Army leaders and their staffs must strike a balance between traditional planning methods and targeted artificial intelligence integration to maximize their effectiveness, according to a new paper published by the Association of the U.S. Army.

“Military professionals must grapple with the advantages in speed and manpower afforded by AI relative to the understanding and adaptability that result from deliberate planning processes,” Maj. Matt Tetreau writes. “The promises of accelerated decisionmaking processes and smaller headquarters footprints could prove advantageous, if not decisive, in future high-intensity conflicts.”

In “Harnessing the Algorithm: Shaping the Future of AI-Enabled Staff,” Tetreau underscores the value of integrating AI into certain aspects of military planning and decision-making.

AI can complete some things that military staffs are tasked with, but “delegating higher-order cognitive tasks to AI risks sacrificing the shared understanding that results from rigorous collective analysis,” Tetreau writes.

Tetreau is an Army strategist on the Army Forces Command staff and is a fellow with the LTG (Ret.) James M. Dubik Writing Fellows Program. He has a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Given the “meaning-making” that comes from planning with peers, AI is best for tasks with a defined problem that may be “tedious, time-consuming or involve more data than humans can reliably process,” Tetreau writes. 

“In the not-so-distant future, commanders will confront the decision of which tasks they delegate to AI,” he writes. “For the foreseeable future, however, I suggest that humans maintain a firm grasp on the responsibility to define and analyze problems” to “build shared understanding, promote adaptability and ensure that we are solving the correct problem.”

Tetreau’s paper is part of AUSA’s Harding Papers series, which was launched in conjunction with the Army’s Harding Project, an initiative that aims to revitalize scholarship and writing across the force.

Though AI is a key tool for decision-makers, “war is a fundamentally human endeavor,” Tetreau concludes.

“Our use of AI should be bounded not by the state of the technology, but by the points at which the tool no longer facilitates analytically sound human decisionmaking, … and our use of AI should augment, rather than replace, the analytical force of our human commanders and staff,” he writes.

Read the paper here.