Air Force AI writes battle plans faster than humans can — but some of them are wrong

In a recent Air Force experiment, AI algorithms generated attack plans about 400 times faster than human staff, a two-star general told reporters here at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference. The catch? Not all the AI-generated plans would actually work.

The challenge in the exercise, called DASH-2, was to come up with detailed “Courses Of Action” (COAs) for how to strike a given set of targets with a given set of aircraft and weapons, explained Maj. Gen. Robert Claude, a member of the joint Air Force/Space Force team for the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). Human staff using traditional methods generated three COAs in about 16 minutes, Claude said, while AI tools generated 10 COAs in “roughly eight seconds.”

Some quick math averages those rates out: The AI generated 1.25 COAs every second, the humans generated one COA every 5.3 minutes. That’s a 400-fold difference in speed.

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