Speed and War in US Military Thought: Mapping the Conditions for AI–Enabled Decision-Making

Abstract

Discussions of, and justifications for, integrating AI into military decision-making processes frequently draw from the notion that faster war is better war. As a result, AI-enabled technologies are promoted as the path towards attaining the required speed to compete and win on modern battlefields. In both scholarly analyses and policy discussions of military AI, speed is frequently uncritically accepted as an operating platform for such debates, taking such rhetorical framings as if they were a natural outcome. By offering a post-WWII genealogical account of speed in US military thought, this article seeks to challenge that seemingly inherent link. To do so, this article first illustrates how developments in the discourse of speed and its relationship to war has undergone significant shifts in the last 70 years. These discursive alterations come particularly in the form of a change in an emphasis on the physical speed and the movement of forces to a focus on the importance of making faster decisions within non-linear models of war. Second, this article then demonstrates how the emergence and stabilisation of the contemporary link between speed, decisions, and war has provided the enabling conditions for the increasingly formalised and institutionalised integration of AI into the US military decision-making processes.