Enginners work at Peloton Technology headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. (Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Seeking an infusion of fresh tech talent, the Pentagon and the Office of Personnel Management are launching a program they’re calling War Force to hire hundreds of “exceptional software engineers” for two-year stints in the Defense Department, the two agencies announced this morning.
War Force builds on the government-wide Tech Force program, which seeks to hire at least a thousand “elite” engineers for two-year tours with a variety of agencies, including Defense. But War Force will be dedicated solely to DoD. The hundreds of engineers it aims to hire will be in addition to Tech Force’s 1,000, a defense official clarified.
“The plan is to hire hundreds and to embed them all the way down to the unit level, in some cases,” the defense official told Breaking Defense.
The War Force program will emphasize skills in artificial intelligence and be of particular interest to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO). “As you could imagine, CDAO is using this initiative extensively, as many of the engineers being recruited will act on the Department’s AI Acceleration Plan,” the official explained.
