In America: Trump-Era Plan To Turn Department of War Into “AI-First” Military

President Trump’s Executive Order 14179, following up 2025’s “AI Action Plan,”, will remove policy that the Executive Branch sees as barriers for government artificial intelligence infrastructure. POTUS intends to promote American military capabilities through innovation of AI, development of computer infrastructure, strengthening private-sector partnerships, and making data operationally sound for the Department of War (DOW). Skeptics view this new military AI strategy with concerns for ethics, strategic instability, and increased hostility internationally. 

Accelerating America's Military AI Dominance

Artificial Intelligence is viewed as a decisive variable in future warfare for the U.S. The Trump administration and Department of War see AI as a new frontier that could strengthen the United States’ technological capabilities to overcome adversaries. 

"It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." - President Trump’s Executive Order 14179

The President and the Department of War have begun to identify and eliminate bureaucratic regulations deterring AI innovation. POTUS has blamed regulatory models, supposedly following DEI principles, for the slow pace of AI innovation in the past. The Department of War’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy is targeting four issues slowing government AI development: data sharing, Authority to Operate Standards (ATOs), contracting, and hiring. The DOW intends to develop AI capabilities for the military through seven “Pace-Setting Projects” or PSPs. The PSPs are meant to target three mission areas in the executive order (E.O.): Warfighting, Intelligence, and Enterprise.   

• Data sharing will be accessible to cleared users; priorly, this cross-service and industry access would be blocked due to fragmented data ownership and policy restrictions. 

• The Authority to Operate (ATO) process allowing for AI development in the government has traditionally taken months to years due to manual security documentation and variability in standards between offices and services. The executive order creates a “Wartime approach”  which will allow for rapid waivers to ATOs and allow for the Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer and Chief Information Officer monitoring government AI development to override ATOs slowing processes. 

• The new strategy encourages fast-cycle contracting rather than traditional cost-plus defense contracting to deliver faster, more innovative offerings matching the pace of POTUS and the DOW intentions with Military AI technology. 

• Hiring for the DOW has been notoriously slow due to clearance processes, pay scales, and the challenge of competing with private-sector AI hirers. The order intends to change this by the use of special hiring authorities, accelerated clearance pathways, and talent hiring development plans.  

Changes to current DOW staffing and operation ideology will pursue rapid experimentation, frontier-model deployment, and unconstrained AI usage for the U.S. military to gain advantages over potential threats. There is a substantial body of criticism and skepticism about the new military AI strategy. 

Major Counterarguments & Skeptic Perspectives     

Concerns for the order’s impact include the lack of ethical guardrails in military AI usage, potential loss of human judgement due to automation bias, and consequences of over-relying on AI frontier models that are historically error-prone and hard to audit. 

The executive order explains that the Executive Branch and DOW will be removing regulatory models that it sees as barring innovation for military AI usage. The DOW will replace models and develop AI systems that ostensibly follow technological facts rather than be constrained by certain political ideologies. There is concern that removing past models could risk discarding long-standing AI safety norms. The new strategy doesn’t mention any narrative regarding how newly established AI will be regulated for ethical use after regulatory models are removed. The lack of restriction on the military use of AI raises alarms for perspectives reviewing the ethics of the current administration. In the past year, lawmakers have voiced outrage with the administration’s actions for alleged unethical and unlawful misuse of the military in the past year. This includes the alleged wrongful behavior of ICE, POTUS’ unlawful deployments of the National Guard, and the DOW’s conflict with Venezuela. 

Oxford University Press explained AI-support systems can erode human judgment. An overreliance on artificial intelligence-powered decision-support systems (AI-DSSs) can risk military actions going beyond ethical morals in warfare tactics, escalate conflicts quicker, and result in military personnel over-trusting AI during crisis situations. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reported that AI used for combat support over the past decade has widely been error-prone and experienced technological unpredictability due to algorithmic biases, brittleness, hallucinations, misalignments, privacy risks and loss of control. The executive order declaring the rapid deployment of militarized AI raises concern for the increased chance of untested systems entering combat.  

The Trump administration sees unrestricted AI innovation for the Department of War as a way for the United States to gain technological advantages over enemies. Will the use of AI innovation for the United States’ military be beneficial? Or will it result in mistakes and misuses that could be unlawful and catastrophic for the United States?