4 November 2024

AI’s New Frontier in War Planning: How AI Agents Can Revolutionize Military Decision-Making

Richard Farnell & Kira Coffey

Throughout history, rapid changes in the geopolitical and military environment impacted decision-makers’ ability to accomplish strategic or operational objectives. Being too slow to adapt to changing conditions can be catastrophic in a dynamic environment. History is rife with accounts of militaries paying steep prices in lost lives, battles, and even wars due to their failure to adapt.[1] The United States’ national security depends on planners’ ability to account for this dynamism and expeditiously identify gaps, exploit opportunities, and keep pace to stay competitive in modern warfare.

The Department of Defense should aggressively begin experimenting with Agentic AI tools (a category of AI that can work through a series of tasks on its own to achieve an assigned, complex objective[2]) in its Joint Operational Planning Process (JOPP) for two important reasons. First, Agentic AI has the potential to more quickly and comprehensively synthesize a broad scope of traditional and non-traditional planning factors than humans alone to help produce more thorough, objective courses of action (COA). Second, once a COA is selected, Agentic AI also has the potential to help rapidly publish downstream directives and orders, flattening communication and saving hundreds of man-hours in each planning cycle.


No comments: