Benjamin Jensen
Next Army is a collaborative series by CSIS Futures Lab and the Modern War Institute launched in honor of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday and the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). The commentaries explore how emerging technologies, organizational reforms, and major shifts in the strategic environment will shape the force of 2040 and beyond.
In the future, the U.S. Army will operate as a distributed, data-centric network in which every echelon—from squad to theater armies and corps serving as combined forces land component commands—can tap a continuously refined “brain of the Army.” This agentic AI model will integrate lessons harvested from professional military education (PME) and real-world operations, fusing human insight with machine speed to accelerate the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP), Troop Leading Procedures (TLP), and functional planning. Commanders will query staffs that combine human military professionals and an ecosystem of AI agents fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback. The best and brightest across the Army will collectively teach AI agents how to think about land power based on insights captured in classrooms, staff rides, and decision games—turning the classroom and leader development into the structured data needed to train algorithms.
Widely used AI platforms ingest commercial datasets divorced from the realities of land warfare, leaving commanders with generic models that misunderstand terrain, tempo, and tactical nuance. Most foundation models, which are generalists, are trained on more data about the Kardasian family than corps commanders from World War II or evolution of Army doctrine for leading large units.
As a result, the Army of the future must find mechanisms for fine-tuning foundation models that will become ubiquitous across the force. The ideal location to this end already exists: military education. Transforming PME into a more dynamic setting and deliberate data-aggregator capturing outlines for courses of action, commander’s intent statements, and after-action reflections creates the type of human-based, high-context data needed for broader AI adoption in the profession of arms. This change will require that every schoolhouse become more of a battle lab in the best tradition of the profession. There will be little time for lectures on strategy and outdated history treatments as students focus on fighting each other and even AI agents replicating threat doctrine. Civilian academics will still play a key role, but all curriculum—from history to political science and international relations—will be calibrated to the core purpose: creating a battle lab where thinking leaders fight and data on how they think is captured along the way. This vision is not cost-neutral. The Army will need to invest in the computational infrastructure and the processes required to harvest data from this battle lab.
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