“AI in the Dirt” … Combat Testing Generates New Army Combined Arms Maneuver Doctrine

By Kris Osborn, President, Center of Military Modernization

The Army is preparing for a new kind of high-speed, AI-enabled multi-domain combat by replicating future warfare conditions in specific scenarios linking drones with helicopters, armored vehicles and ground control stations. The concept is to not only share, process and transmit time-sensitive information but help Army weapons developers and futurists craft new concepts of operation and advance modern paradigms of Combined Arms Maneuver.

The speed and interoperability of networking technology, combined with paradigm-changing, AI-enabled data processing and transmission, is fast generating Army weapons developers to craft new requirements, concepts of operation and Combined Arms Maneuver strategies.

Instead of traditional, linear mechanized formations requiring time-consuming information transmission, data processing and soldier decision-making, technology has massively changed the equation and enabled satellites, drones, air assets, armored vehicles and even dismounted infantry to identify, confirm, close with and destroy enemy targets in seconds of milliseconds.

“At the end of the day we need seamless data, immediate data to be seamless in transition across warfighting functions,” William Nelson, Deputy, Army Futures Command told Warrior in an interview.

It is a long sought after Army breakthrough, as the service has been trying to achieve “system-of-systems” force wide networking since the days of its Future Combat Systems as far back as the early 2000s. In subsequent years, the Army developed a software programmable radio technology called Joint Tactical Radio Systems designed to send IP packets of voice, data, text and video across the force in real time using high bandwidth waveforms. This effort, like FCS, made tremendous progress but also encountered developmental complexities. The Army intent and goal has for decades been to network the force and enable seamless data exchange, paradigm-changing high speed attack and new maneuver formations.

Advanced algorithms employed by AI-capable computers can organize otherwise disparate pools of sensor data and identify the optimal “weapon” or “shooter” or “countermeasure” method for a given combat circumstance in a matter of seconds.