There are too many defense thinkers framing artificial intelligence as either revolutionary or rote. It's easy for us to think in binary terms (no pun intended); the truth is much messier, and that introduction of AI to warfare will be *both* evolutionary and revolutionary.

Mundane organizational aspects will proceed much like they always have, just much faster and more efficiently. Human capital becomes more important, not less, as the requirement for holistic thinkers who can keep pace and rapidly integrate disparate knowledge will grow.

The scaled deployment of autonomous systems, however, will fundamentally change how 'battles' are fought - pitting competing algorithms against one another at speeds un-augmented human operators won't be able to keep up with - particularly in the digital world.

As cyber-physical systems replace simple physical ones, the 'attack plane' will spread across every aspect of social and economic life, wiping away any remaining distinction between foreign and domestic, 'over there' and 'at home.'

The acceleration and convergence of threats will mean much more 'tactical' decision-making has to be delegated to algorithms that have the acuity to encompass all the inputs.

This doesn't render the 'human in the loop' obsolete of course, but it does mean the human will increasingly be outside 'supervising' the loop instead of inside it.

More importantly, AI will change warfare in ways that we can't even imagine right now, at the outset of this era.