How Tough Conditions and Contested Communication Are Forcing the US Military To Reinvent AI

The era of artificial intelligence presents new opportunities for elite troops like the Army Rangers or Navy SEALS, but those opportunities are conscribed by some hard limits: for example, the power and connectivity of computers behind enemy lines, or the span of human attention in dangerous, stressful environments.

U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, is working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, on new projects and experiments to bring artificial intelligence to operators working in the sorts of environments where the computing power and data to...