Smack Is Scaling its 'Smack DEN' of Military Domain Experts. Challenge the Status Quo With Us
In order to build the training environments required for defense-specific AI, you need human domain expertise. There's no way around it.
That expertise can't be captured through doctrine and historical data alone. As the famous anecdotal expression goes: "One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine."
The American warfighter not only acknowledges this; they revel in it. So does Smack. We don’t build AI environments from sanitized plans developed at a war college. Instead, we build with expertise from warfighters who have spent their careers planning and re-planning campaigns, developing tactics, and making decisions under pressure. Their judgment is what enables us to encode the countless assumptions, constraints, and tradeoffs that define how wars are actually fought.
That's why we created our Domain Expert Network, or Smack DEN.
The Smack DEN is our growing body of military domain experts who shape how Smack's reinforcement learning (RL) models are trained and evaluated. Their expertise informs our RL pipeline, helping us encode the human priors, operational realities, and tactical intuition that domain-specific AI models require.
As Smack expands into new mission areas, we're expanding the Smack DEN alongside it, bringing together a broader range of operational perspectives from across the Joint Force.
We're looking for exceptional practitioners with deep operational or planning experience, including those with backgrounds in:
Combatant Command and Component-level Operational Planning Cells
Warfare Development Centers, Development Groups, and Centers of Excellence
Campaign-scale Combat Operations
Weapons and Tactics Instructors
If your experience does not align closely with the criteria above, don't self-select out. This is the beginning of our screening process, and we want to hear from the military thinkers, planners, and operators who can help shape the next generation of defense AI.
If you’ve ever sat in the back of a training course and thought “who the hell even writes these slides?”, we want to hear from you.
