Adm. Stephen Koehler, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, speaks at the TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu on Oct. 28, 2025. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
HAWAII CONVENTION CENTER, Honolulu — U.S. Pacific Fleet’s commander on Tuesday challenged the high-tech industry to boost the Navy’s ongoing effort to empower sailors with artificial intelligence.
“We are using AI on nearly every network to develop familiarity with our team and improve decision making throughout our commanders,” Adm. Stephen Koehler said during the opening keynote address for the three-day TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu.
“We’re embracing a hybrid government-commercial approach that partners with private sector leaders to accelerate innovation on AI, and we are working with partners in industry and government to integrate it into our day-to-day functions and operations,” he said.
“Those include command and control, cyber, logistics, [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], target analysis and more.”
Koehler told the audience, filled with representatives in the fields of communications, IT and intelligence, that Pacific Fleet needs their help in speeding such innovation.
“We know our industry partners are key to all of these critical efforts, and it’s not just AI,” he said. “As we move forward together, we should combine our unique strengths. We should blend the best of both of our worlds to see and then achieve the art of the possible.”
Pacific Fleet’s area of responsibility covers nearly half the globe. Its fleet includes roughly 200 ships, 160,000 personnel and 1,500 aircraft.
Koehler told the audience that the fleet is already integrating and pairing all its data with AI to dominate adversaries from “seabed to space” and across the continuum of competition to conflict.
“Going forward, I envision a future where the Pacific Fleet is empowered by artificial intelligence, where sailors and commanders at every level balance the art and science of warfare to make more effective decisions with superior outcomes faster than the adversary, a future where AI further accelerates the cycle of action between maneuver and fires for decisive combat advantage,” he said.
In the coming months, Pacific Fleet will step up the “drumbeat of experimentation and innovation,” Koehler said.
“I consider it experimentation combined with rehearsal,” he said. “Our common practice here is to pair them with exercises, to work in parallel specifically to develop new capabilities and build new concepts of operation.”
If that sounds like building an airplane while already flying it, that is by design, he said.
“We have to work fast to take advantage of today’s rapid pace of technological innovation,” he said. “We have to get that capability into the hands of our sailors quickly to enable them to innovate and force change, if needed.”
Koehler touted the opening in July of The Forge, an advanced manufacturing facility at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, as one way the fleet empowers sailors.
The Forge, a partnership between U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Defense Department’s Innovation Capability and Modernization Office, uses advanced technologies such as 3D printing, casting and forging, precision machining and rapid prototyping to speed up delivery and innovation.
“The Forge and similar capabilities will allow our sailors to quickly obtain reliable parts outside the legacy stock system,” Koehler said.
Sailors, however, will need to have the authority and confidence to install parts without waiting for contractors, he said.
“For example, if an unmanned system needs to be reconfigured during the fight, our sailors need to do it all,” he said. “We owe our warriors the right to repair and reconfigure their own equipment.”
