‘We need your creative, innovative, patriotic, and diabolical minds’: Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine
Gen. Dan Caine called for greater collaboration between the Pentagon and industry — building on the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit — to speed up new technology, especially for globally integrated command and control.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on June 04, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Lt. General John D. Caine testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, chose a massive AI conference in the nation’s capital for one of his first public addresses as chairman, invoking his own business background in a passionate appeal to tech entrepreneurs in the audience.
“I deliberately chose this forum to have one of our first public appearances, mindful of the audience today,” Caine told the third annual Ash Carter Exchange and AI+ Expo, convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project to continue the late defense secretary’s campaign to bridge the gap between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.
“I’m so lucky to have come from a unique background where I had time as a fighter pilot, time as a special forces officer, a part-timer in the military service [as an Air National Guard officer], but for this crowd, time is both a founder and a funder in several different sectors,” Caine told the overwhelmingly civilian audience. “That has allowed me to see things from a lot of different angles … [and] one of the things that I learned is we cannot do this alone. We have to do this, we have to do this together. And frankly, my friends, the joint force needs your help.
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/we-need-your-creative-innovative-patriotic-and-diabolical-minds-joint-chiefs-chairman-caine/
