HONOLULU — Faster intelligence gathering and analysis enabled by AI is allowing special operators to pull off missions that would have been impossible years ago, U.S. Special Operations Command leader Adm. Frank Bradley, said Wednesday. But malign actors empowered by simple AI tools are undermining military and civilian leaders’ confidence in digital information, he said. That credibility decay, raising doubt about what is and is not true, will affect not just operations but the ability of the United States to “generate that unity of effort” to deter or defend against adversarial attack, he said.
“I have been plagued by my own staff hijinks on the use of artificial intelligence,” he told the Global SOF Foundation’s Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium, a meeting of international special operations forces, industry representatives, and some lawmakers. “If you weren’t part of the inside crew, you probably couldn’t tell the difference because of how capable AI is at creating deepfake content.”
Ongoing Russian and Chinese efforts to deceive Western audiences, both for tactical gain and to influence public sentiment, sometimes called “active measures,” get a boost from AI tools. But those efforts are hardly isolated. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of a junta currently controlling Burkina Faso, has shown how easy it is for even small-scale dictators to use AI tools to gain control of populations.
“Active measures have eaten the world,” one former State Department intelligence official told Defense One.
More persuasive AI-enabled content, quietly but consistently shaping perceptions about what is happening where, has become the dominant feature of a new critical battleground, Bradley said. “Exposing hostile behavior for exactly what it is—that early credible illumination is a critical advantage…Information advantage leads to decision advantage,” he said.
A U.S. military official who works in counter-intelligence and foreign influence analysis said, “AI has made deception scalable. Even outside of specific campaigns, that will undermine confidence in all intelligence gathering. Every source of information will become increasingly suspect. We’re no longer just fighting phishing emails, we’re fighting synthetic voices, cloned faces, and entire fake identities convincing enough to fool the people who know the real person best.”
The former State Department official said the United States, under the new Trump administration, had surrendered critical tools to watch and detect foreign influence just as adversaries were ramping up their ability to conduct influence operations.
“The information environment itself is much less transparent, ironically, than it used to be,” they said, describing how changes in leadership at social media companies had decreased transparency into issues like content moderation and allowing disinformation on the platform.
“The structures that were protecting the domestic environment don’t exist anymore. It’s not clear who’s able to see this,” they said, referring to governmental offices like the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) at the FBI, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the DNI, and various USAID activities and programs.
A secondary effect of those decisions: analysts or intelligence officers not directly working with those entities but who might be tracking foreign influence attacks in some other way will be less likely to raise concerns about what they see.
“The federal bureaucracy is very sensitive to priorities of political leadership, and I think you realize at this point that looking at this stuff is not going to be a career-enhancing move,” they said. “We’re in this period now where we are largely flying blind.”
A new playing field
New tools to synthesize intelligence from multiple sources at scale will provide new pathways for getting to the truth faster. That is already enabling faster joint operations of the sort that would not have been possible just a few years ago, Bradley said.
He pointed to the April rescue of a downed F-15 pilot behind enemy lines, “made possible by a tightly synchronized intelligence, cyber-enabled support, and disciplined coordination across multiple elements.” It was the sort of coordination that can only occur when multiple elements can share a common intelligence picture that changes as quickly as real-world conditions, and data that effectively predicts how conditions will change, he said.
An intelligence official described how those new intelligence streams are shaping decisions not just for commanders, but for everyone at once.
“About 10 years ago, [virtual imagery] was just for analysts, or just for the people who had specialties into these things. But now we’re bringing 10, 20, 30—I mean, dozens, if not thousands, of different data sources in to build that operator level,” they said. “And it updates every 15 minutes.”
The challenge going forward, Bradley and the intelligence official said, is not just finding new intelligence and data streams, but trusting them—especially in a future information environment where adversarial AI agents are finding new methods to access and alter data and intelligence.
“We’re spending a good bit of time and energy right now inside the the Department of War, but across the United States government as well, to ensure that those data sets and that those those systems are are appropriately protected against agentic AI attacks that might, that are coming,” Bradley said.
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