Artificial intelligence could help the U.S. military speed up the process of finding and targeting missile threats, but a recent joint Air Force exercise showed that continuing cooperation through joint military alliances and partnerships is critical to that task—cooperation that is being challenged by continued verbal attacks by President Donald Trump.
A December exercise that included the U.S. Air Force, as well as forces from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, tested how allied forces using artificial intelligence and new sensor data, could accelerate operations relevant to missile defense, such as identifying or finding adversary mobile missile launchers or command and control sites. The exercise was called ShOC-N, or Shadow Operations Center-Nellis.
Doing such tasks more quickly and accurately with multiple partners requires years of work and cooperation to ensure everyone’s systems and forces can operate together. Because of that challenge, the exercise “places special emphasis on reducing barriers to interoperability and information sharing between the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom,” said Lt. Col. Wesley Schultz of the U.S. Air Force’s 805th Combat Training Squadron. “Unified intelligence and battle management awareness is critical to success in these environments.”
Four more similar exercises are planned for later this year, with Canada playing a key role, Schultz said.
U.S. military officials Defense One spoke to politely declined to comment on the current high-level political drama playing out between the leaders of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. But they were enthusiastic to discuss the value of the military relationships highlighted in the exercise, and their work to develop faster, smarter AI-enabled techniques for shared military objectives and keep North America protected from attack.
“The coalition collaboration is very important to us, and [Canada and other partners] been part of a lot of our exercises and experiments,” Lt. Col. Micah Graber, the chief of the Air Force’s ABMS Division’s Deployable Systems Branch, told Defense One, adding that the U.S. contributes and benefits from such partnerships.
Joint technology efforts are already underway to create a software co-development space, or sandbox, allowing more partners and operators to contribute to building the system, he said. “We’re building that sandbox now… so we can have that more persistent connection with them.”
That’s essential because the pace of operations is accelerating. Adversaries are becoming better at moving command and control centers and weapons, increasing the need for what’s called dynamic targeting.
“We’re really focused on dynamic targeting—not pre-planned and not known in advance. That could be a critical target, something that’s really important, or something that’s a time sensitive target, where there’s a fleeting opportunity,” Lt. Col. Carl Rossini, the deputy chief of the deployable systems branch at the Air Force’s ABMS division, told Defense One.
Distributed artificial intelligence is key to finding those more mobile targets and accelerating the operations. The Air Force is relying on Palantir’s Maven Smart Systems and AI software from Maverick to allow for “tactical control, execution, and assigning of assets in an embedded common operating picture, while also receiving simulated track data.” The participants demonstrated that, with help from AI, they could “ingest and display red and blue tracks within a tactical data link,” meaning real-time sharing on the location of forces along a narrow, secured datalink.
But the system also ingests planning data, “which gives battle managers critical insights allowing them to better handle complex and evolving areas of operation,” according to an Air Force statement about the exercise.
While artificial intelligence is already speeding up business processes in the civilian sector, applying it to something like military command and control across several domains and multiple partners is far more difficult. That’s part of why having partner militaries participate and contribute to exercises is important, officials said.
“It took many years for us to get automation to a point where it can allow our operators to do their job more effectively. And I think we’re probably several more years out for AI to improve their ability to get after decisions at an exponential speed compared to where we are today. So it’s definitely going to take some time for us to get there in the AI world,” said Steve Ciulla, program manager for the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Operations Center-Light, an effort to recreate the intelligence and command capabilities of larger headquarters in smaller form, making battle management more mobile.
One of the big takeaways from the exercise, Graber said, is that larger teams are better. “There were still a lot of humans needed in the loop. Even though the AI helped, there was still a lot of task saturation,” he said, meaning a lot of processes and decisions left to human operators. “We’re trying to flush that all out, to simplify and make sure that we only filter the messages and targets and things we need…Some of the operators were a little overwhelmed.”
That is part of why continued relationships with allies and partners are essential—to operate faster now and to build the system that will allow them to work even faster in the future. Partners bring more data to train autonomous tools and more human expertise to train them.
Rossini described it as “providing crew.” Those Canadian, British, and Australian operators, working alongside their U.S. counterparts, “provide unique operations expertise from their [area of responsibility] and then from the national security priorities that their respective country is working more broadly in operations.”
They can also bring more satellite data, drones, aircraft, and other things to collect more data, Ciulla said. “There are early discussions of sensor contributions from each of those nations.”
The United States and Canada also recently participated in joint exercises in Greenland.
The Air Force participants’ positive feedback about partner militaries in the ShOC-N exercise stands in contrast to the increasingly antagonistic relationship between the leaders of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The U.K.-based Daily Mail, citing defense sources, says U.S. officials have urged their country’s leaders to exclude the United States from the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing agreement, which military and political leaders have repeatedly described as highly valuable for detecting emerging threats. The proposal follows the U.S. decision to cut back on intelligence sharing with Ukraine and to prohibit other allies from sharing U.S. intelligence as well, a decision that White House leaders reversed on Tuesday.
And repeated Trump threats to turn Canada into the 51st state have damaged U.S. relations around the globe.
Trump has not suggested that he would resort to military action to achieve that goal, citing instead tariffs and other forms of economic leverage. And White House officials have publicly denied reports that the U.S. might abandon intelligence and military sharing with Canada. But Canadians, and particularly Canadian intelligence professionals, are taking Trump very seriously.
Vincent Rigby, a former top intelligence to the Canadian Prime Minister told Canada’s The National last month: “I’m afraid at one point, intelligence is going to be used as a negotiating tool.”
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