The Pentagon's AI Problem Is Judgment, Not Autonomy

Institutional momentum inside the Pentagon favors acquisition over doctrine. The rush to field LLM-based tools tracks a procurement cycle that measures success in deployment speed and capability breadth — not in whether the humans using those tools retain the judgment those tools are supposed to support. The research on AI eroding human thought and communication sits uncomfortably against that institutional logic because it doesn't argue the tools fail at their stated task — it argues the tools succeed while quietly degrading the operator.