Faster Wars, Smarter Minds: Driving the Army’s Quiet Cognitive Revolution

“WAR ON THE ROCKS” By Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr.

“No amount of technology can offset a deficit in human adaptation. Artificial intelligence should be seen not as augmented or automatic intelligence, but as additional intelligence — a means to enhance, not replace, human judgment.”

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“The U.S. Army stands at the convergence of two accelerating forces: the exponential growth of battlefield technology and the finite limits of human cognition. From low earth orbit to tactical edge networks, the tools of warfare are changing faster than our cognitive infrastructure — education, training, and judgment — can adapt. While it’s tempting to believe the answer lies in fielding faster tools, better networks, or more advanced artificial intelligence, the truth is: no amount of technology can offset a deficit in human adaptation. Artificial intelligence should be seen not as augmented or automatic intelligence, but as additional intelligence — a means to enhance, not replace, human judgment.

The Army’s educational institutions, especially the Combined Arms Center and its subordinate Centers of Excellence, are already adapting swiftly across educational, operational, and technological fronts to equip future leaders with the creativity and cognitive tools tomorrow’s wars demand. These organizations remain singularly focused on doctrine, force structure, training, and leader development from the individual soldier to the theater command.

Progress in the educational domain is not always immediately visible or easily reduced to dashboards or slide decks. But it is happening — quietly, deliberately, and with urgency. The quiet delivery is intentional and for good reason.

As Juliet Funt observed in A Minute to Think, there are “lead measures” and “lag measures.” A lead measure tracks actions you can control that drive results, such as studying daily or rehearsing battle drills. A lag measure tracks the results that appear later, like test scores or mission success. Cognitive investments often fall under the latter, yielding results only over time.

Professional military education is such a domain. Unlike a new weapon system that shows immediate improvements in range or lethality, the cognitive impact of professional military education becomes clear only when leaders apply what they’ve learned years down the line, often under uncertainty. Education fosters cognitive growth. Training fosters behavioral growth and is more like a lead measure. Both are essential, but they operate on different clocks.

Rethinking What and How We Educate

For generations, the Army’s schools have taught soldiers what to know and how to do it. That foundation endures, but the character of war is shifting too fast for education to remain a static exercise. We are no longer filling rucksacks with facts. The Army is sharpening minds to improvise, to connect dots no manual can yet chart, and to see the fight as it unfolds in unexpected ways. To train for tomorrow, the Army needs to teach leaders not just to execute doctrine, but to bend it, stretch it, and reimagine it under fire.

This begins with new approaches that strip away barriers and focus learning on adaptive thinking. It continues with changing skills that blend institutional and operational training to close the cognitive gap. And it relies on technology that sharpens, rather than replaces, human judgment.

More Than Inputs and Outputs

Our efforts to transform professional military education began with reducing barriers to learning while preserving rigor. In 2024 alone, we streamlined over 346 hours of distributed learning requisites across professional military education programs, completely removing the prerequisite requirement for officers and reducing to 50 hours combined in the advanced and senior leader courses for non-commissioned officers. This effort wasn’t about eliminating content. Rather, it was about giving time back to operational units and enabling learners to focus on what matters most: adaptive thinking and problem-solving.

Across the enterprise, the Combined Arms Center and its centers of excellence are modernizing how learning happens. Partnerships with academic institutions have shown us that delivery matters as much as content. At the Cyber Center of Excellence, for example, students use game-based tools like Kahoot! to reinforce technical concepts. At the Defense Language Institute, AI-enabled systems like LinguistNext help students master context-based usage of language while continuously adapting to individual learning gaps.

These tools do more than convey information. They add to skills development while simultaneously developing cognition efficiently and effectively. Creative Thinking: A Field Guide to Building Your Strategic Core by Angus Fletcher has been added to the Command and General Staff College curriculum. Based on partnerships with researchers at the Ohio State University, it was proved that creativity can be taught. Fletcher’s other book, Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know, applies this work on creative thinking in ways applicable to military education. We all have the gift of creativity but tend to lose it over time due to the requirements of our profession to think in certain ways. The focus on critical thinking ought to be balanced with creative thinking.

In this way, artificial intelligence is becoming additional intelligence.

Changing Skills for a Changing Fight

Operational demands remain largely the same: leaders must still lead, fires must integrate, and logistics must sustain. However, the environment in which these tasks occur is radically different. Recognizing this, the Combined Arms Center launched innovative approaches like the mobile advanced readiness training model, currently active at Fort Gordon’s Cyber Center of Excellence and Fort Sill’s Fires Center of Excellence. This model blends institutional and operational learning by deploying instructors, program managers, and vendors to train soldiers not just on new systems, but on how to integrate those systems within existing formations.

Some may think that mobile training teams and new equipment training or fielding teams do this already, but they focus on a specific piece of equipment and how to operate, maintain, and use the system. The training model we are using, on the other hand, leverages centers of excellence instructors and faculty, teamed with program evaluation offices, program managers, and vendors, to deliver training that helps soldiers and leaders understand how to integrate new capabilities into the systems that currently exist inside of a formation.

It is this integration work that fills the cognitive gap. Learning how to operate a new system as a stand-alone or replacement is one thing, but integration into the systems of systems of an organization in the context of warfighting is different. Additionally, the centers of excellence teams learn from each encounter or transform-in-contact events and can immediately transfer lessons, trends, observations and insights into doctrine, lesson plans, and course curriculum. In general, this approach bridges the gap in learning at the institutional and operational force.

This is how the Army closes the cognitive gap: not just by teaching what something is, but how it fits into the larger fight. These changes aren’t just technical: they are fundamental cognitive shifts in how the Army conceptualizes, employs, and fights with emerging technologies.

Tech Should Enhance, Not Replace, Cognition

Many fear that artificial intelligence and automation may replace human decision-making, but the more productive view is that technology should augment cognition — not override it. The systems will not think for us. They are designed to augment our ability to think faster and better.

The Army is already seeing results. As Maj. Gen. Michelle Donahue, commanding general of the Sustainment Center of Excellence, explained to the Army vice chief of staff, “What took us months or weeks to do in changing doctrinal manuals now takes hours.” The Training Development Tool delivers similar gains. Traditionally, programs of instruction — broad frameworks like the Rifle Marksmanship Program — could take up to three years to update under existing policy and governance rules. The real hurdle, though, isn’t the program itself but the lesson plans inside it. Those can now be revised in minutes instead of hours. Meanwhile, the Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachuca is developing an AI-enabled personal assistant trainer, a military counterpart to platforms like Khan Academy or Cognito, to guide learners through professional military education and beyond, enhancing both personalization and understanding.

Technology can enhance cognition—but only if the Army equips soldiers and leaders to ask better questions and think critically about the answers.

Trust, Repetition, and Ethics in the Digital Age

Education is not a download of information. It is the slow forging of judgment. In a digital age where algorithms promise speed, the Army’s task is to prepare leaders who know when to trust machines, when to question them, and how to anchor every decision in professional ethics. Trust in technology grows when soldiers learn to work with data rather than simply receive it. Repetition through writing and discourse strengthens the habits of thought that turn ideas into doctrine. And ethics keep pace with innovation, ensuring that new tools sharpen judgment instead of dulling it.

New Roles of Coordination: Trusting Tech by Training People

Trust in digital systems must be earned through experience, not imposed by policy. That’s why we’ve embedded operational data literacy into professional military education across various cohorts. The scope and depth vary by military occupational specialty and branch: Some courses at the Cyber Center of Excellence now include over 1,300 hours of data science, and sustainment courses exceed 900 hours.

More importantly, for the first time, the Combined Arms Center is assessing data acumen. In partnership with the Army Research Institute, we recently piloted a pre- and post- assessment with a cohort of non-commissioned officers. The group’s baseline score was 62 percent. After training, that jumped to 92 percent — a 30 percent increase in knowledge. It will take additional education and experience to increase understanding, the highest domain in the cognitive hierarchy. While this doesn’t turn soldiers into data scientists overnight, it proves that with the right exposure and tools, they can quickly gain and apply data proficiency leading to enhanced understanding of “Data Centricity” across our Army. The Carnegie Mellon Artificial Intelligence Integration Center program, the Army’s partnership with Arizona State University, and our evolving work with Vantage and CamoGPT are building leaders who not only use data — but challenge it. To be data literate means having the “ability to read, work with, analyze, and communicate using data.”

Reinforcement and Repetition Matter

The Harding Project, often viewed as a writing initiative, is restoring our institutional muscle memory of professional discourse. With the launch of the Line of Departure website, branch journals now reach over 20,000 readers per month — a tenfold increase over previous years. This is not just good communication — it’s cognitive exercise. Reflection, writing, and publication all reinforce critical thinking across generations. The four 2025 Harding Fellows are currently enrolled in the Mass Communications Master’s Program at the University of Kansas with six more fellows coming in 2026.

The increase in writing and professional dialogue and discourse creates a cognitive explosion that drives the lessons that we need to incorporate across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy. With this increase in writing and demonstration of clear thinking, the impact on our doctrine is tangible. Several articles have migrated to handbooks and doctrinal publications in less than a year’s time. As examples, “The Graveyard of Command Posts” is now a handbook and insights from articles on drones, electronic warfare, and deception are now in doctrine.

Good writing is good thinking, and good thinking is used to help enable the Army to fight at echelon in a major war.

The Salience of Ethics

Deepfakes and autonomous weapons show that ethics are central to modern war. The Army is embedding them directly: a Deception Planners Course, ethics-driven updates to Field Manual 3-37, all centers of excellence shaping Army Doctrine Publication 1, and new training for contested environments. The Institute for Religious Studies will soon join the Combined Arms Center, strengthening how the Army thinks about artificial intelligence in doctrine, training, and leader development.

In professional military education, the Combined Arms Center updated policy to enable students to leverage tools to increase their cognitive abilities. Some might think these new tools will make soldiers lazy. I’d beg to differ. If we understand how to use new tools ethically and responsibly, soldiers won’t become lazy, but rather more intellectually aware and astute. In the end, an increase in cognitive efficiency and reduction of time-consuming tasks can be achieved in ethical and responsible ways.

The Work is Quiet, But It Is Moving

We’ve heard the concern: “If I can’t see it, maybe it’s not happening.” But that assumption misses the nature of the challenge.

Modernizing cognition isn’t about throwing technology at the problem. It’s about teaching humans how to think in a world that’s changing faster than ever before. That means fewer grand unveilings and more hard conversations in curriculum reviews, doctrinal rewrites, and cross-functional sprints. It means hundreds of senior non-commissioned officers and captains adjusting how they teach, what they evaluate, and how they adapt under pressure. These changes are messy. They’re not suited to a 30-minute brief. But they’re happening. In fact, they’re accelerating.

The Combined Arms Center is not just reacting to the future: It is building it, one syllabus, one classroom, one integrated training environment at a time.”

Faster Wars, Smarter Minds: Driving the Army’s Quiet Cognitive Revolution

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lt. Gen. Milford “Beags” Beagle Jr. is the commanding general of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center on Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is responsible for integrating the modernization of the fielded Army across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy. He has served in multiple leadership capacities from platoon through division level, and his career deployments span the globe from Hawaii to the Republic of Korea. He previously served as the commanding general of 10th Mountain Division (Light).