Defense One
After nearly half a year of focusing on new tech, commanders get to pit decision-making tools against operational plans.
WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has long sought to realize the potential of artificial intelligence to help commanders; now U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is about to use AI-powered decision aids in a signature tabletop exercise.
INDOPACOM will put its work on the Thunderforge project to use during the second half of its annual Pacific Sentry exercise, in which headquarters staff and command components square off against a simulated enemy, the command’s director of requirements and resources said Thursday.
“This is the first time we are using the online artificial intelligence tools to help us,” Bob Stephenson told Defense One on the sidelines of Scale AI’s Gov Summit here. “We’ve run one exercise. We’re about to move into our next phase, which is combining the AI-enabled applications that are available now—the reasoning models—with agentic, with Thunderforge, which is using modeling simulation and [courses of action] assessment.”
