Warfare in the Intelligent Age
Midjourney prompt: Warfare in information
The Intelligent Age has replaced the Information Age. Most military leaders are still struggling with information age thinking and most of their plans will not deliver for at least five years.
Therefore, four changes are needed to accelerate and adapt a military organisation to win in the Intelligent Age:
enhanced leadership that focuses on faster decisions;
prioritised automation of most routine human activities, so that humans can focus on more valuable cognitive and creative tasks;
recognition that more power exists outside defence than within, and that militaries need to adapt, adopt and operate outside their traditional organisations;
transform procurement first to meet military aspirations.
The Information Age was characterised by open and rapid data-sharing; social media-driven utilisation of personal data, often for advertising; and integration of knowledge systems. Information became the new oil, according to one truism of the times. Today, militaries are struggling to adopt and adapt these characteristics even as they are now becoming outdated.
The Intelligent Age is characterised by the Age of With, where every human works with intelligent machines in every activity. It merges the digital, physical and human worlds, collaborating across the boundaries of each to improve performance and empower smarter humans to achieve more at incredible speed.
This accelerated intelligent enhancement threatens to disrupt adoption of information age thinking and to derail preparations for the future. This provides both a military threat yet also an opportunity to disturb slower-moving adversaries by adopting four changes:
Leadership, but better
Leadership will remain critical for military effectiveness in the intelligent age, and ‘intelligent-enhanced’ leadership will prove even more decisive and emphatic by performing better than humans. Age of With leadership constructs acceptable solutions faster than its adversaries, who struggle to collate and comprehend the flood of information ‘oil’ across their processes. Improving decision-making with intelligent abilities will increase the probability of positive outcomes, confer advantage, and enhance military effect.
Automation where it delivers
Good leadership understands that humans are too expensive and valuable to waste on the mundane. The mindset of starting with what can be automated and building upwards must fundamentally change to one that starts with what humans must do and automating everything else. Intelligent systems are better suited to replace routine activities. Highly trained and scarce military humans need to prioritise activities that can only they can do.
Intelligent age militaries must avoid the costly pitfall of sequentially automating individual activities and processes and instead automate functions and roles at a massive scale—including entire staff branches who can be freed for more valuable duties. Those that harness the tremendous growth of automation will be the ones to gain the most significant advantages over adversaries.
Growth will also be faster and cheaper than equivalent step-change through process automation as leaders improve their critical issues by saving time, cost, and effort. A recent British Army empowerment study showed that infantry soldiers spent less than 20 per cent of their time on infantry skills, and that leaders struggling to cope with the routine present had little time to anticipate and prepare for the future.
More power outside than in
Warfare in the intelligent age recognises that, like all modern structures, there is more power outside the organisation than within it. The hierarchical command and relatively insular nature of militaries can combine falsely to reassure leaders that their team is the centre of the universe. Think of the archetypes epitomising military resilience: a battered ship at sea, a fort surrounded by enemies, or a lonely bomber heading home. These all place the military at the heart of the action.
Yet, intelligent age warfare is genuinely unrestricted, integrating national and political strategies across all aspects of a society, including financial, political, and cultural. It does not adhere to what has traditionally been seen as military domains, or deploy only traditional instruments of power. Its boundaryless nature uses intelligent systems to exploit the world outside defence domains, combining influence and power across a society’s agencies and organisations. Intelligent age military power therefore achieves its more limited objectives by using unrestricted measures across multiple vectors, such as media and the economy.
A modern military in this environment will attempt to impose their actions upon an adversary that is dynamically changing within a situation that is rapidly evolving. Enhanced leaders will need to act at increased speed, cycling faster through choices and decisions, and demanding new and original options with possible effects. Victory will depend on human ingenuity to deliver and enhance adaptation and exploitation in minutes and seconds.
Procurement transformation first
Therefore, the final, critical characteristic of enhanced warfare requires improvements to equipment and capabilities that go far beyond software enabling military platforms. Defence procurement organisations and functions must do far more than purchase technology such as AI, robotics, drones, or software for the parts on the battlefield. Every human activity in the Age of With needs enhancement and the procurement function of an intelligent age military must be the first to adopt and implement this transformation.
Without this procurement transformation, all subsequent changes will fail. Military procurement has for too long been measured by what rather than how it buys. Now, it must embrace warfare in the Intelligent Age. The function needs to adopt the mindset of ‘what must be done by humans and automate the rest.’
This will require the same aspirations that the battlefield forces must have to equip the military: use Intelligent Age approaches and methods at scale across their entire organisations. The first and most critical change will be to halt stagnant processes that plan and deliver in years and decades.
Intelligent Age Warfare enhances human insight with intelligent systems that blend physical, digital and human worlds. A successful military will enhance its decision making, improve its leadership performance, exploit power from outside the military, and apply new procurement processes to maintain these changes.
The end of the intelligent age is already foreseeable with the arrival of the quantum age. This will bring into starker contrast the immense gaps between information age and intelligent age warfare. If information was the new oil and intelligent systems the new car, quantum is the new internet. The application of quantum processing and insight will enable an intelligent age military to significantly surpass current levels of effectiveness.
