{"id":13612,"date":"2026-07-13T10:44:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/marines-eye-cloudless-networks-to-keep-ai-tools-running-when-the-cloud-goes-down\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T10:44:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:44:31","slug":"marines-eye-cloudless-networks-to-keep-ai-tools-running-when-the-cloud-goes-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/marines-eye-cloudless-networks-to-keep-ai-tools-running-when-the-cloud-goes-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Marines eye cloudless networks to keep AI tools running when the cloud goes down"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The cloud connectivity that makes big AI models work is also the reason they won\u2019t work in war. As the Marine Corps explores ways to bring AI tools to the battlefield, it is looking at one software company\u2019s proposal to keep troops computing when broader access gets cut off.<\/p>\n

Ditto will announce Monday that the Marines\u2019 Project Dynamis will evaluate their technology for turning radios, cell phones, even drones, into a local network that can keep data flowing and AI tools running locally when cloud access disappears.<\/p>\n

\u201cDitto’s position is that we do not leverage a server-client model,\u201d Eric Hanft, Ditto\u2019s senior vice president for public sector and a former Army infantry officer, said in an interview. \u201cIf you continue to architect your data flows around that, you never remove this fundamental dependency that, if two edge nodes need to communicate and have to go to and from a server\u2014and that server is not available\u2014there’s no communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

A digital and data communication failure is a nightmare scenario that the United States has largely been able to avoid in past operations. But over the past two decades, those operations have increasingly focused on the Middle East, where the United States did not face adversaries that were capable of disrupting critical communications infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Project Dynamis is the Marine Corps’ addition to the Pentagon\u2019s joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, efforts. Increasingly, such efforts\u00a0focus on binding troops, satellites, drones, and more in a data web to enable much faster sharing of information and, as a consequence, faster and more successful operations. According to Marine Corps documents about these efforts, they test solutions in situations where communication is \u201cdegraded or denied.\u201d But details beyond that, such as whether cloud connectivity itself was denied during experiments or tests, are hard to come by.<\/p>\n

Marine Corps leaders are more likely to discuss the need to move to the cloud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cImplementing cloud on our networks is the critical requirement for CJADC2. Without cloud, JADC2 just is not going to come to fruition,\u201d Col. Jason Quinter, who led Project Dynamis as\u00a0 commanding officer of Marine Air Control Group 38, said in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As sensors\u2014flying, orbiting, marching\u2014proliferate across the battlefield, and as the military charges ahead with ambitious AI plans to better use that sensed data in combat, the growing reliance on cloud computing makes sense.<\/p>\n

But Ukraine’s experience against Russian electronic warfare suggests that cloud architectures are exactly the sort of target high-tech adversaries will come after first.<\/p>\n

That is already becoming a problem for the military as it seeks to put large language models into combat settings. One of Anthropic\u2019s arguments against allowing the Pentagon to use its tools in battle is that if data is wrong or is missing, transformer models may hallucinate the missing pieces. It\u2019s a low-stakes problem when trying to write a term paper, a high-stakes issue in war.<\/p>\n

OpenAI appears to have similar concerns, announcing in March that its own military contracts \u201cwould not permit powering fully autonomous weapons, as this would require edge deployment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pentagon has responded to such concerns by looking for models less prone to errors on the edge. And the Marines have added a goal to Dynamis: testing assured communication technologies.That\u2019s where Ditto comes in. Hanft argues that relying on the cloud during a conflict is \u201cgoing to become a problem\u201d no matter which AI company is making the tools. Local networks can help ensure important data aren\u2019t lost when the cloud goes offline, but the military\u2019s existing peer-to-peer tools are limited and difficult to use, he said.<\/p>\n

So Ditto offers a way to use \u201cwhatever transports the customer brings\u2014in the case of a commercial environment, that could be the radios that are already built into your phone\u2014and deal with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We can create a peer-to-peer data mesh with no new hardware, just, you know, your consumer phones.\u201d<\/p>\n

That aligns with the Pentagon\u2019s efforts to prioritize commercially available or dual-use technology rather than military-specific tech.<\/p>\n

The company was founded eight years ago to connect civilian and commercial devices when their cloud connectivity vanishes, as when, for instance, a business closes its doors for the day because\u00a0 the credit-card machine is down, he offered by way of example.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s trying to apply its methods to the battlefield. Hanft said that the company has already done experiments with U.S. special operations elements and Nordic military forces. He didn\u2019t say whether the company had worked with Ukraine directly but acknowledged that they have \u201cworked in the past with organizations that are operating within those boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

“One of the greatest strengths of Project Dynamis is in its methodology. For the last several months we\u2019ve been in a continuous cycle of designing, testing, and refining warfighting solutions\u2014Marines and industry engineers side-by-side\u2014so we can find best-of-breed solutions and get them into the hands of our Marines,\u201d said Col. Arlon Smith, the current director of Project Dynamis, in an early version of Ditto’s press release.\n\n<\/svg><\/p>\n<\/div>\n