Pentagon urged to wage decision-based AI warfare

The Pentagon is joining the global race to use artificial intelligence to produce more lethal forces but needs to shift from the current use of large language models to a new form of combat that a high-tech company is calling “agentic warfare.”

“Genuine strategic advantage in this new era will not come from stealthier jets, faster missiles or larger drone swarms alone; it will come from new kinds of human-machine teaming that drive accelerated decision-making,” the company Scale AI said in a new report.

The essence of agentic warfare is providing “decision advantage” at all levels of command. This advanced warfighting capability will allow U.S. forces to outpace and outmaneuver the most capable enemies, the report says.

“The United States must capitalize on its first-mover advantage before adversaries do,” the report said.

The report by Scale AI executives Dan Tadross and Jared Jonker said the national security usage of large language AI models has produced impressive tools.

But the tools are mainly benefiting “clever junior staffers, summarizing emails or drafting memos, yet unable to execute complex tasks or interact with the physical world,” the report says.

War is not fought using text, and future military AI will be carried out with networks or groups of AI agents that can monitor the battlespace, plan, test and execute complex actions at speeds no human officer can match.

A fully armed military with strategically superior AI systems also would produce a deterrence of conflict through a superior decision-making advantage.

For example, a war in 2026 will include the world’s most advanced military sensors and weapons but will be hampered by an inability to rapidly connect them.

“We still rely on linear, manual workflows that produce static Operational Plans in physical binders that take two years to write and are often obsolete by the time they are printed,” Mr. Tadross and Mr. Jonker said.

“In a conflict with a near-peer adversary like China, we will not have two years; we may not even have two days.”

The authors warn that China’s military already has begun reorganizing its forces around so-called “intelligentized warfare” and “command brains.” These tools will seek to cognitively overwhelm enemies not equipped with AI-enabled systems and that can collapse American decision-making.