News - Category Military Change/Transformation

Fighting with Data: Design Implications for AI-Enabled Mission-Command Systems
August 5, 2026 — How will artificial intelligence change war fighting? Fighting with Data argues artificial intelligence–enabled mission command does more than accelerate decisions—it redistributes cognition across human-machine networks. The result is a new logic of combat in which trust, adaptation, and decision advantage depend on adapting faster, not just deciding faster, than an enemy...

Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army's Professional Expert Knowledge
February 8, 2023 — C. Anthony Pfaff, Christopher J. Lowrance, Bre M. Washburn, Brett A. Carey — IRP by the US Army War College, US Army War College Press, Strategic Studies Institute — "Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Also, unlike the development of the bomb, effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists; almost everyone will have to develop some level of AI and data literacy..."...

The Future of the Joint Warfighting Headquarters: An Alternative Approach to the Joint Task Force
August 17, 2022 — Eric Bissonette, Thomas Bruscino, Kelvin Mote, Matthew Powell, Marc Sanborn, James Watts, Louis G. Yuengert — Collaborative Study by the US Army War College, US Army War College Press, Strategic Studies Institute — "The US military must create standing, numbered, and regionally aligned Joint warfighting headquarters— American Expeditionary Forces (AEFs)—around a command council and a staff organized into Joint centers and cells. Calls for standing Joint force headquarters are not new, but the demonstrated military effectiveness of the Joint Task Force (JTF) model coupled with increasing service-specific resource requirements and tightening fiscal constraints have resulted in little evolution in joint force headquarters construction since the end of World War II."...

Framing the Future of the US Military Profession
January 13, 2022 — Richard A. Lacquement Jr., Thomas P. Galvin — Monograph by the US Army War College, US Army War College Press, Strategic Studies Institute — "The military profession needs to be redefined by examination of its expertise and jurisdictions of practice, whereas previously the focus was on securing its professional identity. Twenty years ago, the original Future of the Army Profession research project responded to growing concerns among officers that the Army was no longer a profession in light of the post–Cold War drawdown and the onset of global operations including Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the profession faces recurrent challenges raised by the changing character of war, the renewal of great-power competition, crises surrounding issues of sexual harassment and assault, the effects of a major global pandemic and associated social and political unrest, and the growing societal distrust toward professions in general..."...

Veteran Disability Compensation and the Army Profession: Good Intentions Gone Awry
January 29, 2021 — Veteran Disability Compensation and the Army Profession: Good Intentions Gone Awry — Dr Wong Leonard, Dr Gerras Stephen — Monograph by the US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College Press — "For 40 years, from 1960 to 1999, about 8 percent of the veteran population received disability compensation. In 2000 the percentage edged up to 9 percent or 2.3 million veterans. By 2018 the percentage had tripled to 24 percent or 4.7 million veterans. Although many researchers attribute this upward trend to the influx of wounded from the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, the authors show that favorable legislative action, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) policy changes, societal developments, and improved information flow enabled and encouraged many more veterans to file for disability. The rise in the number of veterans receiving disability compensation signaled a cultural transformation concerning disability compensation that would eventually spread throughout the US Army and the other services."...