Mass has long been a cornerstone of military strategy. Traditionally defined as the concentration of combat power at a decisive point to overwhelm the adversary, this principle remains as relevant to contemporary joint force planning as it was during the Napoleonic Wars. However, advancements in artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping how mass is generated, applied, and countered in modern warfare.
Mass now derives from converging effects across domains and aligning them against objectives. This process relies on synthesizing large volumes of information to support mission command and generating tempo in modern military operations.
What is Mass?
In war the principle of mass describes, as US Army doctrine puts it, the imperative to “concentrate the effects of combat power at the most advantageous place and time to produce decisive results.” The modern foundation for thinking about mass emerged from analysis of Napoleonic warfare in the early nineteenth century. In On War—particularly the book’s chapter on the “concentration of forces in space”—Carl von Clausewitz sees the concentration of force as an almost law-like principle governing how to win decisive battles. Antoine-Henri Jomini asserts that most fundamental principle of war is applying “strategic combinations [of] mass” on the “decisive points of a theatre of war.” These concepts became the principle of mass in modern war through J. F. C. Fuller’s attempts to formulate a science of war in the early twentieth century.
The definition of mass in modern military theory was never static nor strictly physical. Over time, the definition evolved to include not just the mass—or relative size—of units, but the volume of firepower they produced, a concept that still resides in the Lanchester equations for modeling combat. Multiple thinkers also saw critical factors shaping how units generated combat power ranging from morale and lines of communication to entire systems for combining arms based on capabilities and training. Even in Soviet doctrine, the correlation of forces and means analyzed multiple coefficients that affected the ability of a force to turn latent combat power into actual massed effects. And Fuller’s science of war called for thinking about the mental, moral, and physical spheres of war to capture key interactions that shape how armies concentrate forces in time and space.
At its core mass is about understanding the interaction of enemy forces, terrain, and friendly forces sufficiently to identify objectives where concentrating effects has the best chance of gaining an advantage in time and space. These objectives are decisive points, selected because they either hold enemy forces at risk or protect friendly forces. In the ideal, concentrating forces at these decisive points creates disproportionate gains in which the sum is worth more than its parts, a hallmark of complex systems, producing shock and dislocation a force can exploit through maneuver.
AI and Mass in Modern War
Artificial intelligence is ultimately about information in war. Through collecting data and training algorithms on underlying patterns, military organizations in theory gain a decision advantage. They can see fleeting opportunities where the interaction of enemy forces, terrain, and friendly forces creates decisive points. This information advantage rests on huge investment in computational infrastructure to process information and intelligence to collect enough data to identify tendency and potential in a system. According to former Army Chief of Staff General James McConville, AI has the potential to help soldiers sort through mass volumes of information to find the “the right arrow” to fire at the enemy. For current Chief of Staff General Randy George, this approach requires flattening network architectures to enable more data-centric approaches to mission command. It also includes simulating battlefield scenarios with AI to hone tactical judgment.
Many of these ideas have been evolving since the 1990s publication of Force XXI, which called for mastering technologies associated with a “digital battlefield,” advanced electronic warfare, and improved battle networks to simultaneously strike an opponent across the depth of the battlespace. The Army’s current operational concept—multidomain operations—extends this idea to multiple domains and dimensions with the concept of convergence, in which capabilities from multiple domains and echelons are arrayed against decisive points.
Mass now rests on information advantage and identifying when, where, and how to combine effects. Information becomes the key multiplier for generating combat power. Better understanding of your own forces and the ability to adapt to feedback from the environment creates tempo and the ability to make better decisions faster than the adversary can respond. This process rests on creating new approaches to aligning the best of human judgment with AI agents optimized to support mission command.
Generating Mass in Modern War
Mass in modern war is subject to diminishing marginal returns absent the ability to achieve information advantage. Witness Russia, which is destroying its economy and demographic future to gain hundreds of meters at a time and struggles to synchronize effects in time and space. Russian operational art is not able to generate modern mass—converging effects and combinations across multiple domains—leaving its army subject to blunt attritional calculations like human-wave attacks and long-range missile strikes uncoordinated with counterattacks.
AI can provide tremendous capability for massing both kinetic and nonkinetic fires in modern conflict. AI and machine learning algorithms’ ability to rapidly process vast corpuses of data to identify, track, and recommend targets while removing human bottlenecks will provide decision dominance to the using force. This was demonstrated by Israel’s use of systems known as “the Gospel” and “Lavender” to automate targeting of Hamas buildings and operatives, which—despite ethical and law of armed conflict concerns—demonstrated high operational tempo. The speed of identification created efficiencies that enabled the Israel Defense Forces to expand their target portfolio to include vast numbers of junior-level targets but reinforced the requirement to maintain humans on the loop to validate targets and avoid false positives.
Moving past the physical dimension, AI can also enable a force to achieve mass in the information dimension. AI provides a unique capability to analyze large volumes of information using techniques like natural language processing to help commanders visualize and describe sentiment, mood, and how the population is reacting to narratives. Used in line with the laws of war, this information flow can be adapted to support generating images and information tailored to audiences to shape perception and support military objectives, or to at least deny adversary use of computational propaganda. The flood of information is simply too much for any human or staff to address, placing a premium on using AI to support a mix of enduring ideas about information in war and new concepts like cognitive warfare.
The principle of mass will endure in war, but how formations generate and apply combat power is evolving as AI changes how commanders will process and analyze information. This condition calls for a new period of experimentation. The US Army—in coordination with the J7—should leverage the schoolhouse to explore how to generate mass using convergent effects across domains. This campaign will require investments in experimentation consistent with the Army’s new learning concept and initiatives in other services like the US Marine Corps Project Tripoli. Military professionals need to return education settings to what they were in the interwar period: forums for testing ideas about new tactics adapted to the changing character of combined arms.
This campaign of experimentation will also require novel methods for replicating highly sensitive and classified effects in space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Too often these effects are treated as exogenous in wargames, limiting the ability of players to understand how to generate modern mass using combined effects. While the Army is making the right investments in these areas, through entities like multidomain effects battalions, it will need to connect these capabilities to tactics and operational art. It will be impossible to turn every classroom or simulation center on military bases into a sensitive compartmented information facility, but it is possible to find creative ways of generating multidomain effects in wargames at the controlled unclassified information level that help officers learn about modern war level and don’t reveal sensitive capabilities.
By converging cyber, space, and physical maneuvers, these experiments will help future Army leaders understand how to synchronize effects at decisive points—generating modern mass through speed, precision, and broad information advantage. The result will likely be entirely new tactics and campaign concepts for fighting formations from the brigade to the corps. The Army should capture lessons learned across these experimental games—most of which will involve virtual and constructed environments—and use the results to refine both the algorithms and the doctrinal frameworks used to build a force capable of dominating in a complex, data-driven battlespace. This process has the potential to flatten combat development, better align schoolhouse experiments with doctrine writers, and identify and field new prototypes.
Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Jensen, PhD, holds a dual appointment as the Frank E. Petersen Chair at the Marine Corps University School of International Service and as the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Major General Jake S. Kwon is the director of strategic operations in the Headquarters, Department of the Army G-3/5/7.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Zoe Morris, US Army National Guard