The Department of War Should Establish a Strategic Compute Reserve

Special Competitive Studies Project  |  Andreas Theodoropoulos, James Ryseff

American forces during Operation Epic Fury leveraged AI tools like the Maven Smart System to identify and strike 13,000 targets in 38 days, demonstrating that modern warfare is increasingly constrained by computing power. This unprecedented operational speed exposed a critical vulnerability: the military's classified compute infrastructure remains dangerously inadequate for sustained peer conflict.

While commercial tech giants command massive GPU clusters, U.S. Central Command recently operated its classified network on just four NVIDIA H100 GPUs. To bridge this gap before a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific, the Department of War must establish a Strategic Compute Reserve to mobilize America's dominant commercial data center base. This initiative requires reforming obsolete, compliance-oriented cybersecurity regulations to enable rapid risk-based accreditation of civilian infrastructure. Additionally, the Pentagon should subsidize physical and logical security upgrades at commercial facilities, utilizing a rapid conversion model to quickly transition unclassified hardware into trusted military compute during national crises.

Comment

The integration of the Maven Smart System during Operation Epic Fury exposes a critical dependency on advanced graphics processing units that standard military logistics networks cannot organically provision. While U.S. Central Command has historically operated its algorithmic workflows on extremely limited physical hardware, scaling these targeting tools for high-intensity conflict requires immediate access to commercial-grade hyperscale data centres. This structural bottleneck reveals that modern operational endurance is directly tethered to civilian semiconductor allocation and cloud infrastructure resilience rather than traditional munitions stockpiles alone. Consequently, the ability to sustain algorithmic warfare in a protracted theatre depends entirely on pre-negotiated industrial mobilisation agreements with commercial cloud providers.

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