The Pentagon office assigned in 2022 to oversee the military’s responsible use of artificial intelligence remained severely understaffed as the department pushed to accelerate AI development. As of February 2026, just three of the office’s 10 authorized positions for that mission had been filled.

The Government Accountability Office also found that 29 of 64 efforts identified in the War Department’s Responsible AI Strategy and Implementation Pathway remained incomplete as of April 2026. The findings appeared in a report published Oct. 14.

According to the GAO, staffing shortages limited the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer’s ability to take additional steps toward implementing responsible AI. The department relies on that office, known as CDAO, to help accelerate AI adoption.

“Responsible AI should be considered the same as operationally effective AI,” said Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

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Daniels said effective testing, evaluation, verification and validation practices can help the military manage risks. Those practices can also help ensure systems work as intended while giving operators a clear understanding of their strengths and limitations.

The oversight gaps were not limited to vacant desks. The GAO found that the Responsible AI Working Council did not meet from late 2024 until August 2025, leaving a lengthy pause in the department’s collaboration efforts.

CDAO officials told the watchdog that other priorities prevented the Responsible AI Division from organizing meetings. Those priorities included developing guidance for generative AI and contributing to government wide AI risk management resources.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., raised a related accountability concern during a May 2025 hearing examining the Pentagon’s AI posture. “It’s my observation that the War Department doesn’t lack in the number of principals, but rather, it often struggles with too little clarity in who is responsible for what.”

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Officials from four DoW components told the GAO that they experienced implementation challenges during the council’s hiatus and could have benefited from greater collaboration. Six of the 10 components surveyed said sharing responsible AI resources and best practices would improve their ability to incorporate the department’s six Responsible AI tenets into AI use cases.

The council resumed its meetings in August 2025, but the GAO found that it still lacked a formal charter. No charter defined the council’s responsibilities or established how frequently it should meet.

“Without a charter that defines roles and responsibilities for the council ... and that specifies the frequency of council meetings, the council is at risk of lapsing again,” the GAO report reads. “Such a lapse could increase the risk of DoW facing Responsible AI implementation issues that it would not have the collaborative capacity to swiftly and effectively resolve.”

CDAO officials told the GAO that vacant positions were unlikely to be filled and staffing was unlikely to increase while the office underwent restructuring. That restructuring followed its realignment to the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering.

The GAO responded that “by ... taking action to ensure it has staff in place to meet those needs,” CDAO could make better progress toward accelerating AI across the department. Daniels said the staffing shortage could also make building AI literacy throughout the force more difficult.

“Operationally, the force needs to become AI literate, as warfighters will be responsible for determining when to deploy AI-enabled systems,” Daniels said. Service members, he added, must understand system limitations and recognize when delegating decisions to machines may be inappropriate rather than automatically accepting a machine’s judgment.

“Exercising meaningful human control — or to use the department’s term, appropriate levels of human judgment — over a military AI system requires robustly understanding a system’s operating boundaries through development, rigorous testing and evaluation, and training,” Daniels said.

The DoW agreed with the GAO’s two recommendations, according to the watchdog. Those recommendations called for issuing a charter for the Responsible AI Working Council and addressing the Responsible AI Division’s workforce needs.

The GAO also urged Congress to direct the department to implement earlier recommendations. Those included defining responsibilities among organizations involved in AI activities and assigning responsibility and a timeline for identifying and managing the department’s AI workforce.

Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Mark Warner, D-Va., and Chris Coons, D-Del., expressed concern in a Sept. 21 letter that the Pentagon’s AI campaign could be moving faster than its governance. Reed also called for Congress to establish clearer guardrails, saying lawmakers must provide “balanced oversight, standards, and rules of the road.”

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