With the resurgence of great power competition has come the resurgence of defense technology. Conflict with a near-peer competitor would look nothing like our recent warfighting experiences against nonstate actors. It could be fought over vast distances, involve technology we are unprepared to deal with and occur at a scale the United States has not had to contend with in decades. Suddenly, our glittering collection of large, exquisite systems, built to engineering standards decades behind consumer technology, feels outmoded.
Artificial intelligence should be the linchpin of our efforts to re-armor ourselves for a new kind of fight. In the near term, AI can help us to understand the world with greater speed and clarity than the human mind can achieve. The value of distributed sensors on manned and unmanned systems alike has long been apparent to the United States, but we face a manpower constraint that enables us to analyze only a fraction of the data we capture.
