“Artificial intelligence is going to be on the next major battlefield, and you don’t want to get there second,” Ret. Gen. John Murray, Former Commanding General, Army Futures Command
Retired Gen. John Murray, former Commanding General, Army Futures Command, has over the years told Warrior that he envisioned possible future warfare as taking place on what he called a “hyperactive battlefield”… characterized by ubiquitous, omni-present sensors across domains, robotic platforms and AI-driven combat.
“Artificial intelligence is going to be on the next major battlefield, and you don’t want to get there second,” Ret. Gen. John Murray, Former Commanding General, Army Futures Command, told Warrior in a recent discussion of future warfare.
Murray explained this in relation to a broader context in which modern concepts of operation and Combined Arms Maneuver continue to take shape as technology matures; sure enough, Murray spent many years leading his Command to anticipate how emerging technologies inform and change maneuver formations, tactics and concepts of operation. One such instance of this pertains to “sensors,” as Murray put it, because there will be “nowhere to hide” in modern warfare — due to the expected presence of different kinds of “sensors” dispersed throughout a multi-domain theater of warfare. Robotics are yet another fast-evolving area of expected future warfare, given the pace of maturation of advanced algorithms enabling more and more functions to be performed without needing human intervention.
These kinds of variables are perhaps most significant with regard to how AI continues to change platforms, sensors, networking and concepts of future warfare.
In an initial, somewhat self-evident sense, AI is driving a new paradigm of high-speed, information-driven warfare, autonomy and massively truncated or shortened “sensor-to-shooter” times. The advantages and potential applications of AI are not only vast and wide-spread, but continuing to expand quickly.
One such paradigm-changing example, Murray explained, relates to AI-enabled automatic target recognition technology now integrating into ground attack platforms such as the Abrams tank. As a former 3rd Infantry Division Commander, Murray explained how soldiers were considered capable of being a “gunner” and manning the 120mm cannon if, when looking at flash cards, they were able to correctly identify 80-percent of the correct targets.
