Embracing the Inevitable: Integrating AI into Professional Military Education (PME)

Abstract

This was adapted with Gemini using the prompt: “Using this article, make me a 2-3 sentence abstract”

This article examines a faculty approach to integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Professional Military Education (PME), starting with faculty development. We argue that AI literacy among faculty is a strategic imperative to prepare future military leaders for an AI-driven operational environment, highlighting specific applications of AI tools.

Introduction

In the fall of 2022, ChatGPT blinked in existence and with it came the hopes and fears of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Immediate reactions across government, industry, and academia spanned the gamut of multiple Sci-Fi screenplays. Some institutions tried to vehemently shut the proverbial barn door on the AI horse already out in the field of public access. Some investors flocked to this promise of new wealth while numerous geniuses warned of humanity’s imminent collapse from sentient computers. Between the extremes of techno-optimism and dystopian fear, there was much prevaricating over whether AI would replace human workers, promote cheating and laziness, or erode human creativity and critical thinking.  Over the last three years, global reactions to AI matured and cooled; becoming even dismissive to its potential.  Media trends as many articles dismissing the “AI boom” as those touting it will “bust” shortly.

Beneath that din, some institutions took a measured approach to receiving, assessing, and implementing AI. Our experience at the US Army War College demonstrates a positive evolution in the measured adoption of AI tools.  We felt that our personal journey of self-discovery and implementation, bounded by sensible and forward-leaning policy, would be a useful tutorial for others in professional military education struggling to integrate AI while maintaining academic rigor.

The Imperative for AI in PME Faculty Development

The ghosts of military historical analysis continue to provide stark warnings of strategic and intellectual stagnation. In 1940, Marc Bloch noted in his journal (published posthumously as Strange Defeat) that France capitulated so quickly in 1939 in part due to ossified thinking perpetuated at the French Staff College. We in the contemporary PME community would do well to heed the lesson! In an era defined by rapid technological advancement and complex global challenges, PME must evolve to prepare leaders for the future operating environment. AI presents unprecedented opportunities to the Warfighter, but that capability must be accompanied by an education necessary to use them effectively. PME enables senior leaders to match tasks to talent by providing them time and space to think critically about employment, ethics, and consequences. This understanding requires more than osmosis; it requires active engagement, critical analysis, and the development of cognitive frameworks capable of navigating the nuances of AI-driven warfare. As PME educators, we commit a disservice to our students if we bury our heads in the analog sand. Our sense of urgency stems from the rapidity with which our adversaries are adapting and implementing AI onto the cyber battlespace.  Examples like the Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh War demonstrate that to neglect AI integration is to risk graduating leaders ill-prepared for the complexities of a future battlefield dominated by intelligent systems. Our goal is to enhance faculty development, personalize learning experiences, and cultivate critical thinking skills among military professionals. We assess that the judicious integration of AI into PME is not merely a technological upgrade but a strategic imperative for maintaining a competitive edge in national security.

Effective education about AI necessitates that faculty themselves are AI-literate and adept at leveraging its potential. AI tools offer innovative solutions to personalize learning, streamline administrative tasks, and foster more interactive educational environments. Integrating AI tools into faculty workflows unlocks significant benefits, providing experiential learning on AI capabilities while enabling visualization for AI integration in the classroom. Embracing AI for faculty development is not about replacing the expertise of seasoned educators; rather, it is about augmenting their capabilities, enabling them to operate with greater efficiency and impact. The key areas we find AI most helpful are creating adaptive curriculum content, streamlining workflows, augmenting feedback and grading, and expanding student engagement.

The “How”: Practical Applications of AI in PME Faculty Development

Numerous free and paid AI tools exist, with expanding options surfacing almost weekly. Our use of AI developed organically over three years of use, comparing results across tools, and following leading tech writers and experts whose insights rounded out our knowledge.  Our go-to tools are NotebookLM, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Thesify, and Perplexity. The choice of tool is less important than consistent practice with AI.  Through our process of experimentation and application, we identified several specific tasks where AI tools provided the most significant benefits to faculty efficiency and effectiveness:

Adaptive curriculum content: AI’s ability to summarize and categorize vast datasets allows faculty to tailor learning materials to individual student needs. NotebookLM is particularly adept for this, providing AI-generated podcasts suited to auditory learners and mind maps to assist visual learners. By uploading relevant course readings, websites, or videos, faculty can use NotebookLM to generate concise summaries, thematic analyses, frequently asked questions, study guides, and even quizzes based on the source material.

Streamlining Workflows: AI can automate time-consuming tasks such as lesson planning, freeing up faculty to focus on more complex tasks. Our current Learning Management System, Blackboard, provides AI text generation to speed lesson creation within the platform.  NotebookLM can rapidly cut, paste, and frame text from multiple sources.  This shifts faculty effort from tedious manual word processing to more critical tasks of refining, revising, and adding intellectual value to the AI-generated framework. LLMs like ChatGPT and CoPilot can generate tables of search queries, reducing time to build charts in Excel or PowerPoint.

Augmenting Feedback and Grading: Providing timely, detailed, and constructive feedback is crucial for student development but can be incredibly time-intensive for faculty. Using NotebookLM, Thesify serving as virtual teaching assistants and significantly reducing the workload on educators. AI is useful to refine the tone and phrasing of feedback; we often use AI assistance to rewrite critical comments, ensuring they are constructive, specific, and tailored to the student’s learning level, thereby increasing the likelihood that the student will be receptive to the critique.

Expanding Student Engagement: Paradoxically, AI is useful for stimulating critical thinking by presenting students with AI-generated content from AI tools, like ChatGPT or Gemini, that they must evaluate and critique. By analyzing AI’s responses to prompts, students are challenged to identify biases, inaccuracies, and areas for improvement in the AI response, thereby honing their analytical skills.

The transition to an AI-integrated PME environment contains challenges. Academia writ large harbors concern about academic dishonesty, the potential for AI to supplant their roles, and the ethical implications of using such powerful tools. For PME, there is elevated awareness that controlled, classified, and sensitive information remain out of open-source tools, and content used within AI systems is unclassified and does not originate from protected sources. To effectively integrate AI into PME, it is essential for organizations to develop clear policies and guidelines on the ethical use of AI, addressing issues such as academic integrity, bias, and data privacy. Faculty and students require training and support effective AI use, including prompt engineering, critical evaluation of AI-generated content, and ethical considerations. We provide faculty development and speak at conferences on faculty integration of AI. Educators should foster collaboration and innovation in the use of AI, encouraging faculty to experiment with new AI tools and share best practices. Finally, institutions should invest in the infrastructure and resources necessary to support the effective use of AI, including access to AI tools, data, and expertise.

The integration of AI into faculty development and PME curriculum is not merely an option; it is a strategic imperative. By empowering faculty with the knowledge and tools to effectively leverage AI, PME institutions can cultivate a generation of military leaders who are aware of AI and critical thinkers capable of harnessing its power responsibly and ethically.

Editors Note:

These are the authors’ views and not those of the United States Army War College, the US Army, the US Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

We hold no conflicts of interest.

While AI was used in the research and editing of this article, the writing was solely from the authors.