Technology, Connected - AI Is Going To War

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

This episode of Thinking on Paper, we look at how artificial intelligence is moving from military planning into intelligence analysis, targeting and battlefield operations.Using a White House memorandum on America’s military AI strategy, Mark and Jeremy explore the push to build an AI-first warfighting force. The objective is to process information, identify threats and execute decisions faster than an adversary. That creates a central conflict between military speed and human control.In this episode, we discuss:How AI is being used in modern warfareWhat Project Maven doesHow AI supports intelligence analysis and military targetingWhat the military kill chain isHow AI could accelerate decisions across the kill chainThe development of autonomous weapons systemsWhether humans will remain involved in lethal decisionsHow AI-generated intelligence could produce false or misleading conclusionsWhy the United States sees China as its principal military AI competitorThe role of companies such as Anthropic and defence technology firmsWhat an open AI arsenal could mean for military procurementWhy the Pentagon is competing for AI researchers and engineersWhether faster military systems make conflict less likely or easier to escalateAI could help militaries process large volumes of data, identify targets more precisely and reduce the time between detection and response. It could also compress decision-making to the point where human review becomes a strategic disadvantage.The central question isn’t only whether military AI works. It’s who controls these systems when speed becomes the priority, and who remains accountable when intelligence, targeting and battlefield decisions are executed through software.Please enjoy the show.--🎧 Listen to every podcast⁠📺 Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠🏠 Follow us on ⁠X⁠🏠 Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠To suggest guests or sponsor the show, please email: [e-mail]--Chapters(00:00) Department of War(00:58) Executive Order 14179(01:59) China(04:36) Anthropic(07:20) Pace Setting Projects(08:28) Kill Chain (10:22) Palmer Luckey(11:53) The AI Open Arsenal(13:57) The War Time Approach(16:46) AI Talent Acquisition (18:54) Speed wins

Disrupted and Curious Minds, welcome to the show. What you're about to hear is not fake news. It is not AI generated. It is a memorandum published by the White House, signed by Pete Hegzeth, the Secretary of War, issued by the Department of War on January 9th, 2006. The memo is called Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War, accelerating America's military AI dominance. And we're reading this because six weeks.

after it was signed, the US is at war with Iran and AI is identifying targets. And buried somewhere in the bureaucratic, grandiose chess beating language of this memorandum is a very serious conversation about who controls AI. And does AI make war more likely or less likely? The memo opens. President Trump makes clear in Executive Order 14179, it is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global artificial intelligence dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security.

And then, AI-enabled warfare and AI-enabled capability development will redefine the character of military affairs over the next decade. This transformation is a race fueled by the accelerating pace of commercial AI innovation coming out of America's private sector. Races have winners and losers who's in the race, Jeremy, who is in the seat two of this race. We talked about this a lot, Mark. Just say China. Just say China. Right. Well, whenever something becomes a race, there's an urgency to it. And we forget about a lot of the rules and human necessities outside of that.

So yes, we're in a race. The race is arguably against China. I think is it listed in. in this? Does it spell it out specifically in this? No, it's not. So this war, this race for an AI-led military, how is America going to win this race? This memo outlines the strategy to win the race. The United States military must build on its lead, so it's already winning the race, over our adversaries in integrating this technology established during President Trump's first term to make our war fighters more lethal and efficient.

To this end, aligned with America's AI action plan, I direct the Department of War to accelerate America's military AI dominance by becoming an AI-first war-fighting force across all components from front to back. The Department will achieve this objective by... So, yeah, the language is very aggressive. It's very... Attack, attack, attack, attack. This is the art of war. 2006 style. Let's go through the strategy. So objectives. What are the objectives of this? Number one, unleashing experimentation with America's leading AI models department-wide and rewarding AI first reconceptions of legacy approaches. So reconceptions of legacy approaches. For me, that means rewriting the rule book, the rules of engagement, throwing out what existed before and redesigning that

with AI in mind, how would it look? Yeah. And there's certain approaches, I think, that could be reasonable in this, the safety of people involved, safety of the military safety of the soldiers. You know, how could we improve that? That's kind of a good thing. The experimentation piece of this is pretty challenging, right? Because this, again, this is jet fuel. We don't even fully understand. it. Like these AI models, we don't know how they produce what they produce, why they produce what they produce. We don't even know much about how they're trained as individuals. How does hallucination play into the experimentation as well? If you're experimenting with life and death, I mean, it's all good and well used having an hallucination at work, but having an

hallucination on the battlefield, the consequences are life and death. Yeah. And then, you know, incentives, incentives usually direct people to what you're asking them to achieve, right? And you're asking AI first approaches, even when AI first may not be the best approach. So unleashing, God, that's a strong damn word, right? Like the language in this is, the language in this is pretty big. And then, you know, this next one aggressively identifying and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to deeper integration. So this is really interesting. This ties into some stuff that we talk about a lot. Think about democracy, just in general, gets inefficient for good reason. It takes a longer time to have things happen. And some bureaucratic barriers may need to be there, especially if there are decisions whether to pull the

trigger and automate or automate the pulling of the trigger for weapons, which I think we're largely referring to in this in this doc. Yeah. And you have vestiges of legacy information technology in modes of warfare. So they're talking about, again, out with the old and with the new. And then focusing our investment to leverage America's core asymmetric advantages in AI computing, model innovation, entrepreneurial dynamism, capital markets and combat proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations that no other military can replicate. Okay, well, we have Anthropic, or we had Anthropic, we have Open AI, we have GROC, we have Anderil, we have Palantir, we have the America's finest entrepreneurs on board.

Well, so remember Anthropic, just some history, guys. Anthropic, Dario Amadai, he left Open AI because he largely disagreed with the safety protocols related to releasing products and things in the market. He started Anthropic to do it a little bit differently. And, you know, currently in the news, they're suing the U.S. government, I think, because they were put into a risk profile. Or what was the official categorization mark? Do you have that handy? They're an official supply chain risk, I think is what they were called. Yeah. Because they wanted to have a little bit of small print in their agreement whereby the tech couldn't be used for mass U.S. surveillance and couldn't be used for full optimization of the kill chain. They're not. Probably not bad things to consider. Like, I mean, those seem pretty damn important. Those seem pretty damn important.

But in the race, and we don't have time. That's right. That's right. Let's continue. So we're talking about race. We're talking about speed. So now the memorandum moves into the PSPs, the pace-setting projects that will demonstrate the accelerated pace of execution, focus and ethos we need to stay ahead. The PSPs was also serve as tangible outcome-orientated vehicles for rapidly completing our build-out of the foundational AI enablers. infrastructure data models, policies, and talent, which is an interesting one. So there's seven PSPs. We start with, again, the race, the acceleration approach. So these are outlined, war fighting, intelligence, and enterprise.

So we'll start with war fighting. More bellicose language, Jeremy. Swarm Forge. Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test and scale, novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities, combining America's elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators. Here again, we have big tech and big government and big bombs and big drones and big swarms of drones. This has been acted out in Iran as we speak, is it not? That it is. That it is. Agent Network. We're going to unleash AI agent development and

experimentation for AI-enabled battle management and decision support from campaign planning to kill chain execution. So if I just want to read you something from the Project Maven Wikipedia page. Is this the as of September 2025? Yeah, as of September 2025, the director of the NGA claimed that by June 26, Maven will begin to transmit 100% machine generated intelligence to combatants. commanders using LLM technology. That doesn't mean that they're doing that on the ground now in a live war scenario. It means that that is possible. 100% machine generated intelligence.

The key here, I think, is 100% machine generated intelligence. What is the review process and protocol to take that through the human lens or are we limiting that? So technology scales what we do, right? So do you have, do you have now one person managing, I don't know, four or five theaters per se or areas of battle? And then they're relying on machine generated intelligence to make decisions still, or is this just going to automate, is there going to be a handoff process? And if so, where is the handoff that this decision needs to be generated or reviewed by a human? This decision does not.

I don't see any language in here that really talks much about that. And who is the human if there is the human in the loop? Who decides who that human is? Well, from that language, it means I understand it as they don't, doesn't need or there won't need to be a human in the loop. If there needs to be a human in the loop, that will be a decision made by the department. of war to keep a human in the loop, even though from a technological perspective, it might not be necessary. So you mentioned Project Maven, Andrew Palmer Lucky, right? So Palmer Lucky was the guy that

came up with Oculus, right? Was that his first? Yeah, he sold it to Meta for a billion. Sowed it to meta. And whether this is marketing or whether this is from him pitching his product, What I hear is his idea is to like use all of this to avoid wars and conflicts kind of before they happen, whether I believe that or not. I don't know. I haven't researched it enough. But this certainly, this memo doesn't talk about the avoidance of conflict. It talks about putting jet fuel on the ability to generate conflict. Yep.

So Ender's Foundry, I haven't read the book that this is related to. to accelerating AI-enabled simulation capabilities and SIM dev and SIM Ops, feedback loops to ensure we stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries. There we are again. It's very opaque. I looked at what the book, The Enders Game is, but it's about a child unknowingly fighting a real war through what he thinks is a simulation. And it turns out it isn't a simulation.

If you've read that, anybody, please let us know. I'm not sure that's a reference I want to see happening in an official strategy document for the, I'm going to still call it the Department of Defense. I don't think. I'll call it the Department of War. Intelligence, open arsenal, accelerating the tech, int, turning Intel into weapons in hours, not years. Turning Intel into weapons in hours, not years. You have your Area 53 modern warfare equivalent. You find this strange foreign Chinese technology on the war field in the straits of wherever you might find it.

AI analyzes it, determines what it can and can't do, suck it into the AI machine and use it. And you can do that in a day, not in years, which we would take now. Sometimes days are good. Sometimes having more days are good. I don't know that we need to have something turn intel into a weapon in an hour. While ready as humans kind of limited in our ability to make great decisions on behalf of the greater good, I think. It's kind of like that idea when you get really pissed off, Mark, and your limbic brain is activated and you get into this tornado of just like, blah, blah, and you're chasing down this mad. what do you what are good people tell you to do take a breath take a walk step away from stuff

for a minute we need to be able to step away from shit for a minute before we turn it into something unstoppable turn it to a weapon yeah that's you're right there does seem to me everything in this is written with the optimistic hope that everything is correct although that that's not true is it because later on we should probably get to that they say that there will be we'll make some mistakes but collateral damage is part of war and speed is more important than errors so at least they say there's no breathing space and that might cause some problems but what the hell what the hell fire well speaking to that too just just jumping down real quick wartime approach to blockers i think this is listed down here somewhere. And there is something called an ATO and authorization to operate.

This kind of helped remove some of these, some of these blockers. And this is specific to data sharing. So this talks about what Amadai probably highlighted and said, hey, you know, there's a lot of access to a lot of data. That could be used to create a surveillance state. I don't want to be a part of it, here's a blocker that, or here's a block remover that is put into this document saying, hey, we could just use this vehicle to do whatever we want to do because it's a race, because we have to beat, because we have to win. And listen, man, I'm not downplaying national defense. Like, I'm not downplaying this stuff.

That stuff's important. But, man, this is moving it quickly and maybe, like, recklessly, maybe a bit recklessly. I don't think there's only maybe about it. If you read so, okay, the middle part of the document, we talk about enterprise, they talk about creating a website where all military personnel can access these models and practice and train and do what they want, enterprise agents they call them. But then it gets to AI compute data access. Okay, so all of the departments have to establish, maintain and update federated data catalogs, exposing their systems, interfaces, data assets and access mechanisms across all. classification levels as mandated by the department's 2021 memorandum creating data advantage. They have 30 days to do that within the date of this memorandum.

So that deadline's passed. Okay. So first of all, technologically, that is a very difficult thing to do from a data storage perspective, from a permissions, from an access, from a data hierarchy, like everything involved in that. Is it? How do you know? If they've got open AI on board.

No, but you still have to look at your data archer, your storage architecture. And I'm not a storage architect. I'm not a data architect. I've been around a bunch of them. I've sat in meetings, planning data center programs with them at the table, teaching me, helping me understand their piece of the puzzle of that. And if we had one on today and we said, hey, you have to look across your organization, re-architect everything in 30 days to support this memorandum, they would say, no way.

If we did, it would create tremendous amount of risk. So the accelerated drive for this, again, we talk about, you know, potentially reckless. How much data is that? How many quadrillion terabytes of data is that? All of that information is mind-blowing. Well, but also how much of that data should they have access to? Should all of these departments have access to? Smelling a little surveillance, Mark.

Smelling a little surveillance. Well, before we get into the mad rush, we have the talent, which I think is big tech embed with big AI. There's a line in here, which I want to read out. I believe the best American talent will see this accelerated posture of AI capability development adoption at the DOW. And I expect each service and component to attract and retain this talent. To that end, I direct use of special hiring and pay authorities department-wide, as well as novel talent programs from the Office of Personnel and Management, and other partners to accelerate our pace of technical talent hiring into AI roles.

Sin in Facebook is paying 200 million for the best talent. How much? I don't know what the going rate is for an engineer at the DAW. But are they going to times a thousand of that? Are they going to start paying the talent millions per year to get them on board? Is that what this means? Or are they willing to settle for the second best talent or the third best talent? Because the best talent, except for the warmongers, is going to Silicon Valley.

So how do they, what does this mean? Yeah, I mean, the statement tells us that, you know, they're committing to investing heavily in resources to hire really smart people. So that's all I really gather out of that. Okay. You'll like this language, Jeremy. we're on to acceleration expectations. This strategy will accelerate our advantage

and we must implement it with the warrior ethos. As a non-American, Jeremy, could you explain to me the warrior ethos? I have no idea what that means, dude. I really don't. And it's capitalized. So maybe potentially within the branches of the military, maybe that's terminology within the army

or within the Navy or something that we don't have privy to. But I don't know, statements about technology and aligning with warrior ethos. you know. Okay, let's get on to the two most important paragraphs in this memo for me, speed wins and the AI model parity. Speed wins. We must internalize that military AI is going to be a race for the foreseeable future and

therefore speed wins. We must weaponize learning speed and measure and manage cycle time and adoption rates as decisive variables in the AI era. We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risk. of imperfect alignment. There it is. That's the one line in this whole document that should give us all pause.

We must accept the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment. So imperfect alignment is probably the least aggressive language in this, probably on purpose, imperfect alignment. You know what that could potentially mean? People dying because we use something that hasn't been properly vetted, properly safety tested, properly incorporated into a true understanding of what AI is capable of and where

the limitations lie. This is the Silicon Valley philosophy of move fast and break shit, but this is, this is like, I'm going to call it again, the Department of Defense, we shouldn't move fast and break shit in all cases. Yeah, breakshit takes on a new meaning here. The memo goes on for another page, some of the headers below, wartime approach to blockers, competition, centralized planning, AI native war fighting, modular open architectures.

And the final one, clarifying responsible AI at the Department of War, out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism. I'm going to echo just something right out of that section, out with utopian idealism, in with hard-node realism. The department must also,

utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military actions. So essentially, anyone who doesn't play with the vision in this document is going to be called a supply chain risk, just like anthropic. And we say this from the comfort of our podcast studio. We are not in anywhere remotely dangerous. We're not on the war front. We're not in Iran. We're not military personnel, but I will end the show with the same question I started it with.

Does AI make war more likely or less likely? We'll leave that for you to think about and read about. Until next time. Be disruptive. Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.