Army Developing AI-Powered Mission Planning Assistant Tool

The future capabilities laboratory of the U.S. Army is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help mission planners choose the best moves in multi-domain battles, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.

The Artificial Intelligence Course of Action Recommender is a command, control, computers, communications, cyber-defense, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) center tool that is designed to recommend the best action to take based on warfighters' mission objectives and priorities.

“It is not a multidomain simulation, [but] that is what we will need in order to move beyond just the land domain and to make this a true multi-domain capability, which we hope to do in the future,” said Pete Schwartz, an AI expert who works on the action recommender tool with research and development partner Mitre.

The lab looks to further develop the tool for it to be capable of highlighting critical mission points in a quick and reliable manner. The team wants to enable commanders to focus on different parts of a mission in-depth by providing them with a more interactive system.

Schwartz stated that the battlefield awareness is “only going to become a more complex challenge to overcome, more combinations of decisions to consider, and shorter timelines in which to consider them.”

The team creating the AI tool is currently in the proof-of-concept stage and has reached out to Army AI Task Force, the Network Cross-Functional Team and other Army components that could help develop crucial mission point predictions.

“In the future, we are hoping that we can develop the artificial intelligence to a point where it understands the cause and effect enough that it can start to automatically extract some of those critical points and highlight them for the user,” concluded Schwartz.