Author Description

It is widely expected that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a critical role in future military operations. As part of the Department of the Air Force (DAF)'s efforts to incorporate emerging technology into modern warfare operations, RAND researchers were tasked with studying the data, technologies, processes, and policies that the DAF will need to enable effective sense-making in the next decade. To advance the understanding of how these elements intersect with the current state of technology, RAND researchers identified challenges in the current sense-making processes and opportunities to overcome them. The effort was to focus on how sense-making occurs--where, with what, and by whom--with a particular emphasis on how information from multiple intelligence domains can be fused to find, fix, and track targets. In this report, RAND researchers identify the most significant sense-making challenges facing the DAF and assess how AI capabilities could address these challenges. RAND researchers also provide insights for adoption through a comparative AI adoption schema and conduct a systematic examination of risk on a notional AI system, showcasing requisite considerations on how best to implement these insights. AI capabilities and DAF sense-making processes are not simple. Syncing these processes requires careful consideration of how decisionmakers will use these methods and how they are integrated into the larger intelligence cycle.