Can US military adapt fast enough to future wars?

The U.S. military can measure how many troops are ready to deploy, how many aircraft can fly and how quickly forces can mobilise. But as warfare is transformed by drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and rapidly changing battlefields, a far more difficult question is emerging: can America’s armed forces adapt when war unfolds in unexpected ways?

In an analysis, Military Times argues that while the Pentagon has spent decades refining traditional readiness metrics, the qualities likely to determine success in future conflicts remain among the hardest to measure.

Future wars are expected to evolve faster and with greater uncertainty than the conflicts the United States has fought over the past two decades. Communications could be disrupted, battlefield conditions could shift within hours, and long-held assumptions about combat may become obsolete almost overnight.

The Pentagon recognises this challenge. The 2022 National Defence Strategy describes a security environment undergoing profound strategic and operational change driven by evolving threats, emerging technologies and growing uncertainty. That presents a dilemma for military planners, who must make decisions about force structure, doctrine and costly weapons systems years before a conflict begins.

Nora Bensahel, professor of practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told Military Times that preparing for an unpredictable future requires accepting that today's assumptions may prove wrong.

“You have to train your forces to fight in a particular way, but the odds are you’re going to be wrong,” she said. “Any prediction for the future at any point in history has always been difficult, and now with the really exponential pace of change, the odds that you get it wrong are even higher.”

The war in Ukraine has reinforced those concerns. Bensahel said the rapid spread of drones has fundamentally reshaped warfare, forcing militaries to rethink established concepts of ground combat. In response, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force have all accelerated experimentation with new technologies, including unmanned systems and autonomous aircraft.

Yet Military Times notes that while the military can readily assess whether units are properly staffed, trained and equipped, predicting how they will respond when battlefield assumptions collapse is far more difficult.

“Readiness indicators are very important, but they can’t tell you anything about adaptability,” Bensahel said. “They’re not designed to do that.”

Rather than focusing solely on equipment or personnel, she argues that military adaptability rests on three interconnected elements: doctrine, technology and leadership.

Army doctrine attempts to foster adaptability through the concept of mission command, which encourages subordinate leaders to exercise disciplined initiative, accept prudent risk and make independent decisions within a commander's intent instead of following rigid instructions. Military leadership frameworks similarly emphasise critical thinking, learning agility and decentralised decision-making as essential traits for operating under uncertainty.

Embedding those qualities across a force of more than two million service members and civilians, however, remains a major institutional challenge. Bensahel argues that while junior officers often adapted effectively during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior leadership and military institutions were generally slower to adjust to changing battlefield realities.

Despite the growing focus on advanced technologies, Military Times argues that adaptability ultimately depends more on mindset than hardware.

“The most important thing for military leaders up and down the chain of command need to have in order to be adaptable is flexibility of thinking” and the ability to try new solutions when existing approaches fail, Bensahel said.

She added that fostering such flexibility requires organisations to tolerate experimentation and occasional failure.

“If you want to get leaders in the habit of trying new things that might or might not work, you have to have some tolerance for failure,” she said.

The challenge extends beyond leadership development to institutional learning. While the Defence Department has built extensive systems for collecting lessons from past operations, retired Marine Corps intelligence officer and former RAND researcher Ben Connable argues that transforming information into usable knowledge remains a persistent weakness.

“There’s almost a belief that knowledge now exists in this kind of ether,” Connable said. “We don’t really have to do much with it anymore.”

Instead, he warned, increasing digitisation has made it harder to convert vast amounts of information into practical military knowledge.

Connable also argued that military education relies too heavily on historical examples while failing to incorporate more recent battlefield experience.

“We’ve done a particularly poor job of transmitting recent cases into modern knowledge,” he said. “The lessons that you fail to learn, you wind up repeating.”

By Sabina Mammadli