"To accelerate current weapons development timelines, DARPA is considering an alternative development paradigm to increase the nation's magazine depth and breadth."
Giulio Douhet proposed a revolution in warfare, stating that victory would come from large-scale aerial bombardments targeting civilians and infrastructure rather than just combatants.
I have been working in Ukraine since 2019, first as an active Green Beret advising in an official capacity, then after leaving that service, directing special operations on the ground and more recently carrying hard-won lessons back to NATO before they are forgotten or overtaken by the next news cycle.
Much like the war in Ukraine, future battlefields could be drowning in electronic interference, so the US Army stress-tested new command-and-control tech against that threat. The need to maintain connections between command and deployed weapons and crews, or reestablish those links when they're lost, is shaping how soldiers train on the service's Next Generation Command and Control, a new software-driven system that's being developed for the Army.
According to the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's memorandum on the Strategy, this AI-first status is to be achieved through four broad aims: Incentivizing internal DOD experimentation with AI models. Identifying and eliminating bureaucratic obstacles in the way of model integration. Focusing the U.S.'s military investment to shore up the U.S.'s "asymmetric advantages" in areas including AI computing, model innovation, entrepreneurial dynamism, capital markets, and operational data.