About 1,500 targets in a single day: That’s the scale U.S. military leaders say they are preparing for a large-scale war in Europe.
A trajectory 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 high-intensity conflicts. Drawing lessons from Ukraine, leaders described a battlefield where waves of drones, missiles and artillery could spawn targets faster than traditional headquarters could process.
The exercise focused on moving targeted data across national borders and between different systems.
“We need to be able to intercept 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range unilateral attack drones every 24 hours,” said Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, commanding general of Multidomain Command Europe. Those numbers reflect the scale of attacks seen in Ukraine, he said.
“At the same time, we should be able to develop, detain and pass a minimum of 1,500 targets in the same 24-hour period,” he said. That number, according to Carpenter, is simply to dominate rather than meet the capabilities of enemy forces.
In practical terms, this means that the military must continuously track a target from detection to strike, ensuring that it is not lost or misidentified as information moves between headquarters and firing units.
Because any major war in Europe involves multiple nations operating different systems, Dynamic Front also focused on ensuring that sensors in 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 fellow adversary decides to attack NATO territory, or another ally, or the territory of the United States, the consequences will be so extreme, create an experience for them that is so brutal, that no nation would consider doing it again,” he said.
For soldiers working within command posts, that scale means sorting through streams of incoming data under tight timelines. Army leaders said the volume could not be managed by humans alone and required more reliance on automation.
Col. Jeffrey Pickler, who serves as the 2nd Multidomain Task Force commander and deputy commander of the 56th Multidomain Command Europe, said the scale of the targets leaves little room for manual processing.
“If we’re looking at a target set in the European theater where we think we need to process upwards of 1,500 targets a day, that’s beyond human scope. The answer to the equation is AI and automation,” he said.
Pickler said that the scale of modern warfare is defined not only by the number of weapons but by the amount of information flowing into it. “The battlefield today is swimming in sensors, and we’re drowning in data, and there aren’t enough people to hire at a headquarters or a command post that will be able to fully process all of that,” he said.
Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at 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 about reducing the mental stress of modern targeting.
“AI will help reduce their cognitive load,” she said, “so you don’t need to manually track 600 items on one screen.”
She also said artificial intelligence could speed up what the military calls the “kill chain,” the process of identifying a target before striking it, while leaving the final decision-making to humans.
“For now, no one is talking about delegating decision-making to AI,” she said, calling automation “helping people,” as opposed to a process that ends up “delegating decisions to software.”
