At the Speed of Hypersonic Warfare in the future, how to build intelligence capabilities based on artificial intelligence? (1)

In a combat environment where advanced capabilities represented by hypersonic weapons continue to compress decision-making cycles, how to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to reshape battlefield intelligence work and build trust in AI-driven intelligence processes for battlefield commanders and intelligence personnel, thereby ensuring a decision-making advantage?

The decision-making advantage at the speed of hypersonic warfare relies heavily on intelligence capabilities.

Hypersonic weapons are speeding up the pace of warfare. By greatly shortening the engagement process and limiting the opponent's early warning response time, it brings great challenges to the decision-making and actions of combat commanders. In addition, technological developments such as automation and artificial intelligence are continuously increasing the combat speed on the battlefield, bringing future operations into the era of "hypersonic speed". In this operational environment, gaining decision-making advantage must begin with the intelligence activities that underpin all military operations. Timely and accurate intelligence will provide a decision-making information advantage and support the combatant commander's ability to grasp the opponent's intentions and control the operational initiative.

The nature of intelligence is a cycle. It includes planning to address a specific need, gathering raw information from various sources, using the information to generate valuable data relevant to the need, analyzing, integrating, and evaluating information to form intelligence products, distributing intelligence products to appropriate decision makers. The intelligence cycle begins again as intelligence products are adopted and as intelligence users make new demands. For intelligence users at the strategic and tactical level, the quality of intelligence and the speed at which it is delivered will shape, and will continue to shape, the course of operations.

As advanced technological capabilities continue to shorten decision cycles, it is recognized that "human-in-the-loop" processing and transmission speeds must be dramatically increased to maintain the time sensitivity of evanescent intelligence data. At present, the intelligence community has begun to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning programs to improve the speed of collection, processing, utilization and analysis. For example, the US Army's "fusion project" uses artificial intelligence and autonomy to shorten the time from sensor to shooter from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.