About 1,500 targets in a single day: that is the scale U.S. Army leaders say they are preparing for in a large-scale war in Europe.
The projection, informed by the Russia-Ukraine war, is shaping how the service thinks about automation and speed, officials told reporters Thursday.
Army commanders issued the warning as they shared reflections 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. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, the leaders described a battlefield where waves of drones, missiles and artillery could generate targets faster than a traditional headquarters can process them.
The exercise focused on moving targeting data across national boundaries and between different systems.
“We need to be able to intercept, defeat 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range one-way attack drones every 24-hour period,” said Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, the commanding general of Multidomain Command Europe. Those numbers, he said, reflect the scale of attacks seen in Ukraine.
“At the same time, we need to be able to develop, maintain custody, and pass a minimum of 1,500 targets during that same 24-hour period,” he said. That number, according to Carpenter, is intended to assert dominance instead of simply meeting the capabilities of enemy forces.
In practical terms, this means the Army must continuously track a target from detection to strike, making sure it is not lost or misidentified as information moves between headquarters and firing units.
Because any large war in Europe would involve multiple nations operating different systems, Dynamic Front also focused on ensuring that sensors from one country could feed data to shooters from another without delay.
“We want to build a capability within the United States, within NATO, that if a peer adversary decides to aggress into NATO territory, or the territory of another ally or the United States, that the repercussions will be so extreme, create an experience for them that is so unrelenting, that no nation ever considers doing that again,” he said.
For soldiers working inside command posts, that scale would mean sorting through streams of incoming data under tight timelines. Army leaders said the volume cannot be managed by humans alone and requires more reliance on automation.
Col. Jeffrey Pickler, who serves as the Second Multidomain Task Force commander and deputy commander of the 56th Multidomain Command Europe, said the scale of targets leaves little room for manual processing.
“If we’re looking at a target set in the European theater where we think we’re going to need to process upwards of 1,500 targets a day, that’s beyond the human scope. The answer to the equation there is AI and automation,” he said.
Pickler said the scale of modern warfare is not defined only by the number of weapons but by the volume of information flowing in. The battlefield today, he said, “is swimming in sensors, and we are drowning in data, and there is not enough people that we could stuff into headquarters or a command post that will ever be able to fully process all of that.”
Kateryna Bondar, a fellow with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies the war in Ukraine, said the shift toward automation is less about replacing soldiers than reducing the mental strain of modern targeting.
“AI would help reduce their cognitive load,” she said, adding, “you don’t need to manually track 600 objects on one screen.”
She also said that artificial intelligence can speed up what militaries call the “kill chain,” which is the process from identifying a target to striking it, while still leaving the final decision-making to a human.
“For now, nobody is talking about delegating decision-making to AI,” she said, calling the automation “assistance to people,” as opposed to a process that ends in “delegating decisions to software.”
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
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