War Department's Strategy To Secure Military AI Dominance
U.S. Department of War News Release
January 19, 2026

The U.S. Department of War launched on January 12, 2026 ... a transformative Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy that will extend the lead in military AI deployment and establish the United States as the world's undisputed AI-enabled fighting force.

Mandated by President Trump, this acceleration strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate legacy bureaucratic blockers, and integrate the bleeding edge of frontier AI capabilities across every mission area to usher in an unprecedented era of American military AI dominance.

"We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI," said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. "We will become an 'AI-first' warfighting force across all domains."

The Department is taking a wartime approach to delivering capabilities, with an emphasis on three tenets: warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. This approach will strengthen battlefield decision-making, rapidly convert intelligence data and modernize daily workflows, all in direct support of more than three million DoW personnel.

The catalyst for this acceleration will be seven Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs), each with a single accountable leader and aggressive timelines. These PSPs will establish a new AI execution standard for the entire Department:

Warfighting

• Swarm Forge: Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test, and scale novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities – combining America's elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.

• Agent Network: Unleashing AI agent development and experimentation for AI-enabled battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to kill chain execution.

• Ender's Foundry: Accelerating AI-enabled simulation capabilities ... and sim-dev and sim-ops feedback loops ... to ensure we stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.

Intelligence

• Open Arsenal: Accelerating the TechINT-to-capability development pipeline, turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.

• Project Grant: Enabling transformation of deterrence from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure with interpretable results.

Enterprise

• GenAI.mil: Providing Department-wide access to frontier generative AI models, like Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, for all DoW personnel at Information Level (IL-5) and above classification levels.

• Enterprise Agents: Building the playbook for rapid and secure AI agent development and deployment to transform enterprise workflows.

This AI Acceleration Strategy is driving a major expansion of AI compute infrastructure through targeted investments and will unlock access to the data that gives the War Department an asymmetric edge. The Department will bring in top American AI talent through initiatives like the Office of Personnel Management's "Tech Force" initiative and will empower small, accountable teams to attack complex AI integration opportunities. The War Department will eradicate woke DEI from our AI capabilities and ensure our military has objective, mission‑first systems that will guarantee decision superiority and warfighting advantage in this AI era.

"Speed defines victory in the AI era, and the War Department will match the velocity of America's AI industry," said Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. "We're pulling in the best talent, the most cutting‑edge technology, and embedding the top frontier AI models into the workforce ... all at a rapid wartime pace."

Grounded in the core tenets of warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations ... and following President Trump's direction ... the War Department will accelerate America's Military AI Dominance by becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains.

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U.S. Department of War

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