Commentators and pundits do innovation a disservice when they make it unapproachable. That is happening to artificial intelligence (AI) whenever the term is used to evoke an anthropomorphized machine and imbue it with greater powers than it could ever boast. AI is often mislabeled a panacea rendering human input obsolete or a plague enabling a dystopian future. In truth, it is neither. Senior military decision-makers need the chance to appreciate AI’s ability to improve everyday outcomes today, not in some science-fiction future.
Exponential technology can make the work the military already does better, and it can unlock new possibilities. Both are true today. It can give back hours in productivity by making existing workstreams more efficient and can simultaneously harness the power of correlation, making predictions that enable unparalleled freedom of action. Up and down the chain of command, the military needs to be using AI today, not waiting for tomorrow.
We already have arrived at a moment when more information than ever before can be collected, stored, and accessed and is now more easily correlated and manipulated. Why is this relevant? Because national security planners already are using AI to aggregate early indicators to warn decision-makers about gathering threats much earlier than in the past. One AI partner in Silicon Valley built systems that flashed warning signs in 2022 well ahead of China’s massive missile and aircraft overflights of Taiwanese waters. Similarly, inside the Pentagon, those systems predicted heightened risk around Japan ahead of President Joe Biden’s visit to Tokyo, foresaw political instability in Sri Lanka months in advance, and anticipated Chinese activities in Kiribati and the Solomon Islands. Every planner could be using these technologies.
Today, everyone can access AI tools in ways relevant to every combatant command and every desk in the Pentagon. AI-powered decision advantage applications, for example, are revolutionizing how the Air Force makes investment decisions, obviating Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint and saving thousands of computational hours. It is not just making the budgeting process quicker or easier, it is radically reshaping its quality, giving senior leaders more scenarios to compare and contrast in record time, enabling smarter decisions.
Knowing that a tool is available and relevant is half the battle. But victory lies in overcoming the cultural barriers that stand in the way of adoption. Leaders must insist tools be integrated. Sometimes the most dangerous four words in any bureaucracy are “we’re already doing that.” Senior leaders have a responsibility to ask whether the military truly is integrating advanced technology. The demand must come from the top and build accountability for its use and measurement. Only those who communicate again and again that they do not want to do the same thing the same way over and over will reap the benefits. The questions at the end of every day should be, “Did I use AI to create better outcomes? If not, could I have used it, and if so, why didn’t I?”
Instead of making AI unapproachable, we need to do the opposite and provide proper context. Technology always changes warfighting, and crisis has always accelerated adoption. The 1949 Soviet nuclear test and revelation that the Red Army had long-range aircraft able to reach the United States via an Arctic route precipitated a sudden realization: The United States had no defense against nuclear attack. Lincoln Laboratory grew rapidly out of the World War II radar labs the United States had built at MIT to shape the future of defense. The semiautomatic ground environment (SAGE), which required what was for the day advanced computing technology and had once been challenging to envision, was accelerated and became integral to airspace defense. Necessity was the mother not just of innovation, but also of adoption.
The same sense of urgency is creating scalable AI tools today. Information is of ever-increasing importance on the battlefield to assist military commanders in making sound decisions more rapidly. The Marine Corps recently elevated information to a critical warfighting function. In other words, using AI is not a divergence from what we have spent lifetimes in uniform doing, but rather simply a step forward. It is just a new computing technology. We have done this before.
Once integrated into the modern workflow, AI will become indispensable and implicit in all the military does. It will make existing processes more efficient through access to large amounts of data otherwise impossible to evaluate. Intelligence functions are emblematic; human interaction in the process remains critical, but AI can rapidly evaluate enormous quantities of government and commercial, open-source and classified data to focus available analyst bandwidth on the most valuable inputs.
A confluence of developments—from the proliferation of sensors to the speed of computers and the power of algorithms—have brought the military to a moment when more information than ever before is suddenly collectible, storable, and accessible and now is manipulatable and relatable. Of course, decision-makers will need to inject a dose of humility into how they incorporate these data-driven tools into their work, just as they do with fallible human-derived inputs. The entire system needs to lean into the fact that AI-informed systems will, at times, be wrong. Rather than expecting perfect accuracy to drive decisions on, say, the battlefield, the important thing is to have transparency about the inputs that led to a conclusion. This process should be even more rigorous for AI-enabled judgments than for those that rely on traditional means.
AI offers a fundamentally different approach through the power of correlation. This opens the possibility of new approaches to traditional military tasks, devoid of human bias or preconceived notions. Novel datasets can be used to detect unmaskable signatures based on opponent actions—both current and historic—to expand situational awareness and strengthen evaluation of future actions. Policy-makers would have the capacity to wargame possible responses in minutes or hours, not days or weeks as in traditional tabletop exercises.
We do everyone up and down the chain of command a favor if we stop talking about fantastical futures of mythical AI solutions and instead focus on the here and now in ways that are relevant. The AI age is already here. Now is the moment to make the most of it.
