Regardless of two centuries of evolution, the construction of a contemporary navy workers can be recognizable to Napoleon. On the similar time, navy organizations have struggled to include new applied sciences as they adapt to new domains — air, house and knowledge — in fashionable battle.
The sizes of navy headquarters have grown to accommodate the expanded info flows and choice factors of those new aspects of warfare. The result’s diminishing marginal returns and a coordination nightmare — too many cooks within the kitchen — that dangers jeopardizing mission command.
AI brokers — autonomous, goal-oriented software program powered by massive language fashions — can automate routine workers duties, compress choice timelines and allow smaller, extra resilient command posts. They’ll shrink the workers whereas additionally making it more practical.
As a world relations scholar and reserve officer within the U.S. Army who research navy technique, I see each the chance afforded by the know-how and the acute want for change.
That want stems from the truth that right this moment’s command constructions nonetheless mirror Napoleon’s subject headquarters in each kind and performance — industrial-age architectures constructed for massed armies. Over time, these staffs have ballooned in dimension, making coordination cumbersome. In addition they end in sprawling command posts that fashionable precision artillery, missiles and drones can goal successfully and digital warfare can readily disrupt.
Russia’s so-called “Graveyard of Command Posts” in Ukraine vividly illustrates how static headquarters the place opponents can mass precision artillery, missiles and drones change into liabilities on a contemporary battlefield.
The Position of AI Brokers
Army planners now see a world during which AI brokers — autonomous, goal-oriented software program that may understand, determine and act on their very own initiative — are mature sufficient to deploy in command techniques. These brokers promise to automate the fusion of a number of sources of intelligence, threat-modeling, and even restricted choice cycles in help of a commander’s objectives. There’s nonetheless a human within the loop, however the people will be capable to challenge instructions sooner and obtain extra well timed and contextual updates from the battlefield.
These AI brokers can parse doctrinal manuals, draft operational plans and generate programs of motion, which helps speed up the tempo of navy operations. Experiments — together with efforts I ran at Marine Corps College — have demonstrated how even primary massive language fashions can speed up workers estimates and inject artistic, data-driven choices into the planning course of. These efforts level to the tip of conventional workers roles.
There’ll nonetheless be individuals — battle is a human endeavor — and ethics will nonetheless issue into streams of algorithms making selections. However the individuals who stay deployed are more likely to achieve the power to navigate mass volumes of data with the assistance of AI brokers.
These groups are more likely to be smaller than fashionable staffs. AI brokers will enable groups to handle a number of planning teams concurrently.
For instance, they’ll be capable to use extra dynamic crimson teaming methods — role-playing the opposition — and fluctuate key assumptions to create a wider menu of choices than conventional plans. The time saved not having to construct PowerPoint slides and updating workers estimates will likely be shifted to contingency evaluation — asking “what if” questions — and constructing operational evaluation frameworks — conceptual maps of how a plan is more likely to play out in a selected scenario — that present extra flexibility to commanders.
Designing the Subsequent Army Employees
To discover the optimum design of this AI agent-augmented workers, I led a staff of researchers on the bipartisan suppose tank Middle for Strategic & Worldwide Research’ Futures Lab to discover alternate options. The staff developed three baseline situations reflecting what most navy analysts are seeing because the key operational issues in fashionable nice energy competitors: joint blockades, firepower strikes and joint island campaigns. Joint refers to an motion coordinated amongst a number of branches of a navy.
Within the instance of China and Taiwan, joint blockades describe how China might isolate the island nation and both starve it or set situations for an invasion. Firepower strikes describe how Beijing might fireplace salvos of missiles — much like what Russia is doing in Ukraine — to destroy key navy facilities and even essential infrastructure. Final, in Chinese language doctrine, a Joint Island Touchdown Marketing campaign describes the cross-strait invasion their navy has spent a long time refining.
Any AI agent-augmented workers ought to be capable to handle warfighting features throughout these three operational situations.
The analysis staff discovered that the very best mannequin saved people within the loop and centered on suggestions loops. This method — known as the Adaptive Employees Mannequin and based mostly on pioneering work by sociologist Andrew Abbott — embeds AI brokers inside steady human-machine suggestions loops, drawing on doctrine, historical past and real-time knowledge to evolve plans on the fly.
On this mannequin, navy planning is ongoing and by no means full, and centered extra on producing a menu of choices for the commander to contemplate, refine and enact. The analysis staff examined the method with a number of AI fashions and located that it outperformed alternate options in every case.
AI brokers usually are not with out danger. First, they are often overly generalized, if not biased. Basis fashions — AI fashions educated on extraordinarily massive datasets and adaptable to a variety of duties — know extra about popular culture than battle and require refinement. This makes it essential to benchmark brokers to grasp their strengths and limitations.
Second, absent coaching in AI fundamentals and superior analytical reasoning, many customers have a tendency to make use of fashions as an alternative choice to essential pondering. No good mannequin could make up for a dumb, or worse, lazy consumer.
Seizing the ‘Agentic’ Second
To benefit from AI brokers, the U.S. navy might want to institutionalize constructing and adapting brokers, embrace adaptive brokers in battle video games, and overhaul doctrine and coaching to account for human-machine groups. This can require quite a few modifications.
First, the navy might want to spend money on further computational energy to construct the infrastructure required to run AI brokers throughout navy formations. Second, they might want to develop further cybersecurity measures and conduct stress checks to make sure the agent-augmented workers is not susceptible when attacked throughout a number of domains, together with our on-line world and the electromagnetic spectrum.
Third, and most essential, the navy might want to dramatically change the way it educates its officers. Officers should find out how AI brokers work, together with how you can construct them, and begin utilizing the classroom as a lab to develop new approaches to the age-old artwork of navy command and decision-making. This might embrace revamping some navy colleges to give attention to AI, an idea floated within the White Home’s AI Motion Plan launched on July 23, 2025.
Absent these reforms, the navy is more likely to stay caught within the Napoleonic workers lure: including extra individuals to unravel ever extra complicated issues.
Benjamin Jensen is a professor of strategic research on the Marine Corps College Faculty of Superior Warfighting; Scholar-in-Residence, American College Faculty of Worldwide Service
Jensen led a analysis challenge that was a collaboration between CSIS and Scale AI. He didn’t personally obtain any funding from the corporate.
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