As AI becomes embedded in military education, planning, analysis, and decision support, the
Department of the Air Force must prepare Airmen for more than technical adoption. Lasting AI
advantage depends on a three-legged stool: technological fluency, human performance, and ethical
judgment.

This facilitated session explores how these three dimensions must develop together. AI can accelerate sensemaking, generate alternatives, and support reflection, but it can also encourage overreliance, cognitive surrender, and misplaced confidence if training focuses only on tool use. Participants will examine how AI affects attention, inquiry, judgment, culture, and moral responsibility, especially in environments shaped by emerging digital and offensive technologies.

Drawing from the concepts of digital dexterity, biological and psychological human-performance
research, and military ethics, the session will help participants identify where AI strengthens or
degrades human capability.

The goal is to develop practical principles for training AI-fluent Airmen who are technologically capable, cognitively resilient, and ethically grounded. The costs of falling short on any of these principles and their related imperatives are significant and harder to reverse as time passes, leading to a perennial USAF conundrum—should the platform drive the ethics and ends
of warfare?