The AI Enabled Corps

by Dr Martin Crilly

In this bold and timely article, Martin Crilly challenges the Royal Signals to move beyond digitalisation and embrace true transformation in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Drawing lessons from Ukraine and the evolving nature of warfare, he argues for a reimagined Corps—one that fuses human ingenuity with AI to deliver faster, smarter, and more connected operations. This piece invites readers to rethink legacy models and consider how the Royal Signals might lead the way in shaping an AI-enabled Army for the future battlespace.

The AI Enabled Corps

Like many of us, I love listening to the tales, exploits and adventures of our veterans. They regale stories from their long careers, dits about the changes in warfare and the disruptions during the digital transformation of our Corps. Suddenly I feel my age as they talk about Bowman, Ptarmigan and Falcon in the past tense. As I reflect on this period, I start to think that maybe we got digital transformation all wrong. Instead of focusing on the transformation of warfare by digitalisation, we seem to have been preoccupied with the digitalisation of the equipment and not on the transformation of the Corps, the Army and how we should prosecute a digital war using it. Instead of welcoming digitalisation as a new paradigm for our Corps, did we just apply it as a trendy veneer on legacy ways-of-war models, processes and practices?

In the first major digital war, Ukraine has learnt very quickly that their legacy Soviet and even adopted legacy NATO doctrine, models, processes and practices, built for the last war, were defunct in this new digital battlespace. As new conflicts arise, this is challenging our fundamental assumptions about how we think, how we work, and how we will measure success in the new AI enabled profession of arms. The rise of AI is giving us all a moment of pause. Do we choose to also apply a veneer of AI to the same old processes and practices, making them incrementally a little faster and more efficient… or do we work with our customers to focus on the important things in the next war - more efficiency, effectiveness and lethality? At the same time charting new skills pathways for our soldiers and harnessing everyone’s creativity so we can deliver a truly transformed AI enabled Corps. Augmenting and fusing the human mind with advanced AI technologies could provide a pivotal moment for the Corps, if we are bold enough to seize it.

Link to full article.