Transitioning Professional Military Education to All AI – All the Time

Similar to the arrival of the technologically advanced Borg in Star Trek, Artificial Intelligence has arrived within the hallowed halls of professional military education, leaving resistance as futile.  Thus, this article is not intended to persuade those who remain skeptical about the AI invasion.  For, at the risk of sounding overly harsh, they have opted for obsolescence, and their opinions are no longer relevant.  As their final denouement approaches, they will, undoubtedly, still be shouting “AI is killing critical thinking” as they are pushed into history’s trash bin.

In an earlier article, “Peering into the Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Military Classroom,” I stated that AI would not replace Title 10 professors, but that many professors would be replaced by professors who are comfortable with AI tools.  I no longer believe that statement to be true. AI advances in just the last six months have made it an existential risk to all but a few Title 10 professors.  We are rapidly entering an educational environment where only those who master human-AI teaming are likely to survive.

We are already living in a world where 85% of college students admit to regularly using AI, where high schoolers are writing in The Atlantic about AI “demolishing” their education, and parents are finding AI cheat sheets in their grade schoolers’ laundry.  If we can assume that PME students are at least as clever as a grade-schooler, we must also accept that every one of them is, or soon will be, using AI throughout the academic year.  Moreover, given the speed at which AI is being integrated into the administrative and warfighting infrastructure of every Service, educators have a duty to ensure that their students are as familiar with AI tools as possible.

This cheat sheet was found in a grade-schooler’s laundry (author provided).

Although the full integration of AI into professional military education is inevitable, many schools, as well as their faculties, remain hesitant to incorporate AI into coursework or research.    Even those who pay lip service to increasing AI use within PME are all too eager to throw up roadblocks.  For instance, in a recent War on the Rocks article (23 October 2025), “A Guide to Collaborating With AI in the Military Classroom, Matthew Woessner opened with, “If educators do not learn to embrace AI, they risk being left behind.”  I fully agree with this sentiment but was then amazed to find that the remainder of the article was a litany of reasons for schools and educators to slow down AI integration in favor of a “middle way.”

Unfortunately, Woessner’s “middle way” advocates limiting or forbidding the use of AI until students have mastered basic skills.  Remarkably, for an educator who argues for the “embrace” of AI, Woessner advocates that professional military education first “teach students to live without it [AI].” It is hard to think of a more horrible approach or one that students will so widely ignore.  Humanity now has at its disposal the most powerful educational tool since the invention of the printing press.  Yet professors are telling them to put it on a shelf until they have learned to live without it, forgetting that almost all of them have been living without AI their entire careers.

But what are the skills Woessner insists must be mastered before students can be trusted to use AI? Allow me to collect a few:

• Students must learn to reason for themselves” without AI.
• Students must be taught that AIs are fallible and not surrender their judgment to a machine.
• Students must be made aware that AIs are programmed, and therefore, they must be on the lookout for the “invisible hand of the programmer.”

Finally, Woessner insists that students must be taught not to use AIs to create academic shortcuts, arguing that if students are allowed to use AI at will, they will fail to develop essential skills such as reading, writing, and critical thinking.

It would be far better for all concerned if we kept a simple yet often overlooked fact at the forefront of our decision-making process: every war college student is rapidly approaching or already past the age of 40.  While all of Woessner’s concerns may be appropriate for high school students, they are senseless for adult professionals.  PME is not grade school.  Every student entering our hallowed halls knows how to read and write, and our current programs do almost nothing to enhance those skills.  Moreover, I doubt that there is a PME student alive who does not know that AIs are fallible and often make stuff up.  Thus, no one is “surrendering” their judgment to AIs, now or for some time to come.

But what about critical thinking?  Of course, AI must kill critical thinking, especially if students use it to shortcut the academic process. Right?  In my experience, the opposite is most often true.

But first, as the words “improve critical thinking” appear in the “program learning objectives” of nearly every PME institution, we must come to grips with what it is and how we measure it.  At its core, critical thinking is simply questioning assumptions.  But mastering critical thinking presupposes one possesses a large body of foundational knowledge that can be drawn upon to test assumptions against.  Developing this knowledge base requires intense reading, study, and the employment of active learning methodologies (e.g., wargames).  Contrary to what Woessner and others in the “go-slow alliance” believe, AI will turbocharge all such learning activities, and the sea change is already beginning.

What Students Can Already Do

At the start of this academic year, I taught Marine Corps War College students two classes, totaling approximately four hours, on the use of the three leading AIs (OpenAI’s Chat, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Clause), as well as NotebookLM, a Google-created AI-based learning tool.  In preparation for this article, I asked my students to send me a quick note on how they are using AI in their various courses.  Here is a summary of their replies.

For class preparation and reading analysis, students are using AI to synthesize, summarize, and visualize dense readings.  For instance, almost every student reported using ChatGPT or NotebookLM to generate concise summaries and “audio deep dives” of assigned readings, converting lengthy texts into briefing notes, outlines, or podcasts for review before class.  Many students had gone a bit further and asked their selected AI tools to map frameworks like DIMEFIL+, PMESII-PT, Ends–Ways–Means, or SWOT to readings, creating ready-made discussion tools.

Students continue to use AI post-class, with students describing what one called the “Eureka” effect, after using AI to challenge, reinforce, or extend what was discussed.  Students reported using AI after class to:

• Run post-class debriefs to test assumptions, clarify contradictions, and identify causal claims that were made in class. It is worth noting that students are also increasingly using AI to check my “causal claims” during class.  Yes, it is annoying, but it also forces me to spend more time ensuring I am prepared.
• Asking AIs to red-team their understanding of class discussions and to generate counterarguments for consideration.
• Using AI to translate theory and class discussions into applications. For instance, connecting a discussion of Chinese demographics to help create alternative, forward-thinking ideas on how INDOPACOM might profit from China’s demographic collapse.

A large number of students are also using AI to create customized agents tailored to specific needs, effectively creating AI teaching assistants.  For example:

• One student created an interconnected chain of AI-agents to keep track of developments in the news and then recommend changes to the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the National Military Strategy.  He then had agents specifically designed to behave as President Trump, Secretary of War Hegseth, and Secretary of State Rubio analyze and comment on the perspective changes.  Finally, the approved changes were sent to an “Admiral Pampero Agent” for comment and integration into INDOPACOM plans.
• A few students have created agents that were trained on the MCWAR Strategy Primer and the Joint Planning Process to help design military strategies and plans. These first-cut documents are then used to drive classroom discussion and wargaming.
• One student trained an AI agent on the methodologies that made some of the great captains in history effective and then used the agent to review and comment on his answers to various operational-level case studies.
• To help in a series of negotiation exercises, students employed an agent trained on the methods of Henry Kissinger. A second agent was employed to offer commentary from ten of history’s greatest statesmen (e.g., Bismarck, Churchill, Metternich, etc.), all of whom behaved in character.

Almost every student is using NotebookLM as a personal research assistant to organize their class materials, facilitate interactive discussions of the material, test their knowledge of the material, and present the material in various formats (summaries, podcast discussions, videos, mind maps, etc.).  NotebookLM is also being used to discover new and relevant sources on specific topics and to conduct in-depth analyses of those items that students take a deeper interest in.

Students, as one would expect, are also using AI tools to help them research and craft writing assignments, and then using GammaAI to reduce the hours it used to take to create presentations to a few minutes.  Moreover, almost all of them are using AI to build digital archives, aiming to develop automated pipelines that turn courseware into structured data for later study. Some are even using vibe coding to script Python pipelines that transform their written products into multimedia outputs (JSON file, voice discussion, video, and imagery), and others are beginning to move on to building significantly more sophisticated agent-based workflows using AgentKit, Agent Builder, n8n, and similar tools.

Not a bad start, given they received a mere four hours of instruction at the start of the academic year.

Still, the worry that all of this AI use is wreaking havoc with students’ ability to develop critical thinking skills persists.  But is it true?  Well, in their own words:

• I wholeheartedly think AI improves critical thinking. For specific subjects that I’m less familiar with, the AI-assisted work before class has helped me go one or more steps deeper in my analysis.
• I use AI as an intellectual Socratic sparring partner and a disciplined analyst to dig deep into my thoughts and assumptions.
• AI is what saves me the time required for me to actually think about the deeper meaning of what we are learning, and it is there 24/7 for me to discuss or dig deeper into my reflections.
• I am good at generating immediate, surface-level answers. Iterating with AI improves my precision and conceptual reach.
• I am using AI as a strategic amplifier and cognitive multiplier (author’s note: this is my favorite comment).
• You have to avoid using AI as the easy button, but if you can do that, AI can be a HUGE (emphasis in the original) multiplier/advantage.

Thus, I continue to believe that professors do face a binary choice: either fully integrate AI into everything they and their students do, or risk academic oblivion.  If professors are not using LLMs and AI tools, such as NotebookLM, to support their own research and class preparation, they are doing themselves a tremendous disservice.  If they are forbidding or limiting their students’ use of AI, the day is quickly approaching, in my humble opinion, when they will be committing professional malpractice.

Where Do We Go From Here

Dr. Benjamin Jensen, in his recent War on the Rocks Article, “Building a New Brain: Transforming Military Schoolhouses into AI Battle Labs,” did the Professional Military Education community a favor by pointing out one possible direction the schoolhouses might take as they adapt to the artificial intelligence onslaught.  Many of Dr. Jensen’s ideas represent a significant extension of what I did last academic year, and I am continuing to pursue this year.

However, Dr. Jensen’s desire, “turning senior military colleges into hubs for AI research where students learn and apply core AI skills,” is different from my original aim, but one I now find myself in agreement with.  Jensen’s vision, as outlined in his article, unfortunately, has a crippling flaw at its core.  Where, and at what point, are students educated in the core skills they are expected to be able to conduct meaningful research upon?  No one would expect a student to conduct serious scientific research before she had been adequately educated in the field.  Having, as Jensen advocates, PME students spend an entire academic year focused on narrow research topics leaves no time to educate them on the broad scope of foundational knowledge that is crucial to their future success.

Still, educating officers for war, while also producing high-quality research, are not mutually exclusive.  Success in both endeavors rests upon finding the right balance.  Thus, we require a roadmap that ensures war college students are mentally prepared for their future responsibilities, while also enabling them to better comprehend and contribute to finding solutions for pressing operational and strategic problems.

Artificial intelligence not only makes both possible but also allows most students to achieve their learning goals in significantly compressed time periods, thereby freeing up more time for research and other activities.

None of this is possible unless we adopt Dr. Jensen’s core tenet: “as the military pivots toward great state competition and possible conflict, professional military education, if it is to remain relevant, must change rapidly and radically.”  As Jensen points out, the White House’s AI Action Plan lays out the path,

Grow our Senior Military Colleges into hubs of AI research, development, and talent building, teaching core AI skills and literacy to future generations. Foster AI-specific curriculum, including in AI use, development, and infrastructure management, in the Senior Military Colleges throughout majors.

As there is no reason to limit AI initiatives to War Colleges, I would add a line or two to this instruction to integrate AI throughout PME.  Still, where the War Colleges go, the rest of PME is sure to follow.

To accomplish this, we must eschew Woessner’s “middle way,” which is a disguised excuse to maintain the status quo, and follow Jensen’s all-in approach, with several modifications.  I am firmly behind Jensen’s call for a “deliberate effort to organize history, theory, and doctrine into usable forms that machines can learn from – the ‘Brain of the Army.’ But I believe Jensen hugely overestimates the difficulty of creating and continuously updating such a ‘brain.’  At its core, such a ‘brain’ consists of a custom database (structured and unstructured data) and an integrated LLM, specifically trained to support military operations and planning.  This core can be built cheaply, and a working ‘brain’ could be ready within a few months, after which it can be continuously refined.

As discussed, the missing ingredient in Jensen’s vision is time to educate the students.  Fortunately, the classroom time that professional military institutions dedicate to education can be significantly reduced through the widespread use of AI.  To accomplish this, schools must replace outdated teaching methods with AI systems that take over core teaching duties.  AI modules must be created for each class, enabling students to utilize them for study and preparation.  Then, for two hours a day, several days a week, AI systems will teach students the basics of every course and regularly test their knowledge attainment.  Students can advance at their own pace but cannot advance until they demonstrate basic proficiency in the current module.  In this new paradigm, teachers mostly stop running seminars and move into the role of coaches.

As the AI instruction will end at 1000, students have the rest of the day to complete all the activities that Jensen advocates, including deep dives into military history (studying war), conducting Joint Operations case studies, running detailed planning exercises, engaging in extensive wargaming, and researching the conduct of future wars.  Such projects will tie the student’s education to real-world planning and warfighting-based research that can be fed back into the Joint Force for further experimentation and evaluation.  In this paradigm, professional military education can both educate students and provide the Joint Force with cutting-edge thinking on a host of operational and strategic issues.

For those seeking a working model of this educational paradigm, the Alpha School in Austin, Texas, is demonstrating what the future of education will look like.  Although the Alpha School is a grade school, there is no reason that its methodology, with a few tweaks to cater to adult learners, cannot be adopted wholesale by professional military education institutions.  Alpha’s students spend two hours each day receiving instruction from a proprietary AI platform, with humans teaching less than 20% of the classes.  At the end of those two hours, students are free to pursue passion projects for the rest of the day or explore new areas of learning.

Despite being exposed to formal educational activities for only two hours daily, Alpha School’s test scores place it in the top 0.1% of institutions nationally.  Most 3^rd and 4th-grade students are taking 7th-grade math and routinely scoring in the top 97^th-99^th percentile on standardized tests. By any measure, and even after controlling for Alpha School’s selection process, which attracts students from wealthy homes, these results are astonishing.

Regarding the application of these techniques at higher levels of education, Harvard recently released a study that tested the use of AI tutors by physics students.  The study’s crucial finding was that Harvard students using AI tutors absorbed the material in half the time it took the students who were taught by professors in classrooms.  Moreover, in later testing, they retained twice as much of the material being taught.  In short, AI tutors took half the time professors did and got double the results.  Thus, the question is, why PME is mostly shunning one of the most effective teaching tools ever developed?

Conclusion

By rapidly expanding the use of artificial intelligence throughout professional military education, Professional Military Education can achieve similar results to Alpha School.  Unlike Jensen, who foresees schoolhouses becoming “smaller and more elite,” widespread AI integration will make it possible to sustain a much higher student throughput, while improving student outcomes (by a large margin), and also allowing considerable time for students and professors to conduct research and wargaming activities.  All of this will hugely enhance professional military education’s contribution to the Joint Force’s warfighting capabilities.  Moreover, the schoolhouses will be able to do so, with considerably less administrative staff, fewer teachers, and, thus, at significantly less cost per student.