Marines participate in a water survival advanced training course at Camp Hansen, Okinawa, Japan, June 25, 2025. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Diana Garcia)

Imagine an operating environment where friendly forces develop and simulate optimal solutions as they enter the battlespace. Future-leaning aspirations to “train while you fight” are not science fiction but advanced technical solutions available to modern manned and unmanned units. Instead of physical repetitions to train muscle memory, algorithms will rapidly run analyses and implement new tactics, techniques, and procedures on demand.  Wargaming will exist as a continuous, dynamic activity that defeats enemy forces by ruthlessly optimizing available troops and machines throughout the entire operations process: plan, prepare, execute, assess.

How will this automation work?

Un-manning the Battlefield

NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT) shapes the Alliance’s future concepts and capability development.

GEN Pierre Vandier opines that “Command and Control integration is crucial to winning the robotics race. Putting one operator behind each robot is a flawed strategy. AI-driven C2 enables ‘assisted mission control’ and supports swarm tactics. Armed forces must work hard to evolve from strictly ‘man-centric’ organizations to hybrid structures where humans and robotic systems operate together at every stage of the OODA loop.”

Unmanning the battlefield and evolving to hybrid orders of battle will release incredible opportunities.

First, autonomous systems will be able to wargame optimal force packages and strike strategies during the planning stage, ahead of mission execution. However, automation further fine-tunes execution. Chinese engineers developed an algorithm that repairs kill chains and enables a kill web that intuitively reroutes broken kill links as initial engagements begin. Fortunately, Western engineers have pushed the envelope even further to the tactical edge: training while you fight.

Researchers demonstrated that, using a model-based reinforcement learning approach, they could create a scenario in which each member of an autonomous swarm would “perceive its peers as part of the environment and [then] asynchronously exchange coordination information with them.” In essence, the model can be trained to develop optimal tactics that make the best use of its capabilities during mission execution.

The vaunted decapitation strike will not cause chaos in this scenario; rather, it will prompt the platforms to reorganize instantaneously and maintain mission tempo. Autonomous force structures with this capability will dynamically adjust since the C2 function is not a top-down structure but instead a flatter hierarchy of coordination among systems.

Autonomous systems leave a comprehensive digital thread, enabling algorithms to analyze and evaluate their operations precisely. Subsequently, hybrid force structures will benefit from increased awareness as reinforcement learning fine-tunes the next mission set even further. Simulation will incorporate these realities into a tighter force-package analysis, implementing further efficiencies into the system.

Up-manning the Battlefield

Secondly, hybrid orders of battle will flourish as the animate and inanimate integrate into human-machine teams. The personnel deployed on the battlefield will be highly trained war integrators (wargamers) who operate effectively across a blend of real and synthetic environments from the strategic to the tactical level.

In a rapidly changing battlespace, acting purely off instinct — a warrior’s primary means of survival for a millennium — will likely become ineffective. As techniques, tactics, and procedures evolve in real time, the ingrained experiences of veteran soldiers and military leaders may serve more as a crutch than a capability.

In system-level environments where thousands of autonomous platforms and sensors interact, gut instincts alone are no longer sufficient. Leaders must instead leverage a digital environment capable of training and validating new insights in real time to support real-time decision-making on the battlefield.

The future leader must excel at bridging the essential divides: between human cognition and machine computation, between people and platforms, and between gut instinct and algorithmic feedback. This requires integrating the growing power of autonomy and artificial intelligence without ever excluding the indispensable human element.

Wargames that encompass this decision space must represent human actions and system-level interactions of conflict or competition in a synthetic environment from the strategic to the tactical level.

Fortunately, modern training technologies enable officers to engage in progressive simulation environments that transition from simple 2D interaction to fully immersive 3D scenarios. This capability integrates multiple domains of computing, virtual reality (VR), and human–computer interaction. These training technologies will be the foundation of the future fight. A leader’s training environment and operating environment will be different mixes of live and virtual, real and synthetic.

Just think: what if the Arctic tundra and its vast expanse are currently mapped and modeled in a digital environment, supported by thousands of drones and sensors? When threat actors act, their positions are simultaneously replicated in this digital space. This enables commanders and leaders to simulate thousands of strategic and operational outcomes and determine the optimal course of action.

After they allocate forces and assign tasks, tactical commanders can conduct digital reconnaissance with rapid scenario-generation tools. They can build the current environment around them as they move through virtual-mounted (vehicle) or dismounted simulators powered by VBS4. From a real trench or bunker, numerous virtual training repetitions can occur in a digital environment that incorporates enemy positions and attacks on those positions without warning — from the current environment, they can draw immediate, relevant lessons that will impact the near-future environment.

Once optimal routes and movements are identified in a virtual environment, friendly forces can bring them into reality by following breadcrumbs left by earlier reconnaissance efforts. Advanced helmets and goggles that seamlessly blend real and virtual realities will enable highly effective command and control.

Technology will provide a training revolution for the military — a revolution that will allow militaries to train how they fight as they fight.

S.L. Nelson has served from the tactical to strategic level as a military officer. His views are his own and do not represent the position of the U.S. DoD.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.