Emerging era of warfighting with AI and autonomous systems forces changes to readiness viewpoints

Current and former military officials, as well as officials in the defense industrial base, are warning that drastic changes need to be made to sustain military readiness in this new era of drones, autonomy, and artificial intelligence.Former Army secretary Dan Driscoll, who led the service through these transformations, points to the Ukrainians as the example of what the U.S. military and defense industrial base should emulate. With the survival of their nation at stake, Ukraine’s military was forced to develop new, inexpensive weapons to try to outmaneuver a much larger military with a more sophisticated arsenal.The development of cheap, one-way attack drones has been a game-changer for smaller militaries and non-state actors, giving them a blueprint for taking out much more expensive technology. In the case of Ukraine, it’s a positive, while the United States has been on the other end of the cost equation in the Middle East, using air defense systems that cost millions of dollars per interceptor to shoot down cheaper Iranian drones and missiles. “The post–Cold War international order slowly withered for decades, but it reached a clear inflection point on June 1, 2025. On that day, Ukraine deployed less than a million dollars’ worth of hobby-shop technology to destroy Russian strategic bombers worth billions,” Driscoll’s opening line in a new Foreign Affairs op-ed said. “Russia’s exquisite air defenses and geographic depth made no difference, and images of burning Russian bombers finally settled the debate as to whether drones are a tactical aberration or a tectonic shift in geopolitical power.”Driscoll also referenced a training he saw first-hand at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany with Ukrainian troops, in which he saw how a Ukrainian soldier could “monitor threats and activate offensive and defensive capabilities from one system, on one screen, and with just a few keystrokes,” while he “watched an allied air defender swivel from one screen to the next, manually transferring data from one proprietary system to another.”The experience prompted his jailbreak initiative to get defense companies, which had traditionally safeguarded their technology to prevent it from working as smoothly with systems made by other companies, to break down those barriers. Driscoll believes the military should start pursuing weapon acquisitions that interoperate, not only with other U.S.-purchased weapons but also those of allied forces.These concurrent revolutions are changing the “very character of war,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in July.“Military readiness” is the concept of how prepared forces and the equipment they need are for deployment in combat. If troops or equipment are not adequately prepared for conflict, they are in what’s called a readiness gap, which is growing and has been exacerbated by current conflicts across the globe, including the Iran war.“We think about readiness as a national security enterprise. The conceptual model for readiness is that of a metric system,” Tara Murphy Dougherty, the CEO of Air, a defense acquisition software company, told the Washington Examiner. “It should be how do we create a continuously held state of being ready as the United States of America for any global contingency that we want to take on.”She outlined her thoughts in a new declaration from Air published on Monday morning about readiness shortcomings and possible solutions.In Dougherty’s view, everything the military does chips away at readiness, and between the Department of War and the defense industrial base, both should be operating at such a high level that there is a simultaneous effort to restore readiness as it degrades, or close to it.Such an effort may not materialize in an immediate return to the highest state of readiness, but it would be much closer than the current pace of replenishment.“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect the bounce-back reaction or the replenishment of readiness to be instantaneous,” Dougherty said. “But I would say that as Americans, we should expect that reaction to happen like a rubber band snap, and right now it is like a slug that is crawling through mud, and that’s where I think getting to more of a digital way of operating and running the programs really makes all the difference.”The military, for example, struck thousands of Iranian targets and had to defend against thousands of Iranian drone and missile attacks. Each of those offensive and defensive operations required munitions, which take years to replace.“Although DoD does not reveal the number of munitions it has on hand, a comparison of the reported expenditures of missile defense interceptors with the total numbers that DoD has purchased to date indicates that the United States has probably used between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of those munitions since June 2025,” a Congressional Budget Office report from earlier this month said.The CBO estimated that it could take “at least five years” to rebuild the interceptors inventory, “even if production was increased.”The Pentagon is looking at expanding production of these munitions while seeking cheaper variants and new advancements.The U.S. Air Force and Navy have also stressed their already aging fleets of aircraft and naval vessels during the war, both of which had maintenance and sustainment delays that predate the conflict. Iranian forces have been able to damage or destroy more than 40 aircraft, the vast majority of which were unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones, while thousands of sailors and marines aboard vessels in the region have endured very difficult conditions in an extended deployment. There have been efforts to utilize autonomous systems to speed up the maintenance process.“I think the readiness problem has been a problem for a generation,” Dougherty added. “The trend lines have been going in the wrong direction for decades. Everybody in our space, our defense and national security space, knows it. But yes, absolutely, the recent conflict in Iran has helped push it to the headlines.”UNDERSTANDING THE ARMY’S DRONE STRATEGY: NECESSARY ‘ACROSS EVERY WARFIGHTING FUNCTIONThe department is currently trying to expand the production of the defense industrial base and the number of companies involved, with an emphasis on new startups and tech-based companies, Air being one of them. Despite the effort, Dougherty believes more needs to be done to solve the problem and create a more sustainable state of readiness.“Everyone is talking about the readiness challenges that we face as a country as very critical, but we see a lot of that, or hear a lot of that commentary, and don’t see a lot of demands for change or accountability for the absence of change,” she said.