Challenge
Designing novel weapon components and systems using traditional, human-intensive methods is slow and costly, resulting in long timelines before new weapon systems reach national security missions and the American warfighter. The United States possesses exceptional modeling and simulation capabilities that could enable rapid virtual design, iteration, testing, and certification. In particular, large metal castings and forgings remain a key bottleneck.
AI Solution
The Department of Energy and the Department of War will develop, evaluate, and deploy highly efficient AI models and agentic workflows to rapidly decrease the timelines associated with the design of conventional and nuclear weapon components and full systems, including large metal castings and forgings. These AI workflows will automate or significantly streamline time-consuming steps associated with the design, simulation, testing, and certification of complex component and system designs; for example, translating requirements into parameterized simulation setups, generating and adapting meshes, designing high value-of-information tests and experiments, and triaging results to direct expert attention to the most important data. These workflows will be coordinated by an orchestration layer that enables component designers, physicists, and engineers to monitor and steer the process, integrating expert knowledge and feedback, ensuring accuracy, and providing traceability and interpretability for design choices, tradeoffs, and expert decisions.
Justification
The Department of War brings key data assets, model validation capabilities, and decades of validated data, while Department of Energy and NNSA contributes highly validated modeling and simulation tools, high performance computing, and physics-based machine learning expertise to drive each component of a design workflow. Design cycles for weapon components and systems today span many years, limiting the rate at which novel capabilities reach the theater and the warfighter. Given adversaries’ clear intent to accelerate their own weapon development, the United States cannot risk falling behind.
National Impact
AI-accelerated design and certifications workflows will compress weapon component and system development from years to months, delivering conventional and nuclear capabilities much faster while preserving the rigor and validation standards essential to national security. By extracting greater capability from existing modeling, simulation, and test investments, the United States will sustain a decisive advantage in the pace of weapons innovation.
This was last updated .