence capability believes AI could play a key role in helping the DOD shore up its accounting in hopes of bringing the pipedream to reality.

“You have a set of leaders who are very impatient, including myself, that are done admiring the problem and are moving into tasking," CIO Dana Deasy said.

It's unclear how the proposed network would interact with and complement existing programs.