US Army leaders say future European fight could mean 1,500 targets daily
Nearly 1,500 targets in a single day: That’s the scale at which U.S. Army leaders say they are preparing for a full-scale war in Europe.
The projection from the Russia-Ukraine war is shaping the service’s thinking about automation and speed, officials told reporters Thursday.
Military commanders issued the warning as they shared their thoughts on Dynamic Front 26, a multinational exercise in Europe that brings together U.S. and NATO forces to rehearse the coordination of long-range fires in a high-intensity conflict. Learning from Ukraine, leaders have defined a battlefield where waves of drones, missiles and artillery can create targets faster than conventional headquarters can process them.
The exercise focused on moving targeting data across national borders and between different systems.
“We need to be able to intercept, defeat 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and long-range unidirectional attack drones every 24 hours,” said Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, Commander, Multi-Domain Command, Europe. He said these figures reflect the scale of attacks seen in Ukraine.
“At the same time, we need to be able to develop, maintain and exceed at least 1,500 targets within the same 24-hour period,” he said. According to Carpenter, this number is intended to ensure dominance rather than merely match the capabilities of enemy forces.
In practical terms, this means that the Army must constantly track a target from detection to attack, ensuring that the target is not lost or misidentified during the exchange of information between headquarters and firing units.
Since any major war in Europe would involve multiple countries operating different systems, Dynamic Front also focused on ensuring that sensors in one country could relay data to shooters in another country without delay.
“We want to build a capability within the United States, within NATO, that if a similar adversary decides to attack NATO territory or another ally or U.S. territory, the consequences will be so extreme that it will create such a grim experience for them that no nation would ever consider doing that again,” he said.
For soldiers working in command centers, this scale will mean sorting incoming data streams under tight timelines. The volume cannot be managed by humans alone and requires greater reliance on automation, Army leaders said.
The scale of the targets leaves little room for manual processing, said Col. Jeffrey Pickler, commander of the Second Multi-Domain Task Force and deputy commander of the 56th Multi-Domain Command, Europe.
“If we’re looking at a target set in the European scene where we think we’ll need to process over 1,500 targets per day, that’s beyond human scope. The answer to the equation there is AI and automation,” he said.
Pickler said the scale of modern warfare is defined not just by the number of weapons but by the volume of information flowing. Today’s battlefield is “awash in sensors and we’re drowning in data, and we don’t have enough people to stuff it into headquarters or a command center that can fully process it all.”
Kateryna Bondar, who studies the war in Ukraine from the Wadhwani Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the shift to automation is less about replacing soldiers and more about reducing the mental burden of modern targeting.
“AI can help reduce their cognitive load,” he said, adding: “You don’t need to manually track 600 objects on a single screen.”
He also said artificial intelligence could speed up what the military calls the “kill chain,” the process from identifying a target to hitting that target, while still leaving the final decision-making to humans.
“Right now, no one is talking about delegating decision-making to AI,” he said, describing automation as “helping people” rather than a process that results in “delegating decisions to software.”
