Introduction

Like many of us, I love listening to our veterans' tales, exploits and adventures. They regale stories from their long careers, dits about the changes in warfare and the disruptions following the digital transformation of our armed forces. Suddenly, I feel my age as they talk about some of the equipment I worked on, but in the past tense. As I reflect on this, I think that maybe the military got digital transformation all wrong.

Instead of focusing on the transformation of warfare by digitalisation, we have been preoccupied with the digitalisation of the equipment, not on the transformation of our Armed Forces and how we should prosecute a digital war using it. Instead of welcoming AI and digital transformation as a new paradigm for our Armed Services, did we merely apply it as a trendy veneer on legacy ways-of-war models, processes and practices?

In the first major digital war, Ukraine quickly learnt that their legacy Soviet and even adopted legacy NATO doctrine, models, processes and practices, built for the last war, were defunct in this new digital battlespace. As new conflicts arise, this challenges our fundamental assumptions about how we think, work, and measure success in the new AI-enabled profession of arms.

The rise of AI is giving us all a moment of pause.

Do we choose to also apply a veneer of AI to the same old legacy processes and practices, making them incrementally a little faster and more efficient … or do we work to focus on the important things in the next war - applying AI to increase our efficiency, effectiveness and lethality? At the same time, we must also chart new skills pathways for all our people and harness everyone's creativity so we can deliver a truly transformed AI-enabled military.

Augmenting and fusing the human mind with advanced AI technologies could provide a pivotal moment for us if we are bold enough to seize it.

Digitalisation isn't transformation

It has only been a decade since General Barrons presented his vision on Warfare in the Information Age. It promised to revolutionise us for a new way of war. But for many, the outcome was far from revolutionary; instead of truly investing in digital transformation, we faffed and frittered away the opportunity, making only superficial changes and tweaks rather than complete transformation.

This approach reinforced and cemented traditional tactics, techniques and procedures from the Cold War era, without dismantling the barriers that separated individuals, tasks and data within our formations. Each team, function and arm got its own ICS, which was meant to enhance efficiency but ended up complicating future efforts to aggregate data and interoperate as one.

While much of our equipment changed, how we operated on the battlefield did not fundamentally change the nature of our work or transform it. We introduced new, better equipment, interfaces, and architectures, improving the speed, security and quantity of the same things we always did. It allowed us to maintain the same old Cold War practices, with the data being passed and workflows remaining disparate, still siloed within different domains.

Instead of transforming how we fight, we extended, prolonged, and gave a lifeline to the old ways of warfare with which we were comfortable. We didn't challenge the politics or conventions, retire outdated thinking or butcher any sacred cows. How often have we heard "Why do we keep doing it this way?" We failed to change our perspective on how we think. We failed to question whether our traditions were right in this modern battlespace.

We failed to understand how we should fight in this digital world. As with digital transformation, there is no one-size-fits-all for AI enablement either, but iteration or refinement of past legacy practices is not the answer.

A reimagined military

A few organisations fundamentally understood the real power of digital; they reimagined their purpose and developed a whole new way of delivering their product/s...