An MQ-9 Sea Guardian unmanned maritime surveillance aircraft system flies over Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Coronado. (U.S. Navy)

From Uber to Google Maps, wayfinding apps allow users to rely on machine technology to sort through thousands of options to find the quickest and safest routes for their day-to-day travel. This "human command and machine control" technology is not only reshaping commercial services—it’s also changing the future of warfare and the U.S. military.  

In the new report Advancing Decision-Centric Warfare: Gaining Advantage Through Force Design and Mission Integration, authors Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Tim Walton argue that the U.S. military's force composition—still largely designed for WWII-era high-intensity conflict—must shift to a more diverse, agile, and machine-integrated model capable of adapting to real-time circumstances on the battlefield. By embracing a decision-centric approach driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and unmanned technology, the U.S. military can marshal a complex range of responses that challenge the gray-zone tactics favored by Chinese and Russian militaries.

See key takeaways from their report below, and be sure to join us for one of our many upcoming events.

Key Takeaways

From Advancing Decision-Centric Warfare: Gaining Advantage Through Force Design and Mission Integration by Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Tim Walton

1. China and Russia's Gray-Zone Advantage

The importance of adaptability is highlighted by today’s PRC or Russian gray-zone military and paramilitary operations, which pursue national security objectives while staying below the level of escalation assumed in DoD’s scenarios. The monolithic, multimission platforms and troop formations privileged by forecast-centric planning’s focus on most stressing situations are ill-suited for gray-zone confrontations because they cannot be easily disaggregated or recomposed into more tailored and proportional packages.

2. Boosting the US Military's Strategic Adaptability

This report describes a new model for joint force design and integration, where elements of military capability are able to be composed and tailored to the needs of specific operational challenges close to the time of use. Combined with appropriate command and control processes and systems, this model of mission integration has the potential to provide military advantage against capable adversaries through the surprise generated from force composition and recombination. Mission integration could also reduce the cost of operations and modernization by enabling aggregation of less-expensive weapons systems to realize capabilities provided today by large multimission platforms or formations.

3. The Information Battleground

Although not yet widely adopted by the U.S. military, decision-centric warfighting constructs are being implemented by U.S. competitors in concepts such as the People’s Republic of China’s System Destruction Warfare or Russia’s New Generation Warfare, which treat the information environment and cognition as central battlegrounds for future conflict. Under the PRC or Russian concepts, commanders are directed to electronically and physically attack sensors, communication networks, and command and control systems to undermine an opponent’s coordination while introducing false data through electromagnetic warfare and cyber operations that erode the defender’s ability to orient…

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

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