ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Commanders on the future battlefield will find themselves racing against adversaries that are faster and more capable than ever before, a senior Army leader said.

“The ability to sense first, to understand first, to decide first, which gives you the ability to act faster than a future opponent, is going to be a significant advantage for any commander on the future battlefield,” said Gen. Mike Murray, commander of Army Futures Command.

People are “more important than hardware” as artificial intelligence and machine learning lead the way toward more efficient information operations on the battlefield, according to a top general.

“It's the talented people that we have to help foster,” Army Gen. Richard Clarke, commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command, said Dec. 7 while speaking with the Hudson Institute. 

To become an “AI-ready workforce,” he said, DoD needs to invest in human capital—from interns to coders and data scientists.

The items soldiers carry into battle today and into the future are being identified and developed with more precision, thanks to at least one new process that has emerged through the Army’s modernization initiatives.

Refining an early modernization idea of the “soldier as a system,” the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team at Fort Benning, Georgia, said it has adapted and codified a new way of approaching soldiers’ needs, through a process called “soldier-centered design.”

Unmanned systems on the battlefield are an inevitable consequence of the rise in lethal, precision weapons that make human survival unlikely, said former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work.

Speaking April 24 at a Mad Scientist Conference in Austin, Texas, Work said the U.S. won’t be able to recruit or afford a force large enough to fight in future megacity combat and won’t be able to protect soldiers who could be deployed.

Army systems using artificial intelligence will require battlefield security to prevent information from being altered or blocked, says the U.S. Army Research Laboratory director, who specializes in sensors and electronic devices.

Speaking at the Army Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence Symposium and Exposition in Detroit, Philip Perconti cautioned that data can be hacked, and signals and information in the field can be altered. If that happens, soldiers will lose trust in the systems and turn them off. 

The application of artificial intelligence to solving battlefield challenges runs a risk of making it harder on commanders, warns Peter Schwartz, the lead enterprise systems engineer for the MITRE Corp.

The U.S. Army Futures Command is the service’s “scout into the future,” and what it does “will determine victory or defeat on future battlefields,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said Aug. 24 as the new organization was activated in Austin, Texas.