Army leaders say the modern battlefield is saturated with sensors and networked weapons, generating more data than soldiers can actually process on their own, and artificial intelligence is needed to meaningfully categorize it all.
The Army has long focused on increasing sensors for battlefield intelligence and awareness, but now it must also consider information overload and managing the large amounts of incoming data.
During recent US military and NATO exercises in Europe, the military used indigenous AI systems to consume and categorize data. value That wasn’t exactly the case AI can do it faster, but it also can remember context and patterns that humans can’t.
The Dynamic Front exercise is another example of how the U.S. military is increasingly incorporating AI and automation into everything from enemy attack simulations to administrative processes.
“The modern battlefield, what we’re already seeing around the world, it’s swimming around in sensors and we’re drowning in data,” Col. Jeff Pickler, commander of the Army’s 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force, said during a Dynamic Front media roundtable.
There aren’t enough people to decipher all the information available, he says. “You’ll never be able to fully process them all.”
This year’s Dynamic Front included approximately 2,000 U.S. personnel and approximately 4,000 personnel from allies and partners. U.S. Army Photo: Kevin Sterling Payne
Software aimed at addressing this issue is still in beta testing. The next iteration of Dynamic Front, which will be integrated with another exercise, Arcane Front, to combine technology experimentation and theater-level combat rehearsal, Army leaders say they intend to test the AI on a larger scale.
“If you’re looking at the targets set in the European theater, and you think you need to process more than 1,500 targets per day, that’s beyond human scope,” Pickler said. “The answer to the equation lies in AI and automation.”
If a large-scale conflict is likely to occur in Europe, AI could help locate and assess those targets.
The system can do this quickly, but speed is not the main advantage. AI can remember patterns that humans forget or don’t notice. Pickler gave the example of AI recognizing that an unrelated shipment report, a localized power outage, and a fertilizer delivery could combine to indicate a missile refueling operation.
“So the difference is not seconds and minutes, it’s months and not minutes. It’s not because the machine scans faster, it’s because it retains the context of the entire source that humans can’t keep in memory,” Pickler said after the roundtable.
“It doesn’t mean that analysts can read it faster, but it replaces the weeks that analysts spend reconnecting information across thousands of reports,” he said.
AI, autonomy, and machine learning are at the forefront of the Army’s modernization efforts. U.S. Army photo by Capt. Regina Kesters
In conflict scenarios, this could mean that analysts can get a clearer picture of the battlefield sooner. Correlations between data collected from different sensors may surface sooner. If an adversary is fueling, arming, or moving weapons in ways that aren’t immediately obvious, AI can help flag those links.
However, it is still up to humans to decide how to respond.
The Army says its soldiers have had success by iterating on current AI models. It is recalibrated during testing, with humans always in the loop and reviewing the output at multiple stages.
The goal is for models to continue to increase their overlap with human-generated information. In the targeting example, a milestone would be when the AI achieves a 90-95% match with humans on a set of 100 targets.
The Army’s push for AI and automation also drives the development of next-generation command and control software, a priority initiative.
Developed by a team of vendors including Anduril, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin, the technology uses AI and machine learning to provide commanders and soldiers with real-time data on ammunition levels, maintenance needs, intelligence feeds, targeting, and simulated enemy attacks.
But AI is also changing other aspects of how the Army works. Autonomous capabilities for drones, weapons, and targeting may be at the forefront, but behind the scenes new tools, redesigned workflows, and data integration are being used to recruit, maintain, and hire inventors. These are manual tasks that the service believes can be improved with AI.
