The pace of modernization is accelerating faster than doctrine, training cycles, and human adaptation can keep up. This gap is widening at the exact moment when the Army is pushing toward a future of distributed, AI-enabled formations.
Autonomous systems are advancing quickly. AI-enabled tools accelerate sensor fusion, compress timelines, and extend the reach of tactical formations. Project Convergence, Indo-Pacific exercises, and recent modernization experiments show a battlefield that is more saturated with data, more contested in the electromagnetic spectrum, and increasingly dependent on effective human-machine teaming.
Yet technology continues to outpace the Army’s ability to prepare the humans responsible for interpreting and acting within these systems. Contemporary work on cognitive warfare argues that the modern battlefield extends into the human mind, where contests over identity and resolve begin long before physical first contact. That idea becomes even more consequential as soldiers enter environments shaped by automation and accelerated decision cycles.
Modernization is redefining how the Army fights, but human performance remains the decisive variable. As AI expands sensing and increases operational tempo, identity alignment becomes the factor that enables soldiers to exercise judgment, interpret intent, and act with confidence in uncertain conditions.
Identity alignment is the internal coherence between a soldier’s sense of self and the demands of his or her role. It becomes visible in training when soldiers anticipate intent, act without hesitation, and maintain clarity when systems fail or information conflicts. AI can flood formations with information, but identity-aligned soldiers decide what matters and what to act on.
Sensemaking Under Uncertainty
AI processes information; humans assign meaning. In distributed formations operating under degraded communications, sensemaking becomes a form of cognitive overmatch. Clausewitz described friction as the battlefield force that turns simple tasks into difficult ones. Identity alignment reduces internal friction by giving soldiers clarity of purpose before they face uncertainty.
Gary Klein’s research shows that experts rely on internalized mental models shaped by experience and identity rather than step-by-step analysis under pressure. The Army’s multidomain operations concept reinforces the need for soldiers to act on intent despite incomplete information, deception, and uncertainty. Across Indo-Pacific exercises, junior leaders often manage multiple drone feeds, automated alerts, and fragmented reporting. They must identify what is significant before higher headquarters can intervene. AI accelerates sensing. Humans create understanding. That interpretive advantage cannot be automated.
Moral and Intent Judgment
AI can optimize for efficiency, but it cannot interpret a commander’s intent, assess proportionality, weigh escalation risk, or understand second-order effects. These remain fundamentally human responsibilities.
Karl Weick’s research demonstrates that people interpret information through the meaning they assign to their roles. As autonomous systems shorten the space between observation and action, soldiers require internalized purpose and moral clarity to make responsible decisions. During modernization experiments, automated systems often produce recommended actions within seconds, but decisions involving force must remain in human hands. The Department of Defense’s AI principles reinforce that accountability for lethal choices cannot be delegated to machines. Identity alignment strengthens this moral anchor and helps reinforce the spiritual readiness required to navigate ethical ambiguity.
Adaptive Action When Systems Fail
Automation is brittle in rapidly changing environments. Future conflicts will contain rapid, unpredictable disruptions. Survivability will depend on soldiers who can adapt without guidance.
Cognitive load theory shows that under stress and high task complexity, working memory becomes saturated, increasing reliance on automated, schema-based responses. Identity-aligned soldiers act; misaligned soldiers hesitate. Training rotation observations indicate that many failures in AI-enabled or networked scenarios arise not from system breakdowns but from human hesitation in the face of ambiguity.
Current conflicts illustrate the point. Operators cut off from command networks succeed not because of superior platforms but because they possess the internalized resolve to act on the commander’s intent without validation. Cognitive latency becomes decisive. Identity alignment reduces that delay by anchoring interpretation in purpose rather than uncertainty. When threats evolve in seconds, even minor delays determine outcomes.
Identity Alignment as Cognitive Infrastructure
Sustained performance in AI-enabled formations requires coherence between who soldiers believe they are and what their roles demand. Identity alignment forms the cognitive infrastructure that supports initiative and enables soldiers to navigate complexity without waiting for certainty.
Aligned soldiers learn faster in dynamic environments, maintain lower cognitive load, understand intent with fewer touchpoints, act earlier with greater confidence, and integrate AI as an accelerant rather than a crutch.
Identity alignment increases cognitive availability, the mental bandwidth required to interpret information at speed. As AI expands the tempo and complexity of tactical information flow, cognitive availability becomes a form of combat power. Misalignment at the human layer becomes a vulnerability that adversaries can exploit faster than system failures.
John Boyd argued that orientation, not observation, determines decision advantage. Identity alignment accelerates orientation by shaping the interpretive frames soldiers use when they confront new information. This alignment is assessable through observable behaviors: anticipatory decision-making, confidence in ambiguity, interpretive speed, and effective trust calibration with automated systems. These indicators give commanders practical ways to identify alignment gaps before they become operational liabilities.
In dispersed formations, a junior noncommissioned officer may have only seconds to determine whether a sensor alert represents a threat, a decoy, or a system anomaly. Automated systems can flag activity, but only an identity-aligned soldier can distinguish nuisance from danger and act accordingly. Research on automation shows that mistrust and overreliance often stem from misalignment rather than incompetence. Aligned soldiers effectively calibrate trust and maintain judgment amid system ambiguity. Aligned soldiers act with clarity. Misaligned soldiers wait.
Human-Machine Teams Only Work When Humans Are Ready
AI amplifies human strengths and weaknesses at scale. Modernization experiments consistently show that humans, not machines, remain the limiting factor in machine-speed decision cycles. The challenge is not computational power but the need for soldiers who can interpret, prioritize, and choose.
The Army’s shift from kill chains to kill webs requires initiative at the edge. Effects can originate from any shooter, across echelons and domains. Autonomy is no longer aspirational; it is structural. Some argue that advances in AI will reduce the need for human judgment by automating more tactical or analytical functions. Yet every major modernization experiment has produced the opposite outcome. As systems accelerate information flow and expand the reach of formations, the number of decisions requiring human interpretation, moral reasoning, and context increases rather than decreases.
Automation does not eliminate the human role. It intensifies the consequences of whether soldiers are cognitively prepared to fill it. Identity alignment becomes a prerequisite for decision dominance because soldiers must interpret intent and act faster than adversaries in contested, distributed environments.
The Army Has a Technological Roadmap but No Human Alignment Roadmap
The Army invests heavily in AI, robotics, networks, and decision-support tools. These are essential, but they assume soldiers who are cognitively ready for autonomy.
The Army People Strategy recognizes that purpose, identity, and meaning shape performance. In AI-enabled operations, these factors become operational requirements. Mission command doctrine emphasizes disciplined initiative, understanding intent, and acting without continuous oversight. The rapid tempo and complexity of AI-enabled environments intensify that obligation.
Preparing soldiers for autonomy requires leaders to treat identity alignment as an operational requirement, train adaptation under system disruption, assess alignment indicators during AI-integrated exercises, and embed occupational identity into leader development and decision authority. For example, leader development activities and professional military education can place soldiers in scenarios where doctrine, checklists, and emerging conditions conflict, then assess how they explain and justify their decisions under time pressure. Modernization will fail if the Army modernizes machines but not the humans responsible for decisions.
The Human Advantage
Wars will still be decided by humans interpreting meaning under pressure. Identity shapes whether soldiers make moral, timely, and adaptive decisions when machines accelerate everything else. As autonomy expands across sensors, shooters, and networks, the Army’s advantage will come not from the speed of its machines but from the clarity and coherence of the humans trusted to command them.
In the event of a major war, even before first contact with the enemy, the first battle will be identity, and the second will be how that identity performs inside human-machine teams. The Army does not need to out-machine its adversaries. It needs soldiers whose identity and judgment make technology decisive.
Sergeant 1st Class Jerae Perez is the station commander of the Bessemer Army Recruiting Station and serves as a 42T talent acquisition specialist in US Army Recruiting Command. He has over fourteen years of service focused on leadership development and the human side of talent acquisition. Sgt. 1st Class Perez holds a master of science in human resources and organizational development from the University of Louisville and is pursuing a doctor of education in leadership and learning in organizations at Vanderbilt University.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spc. Elijah Magaña, US Army
