About 1,500 targets in one day: That’s the scale U.S. Army leaders say they are preparing for for a major war in Europe.
Officials told reporters Thursday that the forecast, which is based on the Russia-Ukraine war, is shaping the department’s views on automation and speed.
The Army commander issued this warning while sharing his views on the Dynamic Frontline 26 exercise. Dynamic Frontline 26 is a multinational exercise in Europe that brings together U.S. and NATO forces to practice the coordination of long-range fires in high-intensity conflicts. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, leaders describe a battlefield where waves of drones, missiles and artillery can attack targets faster than traditional commands can handle them.
The exercise focused on moving target data across borders and between different systems.
“We need to be able to intercept and defeat 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and long-range one-way attack drones every 24 hours,” said Brig. Gen. Gen. Steven Carpenter, commander of Multi-Domain Command Europe. He said the figures reflected the scale of attacks in Ukraine.
“At the same time, we need to be able to set, maintain regulation and pass at least 1,500 targets in the same 24 hours,” he said. Carpenter believes that this number is to maintain dominance rather than simply satisfy the enemy’s capabilities.
In practice, this means the Army must continuously track targets from detection to strike, ensuring that information is not lost or misidentified as it travels between headquarters and firing units.
Because any large-scale war in Europe will involve multiple countries operating different systems, Dynamic Frontline also works to ensure that sensors in one country can immediately provide data to shooters in another country.
“We want to build a capability within the United States and within NATO so that if an adversary decides to invade NATO territory, another ally, or the territory of the United States, the consequences would be extremely severe and create such an unforgiving experience for them that no country would consider doing it again,” he said.
For soldiers working in command posts, this scale means sorting incoming data streams on a tight schedule. Army leaders say that volume cannot be managed by humans alone and will require greater reliance on automation.
The scale of the target left little room for manual processing, said Col. Jeffrey Pickler, commander of Multi-Domain Task Force 2 and deputy commander of the 56th Multi-Domain Command Europe.
“If we think about the targets set in the European theater, we think there are over 1,500 targets that need to be processed every day, which is beyond human capabilities. The answer to that equation is artificial intelligence and automation,” he said.
The scale of modern warfare depends not just on the number of weapons, but also on the amount of information flowing in, Pickler said. Today’s battlefield, he said, “is saturated with sensors, we’re drowning in data, and we don’t have enough personnel to cram into a headquarters or command post to fully process all that data.”
Katerina Bondar, a researcher at the Wadhwani Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies the war in Ukraine, said the shift to automation is less about replacing soldiers than about easing the mental stress of modern targeting.
“AI will help reduce their cognitive load,” she added. “You don’t need to manually track 600 objects on a screen.”
She also said AI could speed up what the military calls the “kill chain,” the process from identifying a target to striking it, while still leaving the final decision-making to humans.
“Currently, no one is talking about delegating decision-making to artificial intelligence,” she said, calling automation an “aid to humans” rather than a process that ultimately “delegates decision-making to software.”
