Whether the MSS is indicative of an unfolding RMA remains a subject of debate. At a minimum, it represents a significant leap in how modern militaries sense, decide, and act in combat. From a scholarly perspective, RMAs are not defined by single technological breakthroughs but by clusters of innovations that fundamentally transform the conduct of warfare.

They typically involve shifts in doctrine, tactics, organization, culture, and technology. Unlike broader military revolutions, which reshape societies and political systems, RMAs are confined to the military sphere—and they often unfold quietly, only recognized in hindsight.

Several RMAs were identified in the past, providing a framework to anticipate future ones. In The Dynamics of Military Revolutions: 1300–2050, MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray outline five significant military revolutions in the West since 1618. Each one, they argue, set off a chain of revolutionary changes in military affairs.

These include the emergence of the modern state with its standing armies, the political and social upheavals brought on by the French Revolution, the industrialization of warfare in the 19th century, the era of total war in the 20th century, and the transformative impact of nuclear weapons. If a new RMA is underway, we may not fully recognize it until it has already matured.

The concept of RMA has drawn justified criticism for being abstract, amorphous, and debated to the point of analytical paralysis. After the Gulf War, the DoD’s fixation on identifying the “next RMA” often overshadowed the operational impact of emerging capabilities. Scholars frequently focus on definitional purity rather than assessing real battlefield transformation.

Whether the MSS fits a textbook definition, adopted by the DoW or derived from historical theory, is less important than its functional impact. If an RMA is indeed emerging or approaching, there should be tangible real-world consequences. Otherwise, theory becomes disconnected from practice. In this light, the MSS may serve as a bridge between the long-unfolding information RMA and a new, AI-driven transformation.

The MSS could be indicative of another significant shift in command and control (C2). While the US Army’s command post computing environment (CPCE) already integrates legacy systems into a modular, cloud-capable architecture for multi-domain operations, the MSS pushes these capabilities toward revolutionary real-time situational awareness.

While initially developed to automate drone feed analysis, the MSS has evolved into an AI-powered battlefield intelligence engine. It fuses intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data, enables real-time targeting, and supports distributed decision-making. As with the telegraph in the 19th century, the MSS may redefine the military’s relationship with information and time.

Historically, C2 was slow and fragmented. Commanders relied on flags, runners, and direct observation, limited by geography and transmission delay. The Industrial Revolution began to change this. Introduced in 1793, Claude Chappe invented the optical telegraph which allowed faster coordination across long distances. It was Samuel Morse’s electrical telegraph, patented in 1837, that truly revolutionized communication.

AI is reshaping combat just as electricity once did. Electricity transformed communication by creating the foundation for critical innovation, like the internet. The harnessing of electricity for industrial use itself was not an RMA, but it was the essential prerequisite for one. Without it, the revolution in communication that began with the telegraph would not have been possible. AI may not constitute a full RMA on its own, but it is the enabling foundation for one.

During the Crimean War and the American Civil War, the telegraph enabled real-time command for the first time. In the US, President Lincoln relied on the War Department telegraph office to direct Union forces and enforce strategic decisions. Strategic-level C2 became possible, and expectations for real-time situational awareness took hold. The rise of the steam-powered printing press and the expansion of railways accelerated this transformation, making war reporting nearly instantaneous—a precursor to modern information warfare.

Similarly, Project Maven, initiated in 2017, began as a machine learning initiative to automate drone video analysis. Since then, the MSS has grown to integrate cloud computing, ISR fusion, and targeting. The MSS delivers intelligence to the tactical edge at machine speed on enterprise cloud infrastructure. It processes unfathomable amounts of data in milliseconds— augmenting analysts and automating portions of the workflow.

Just like the electric telegraph centralized control and supported linear commander decisions, the MSS introduces machine learning, machine inference, and adaptive analytics to take command and control. The MSS provides a picture of the theater that is not merely quantitative, but qualitative.

A true RMA requires more than new technology. It demands operational adaptation, organizational restructuring, and doctrinal evolution. The MSS checks many of these boxes. Technologically, the MSS merges AI, edge computing, and cloud infrastructure in a holistic fashion. Operationally, it uses human-machine teaming to accelerate kill chains. Organizationally, it catalyzed the creation of institutions such as the Joint AI Center (JAIC) and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. Doctrinally, it promotes shifts toward algorithmic and mosaic warfare, which are adaptive, data-driven models of conflict.

The MSS could signal a broader shift in military operations, much like the telegraph reshaped communication in the 19th century. By combining intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) with artificial intelligence at operational speed, the MSS is changing how armed forces interpret the battlespace, make decisions, and coordinate action—all while improving the shared situational picture. Yet without a corresponding cultural shift, even the best tools can fail to yield a true RMA. Whether the Department of War can fully adapt its doctrine and institutions to leverage the MSS remains to be seen.

Lieutenant Colonel Matthew J. Fecteau is an information operations officer working with artificial intelligence. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of War, or the US Government. 

Signals of a New Revolution: Maven Smart System and the AI-RMA Horizon was originally published on Global Security Review.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Defense (DoD) appears to be doing the opposite. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) recently axed its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate, a move many analysts view as strategic self-sabotage.

This directorate, responsible for overseeing more than $340 million in AI and digital integrations in fiscal year 2024, represented a critical nexus linking battlefield innovations with institutional infrastructure. Its elimination, justified under “efficiency” mandates, alarmed defense observers who fear it fractures continuity, erases institutional memory, and sends a dangerous signal to adversaries willing to exploit perceived American weakness.

The Strategic Misstep

The CDAO was formed in 2022 by fusing key functions from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service, Chief Data Office, and Advana analytics, aiming to unify policy, technology, and digital services. Embedded within CDAO, the CTO led cross-functional teams in AI, cyber, logistics, and command-and-control systems, ensuring that new technologies remained interoperable and aligned with warfighter requirements.

Abruptly dismantling this directorate not only removes a pivotal vision and coordination role but also creates a void with no clear replacement. The result is fragmented efforts, lost synergy across mission areas, and a battlefield advantage handed to adversaries.

Expertise Lost, Momentum Undermined

Leadership and expertise take years, even decades, to develop. Figures like Bill Streilein, former CTO of CDAO and veteran of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, carried institutional memory and high standards into Pentagon AI programs. But when top-tier professionals are sidelined under the label of “streamlining,” they often leave and seldom return.

This pattern has already occurred. The Defense Digital Service (DDS), once lauded as the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” lost almost all of its members by May 2025, prompting its demise. Nearly every DDS member, citing bureaucratic pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chose to depart rather than conform.

These departures are not benign transfers. They represent the scattering of core innovators and connectors whose insight and trust networks are irreplaceable. Without them, emerging AI systems risk becoming siloed projects rather than battlefield-enabling capabilities.

DOGE: Efficiency or Engineered Evisceration?

DOGE, instituted by a presidential executive order in January 2025, is authorized to slash perceived inefficiencies across federal agencies—often through AI-enhanced, automated assessments. Under the leadership of figures tied to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE has repurposed its mandate to aggressively target leadership and innovation roles across the board—including in national defense.

DOGE has justified cuts using its proprietary AI systems to flag and eliminate “inefficient” programs, often without human oversight or contextual nuance. The CTO’s directorate was among its most high-profile targets, methodically identified and removed, despite its mission-critical nature.

To make matters worse, DOGE is reportedly comfortable with these decisions. One Pentagon official described it as a “theater of dominance,” not just cost-cutting, but deliberate erasure of institutional anchors to obfuscate the depth and breadth of the sacrifice.

The High-Stakes Fallout

Adversaries feast on the narrative that the US champions AI yet purges its own tech leadership overnight. “America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare,” such narratives go. These optics weaken American deterrence, erode allied confidence, and provide cover for Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang to reframe the battlefield narrative.

Domestic consequences are equally grim. The consistent removal of flagship tech roles projects a clear message to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals; serve, and risk being discarded. That weakness is a recruitment boon for adversaries, national lab contractors, and tech-armed autocracies solving tomorrow’s warfare puzzles.

Real efficiencies lie not in gutting leadership but in fortifying it. Per the National Security Commission on AI, prioritizing disciplined recruitment and retention of technical talent, including a Digital Corps and AI fellowships, is key to American competitiveness. Instead, we witness the dismantling of precisely those anchor roles meant to shepherd AI innovation into combat-relevant systems.

The DOGE-Driven Dismantling of Tech Leadership

The concepts herein are alarming and reflect an institutional unraveling that directly undermines America’s global security posture and strategic deterrence in five critical ways. First, the elimination of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) strips away a core pillar of the Pentagon’s ability to adapt emerging technologies for battlefield advantage. This directorate was not redundant bureaucracy; it was the crucible in which ideas from national labs, industry, and warfighters were harmonized into operational capability.

By abruptly dismantling this team, the Department of Defense has extinguished a pipeline of institutional memory and strategic insight at the precise moment when rapid, informed, and integrated decision-making is needed. This brain drain parallels a historical pattern of self-sabotage and leaves adversaries uncontested in the tech talent race.

Second, the removal of high-level AI leadership is a propaganda gift to revisionist powers like China and Russia. These states are watching America voluntarily decapitate its own strategic leadership, an act they can now frame as proof of American decline. This strengthens their strategic messaging in influence campaigns aimed at allies, neutral states, and even American citizens.

“America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare” is not just a phrase, it is a weaponized narrative that demoralizes partners and emboldens adversaries to challenge American dominance in contested domains like cyberspace, space, and AI warfare.

Third, strategic deterrence hinges on credible capability and the perception of cohesion. DOGE’s algorithmic-driven targeting of leadership roles without contextual assessment introduces chaos into the acquisition and integration life cycle of military AI systems. Instead of creating synergistic effects across logistics, cyber, and command and control, the US risks building a fractured, siloed ecosystem that fails in joint operations.

By removing the very leaders who prevent stove piping, the US sabotages its ability to develop and field interoperable, scalable, and warfighter-ready AI tools. This systemic breakdown makes deterrence brittle, vulnerable to being cracked in future high-end conflicts.

Fourth, the US has struggled to compete with the private sector for AI and cybersecurity talent. By signaling that even elite government technologists are disposable under the guise of “efficiency,” this policy drives future talent away from public service. Those who might have joined a modern “Digital Corps” will instead seek stability and respect elsewhere, perhaps even abroad.

Strategic deterrence depends not only on weapons but on technologists who know how to deploy them. Gutting these roles ensures that tomorrow’s innovations will not make it past the lab, let alone onto the battlefield.

Fifth, DOGE’s use of automated assessments to eliminate “inefficiencies” without human oversight is a grotesque parody of reform. Its reliance on cold, context-blind algorithms to purge critical roles mimics adversary models of techno-authoritarianism, not democratic accountability. If allowed to continue, this will hollow out innovation across government agencies and military branches.

Efficiency is not the enemy, misapplied efficiency is. Strategic deterrence requires smart investments, not cost-cutting theater that sacrifices our warfighting edge on the altar of political optics.

Strategic Self-Sabotage Must Be Reversed

This is not merely streamlining, it is full-blown surrender. The dismantling of the CDAO’s CTO directorate and the broader DOGE initiative represents an engineered unraveling of the very leadership needed to project U.S. strategic deterrence in the AI era. Leadership is the vector through which technology becomes capability. Remove it, and you hand your adversaries not only the advantage, but the narrative.

Unless reversed, these concepts and actions will echo through wargames, deterrence failures, and battlefield losses. The US must stop cannibalizing its competitive edge and re-center its national security strategy on strengthening, not sidelining, its AI leadership.

Conclusion

Leadership is not just overhead on the funding spreadsheet; these leaders are our ammunition in the fight for global AI dominance. Removing them during a strategic inflection point is not reform, it is a self-made vulnerability, and as the US disables its own leadership of advanced technologies, it is dismantling future readiness.

The nation must insist on accountability. Cost-cutting means nothing if it costs the technological coherence to compete in tomorrow’s battles. In the strategic competition unfolding now, leadership is the weapon, and ceding it is surrender. This page out of the DOGE handbook should be shredded and burned. Remember, Iranian nuclear scientists were not dismantled by their own regime, they were destroyed by US and Israeli bombs.

Greg Sharpe is Marketing Director at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. He is retired from the US Air Force. The views expressed are his own.

The Quiet Dismantling of America’s AI Warfighting Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.