Assumption: Warfighting AI can assume connectivity.
Every major defense strategy now assumes degraded and contested environments. Networks will be denied. Spectrum will be contested. Connectivity will be intermittent at best—and absent at worst.
Yet much of today’s AI architecture is still built on an unstated assumption: that systems can always reach somewhere else to function.
That assumption does not survive war.
When AI depends on reach‑back for identity validation, updates, telemetry, or provenance checks, denial turns “secure” into “stopped.” The system doesn’t degrade gracefully. It pauses—by design.
In combat, that pause is mission failure.
The real question is no longer how sophisticated an AI model is in peacetime. The question is whether it continues to operate when the outside world disappears.
Inevitability: Warfighting AI that cannot operate under denial will not be trusted—no matter how accurate it is in the lab.
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