Artificial Promotions

Artificial intelligence was introduced into military decisioning making in 2028. Until then it had been used solely on-demand and in an advisory manner - mostly to create marketing images. In 2031 it was fully looped into key process including mid-year budget redistributions, search and rescue mission planning, and manpower analysis which included promotions. But for a short segment of code requiring that humans always be legally in command, AI may have quickly moved beyond being superior advisor to become our robot commandant. Still, this event horizon made it very apparent which officers could lead given the new tools and which could not. 

When AI tackled the task of promotions it started by reading millions of email records, meeting minutes, career summaries, and operational after action reports. The results were very different from the old approach of a panel of chosen insiders deciding fate in a locked room. Let’s just say few of those who would have promoted through classical measures were left standing. Those students of airport-leadership-book-think and admiral-sounding folksiness were tossed in favor of the proven adaptive and actually productive. The homogeneity that the old closed hierarchy shaped and unconsciously protected was gone. AI had no desire to be in charge, but it certainly knew who should be for it to work best.

By 2031, AI had done away with time-base promotions and the paradigm of age correlating with rank was over.  It was like a scene from Szalzi’s Old Man War series with 25 year old admirals and 50 year old lieutenants walking around, both with their contributions optimized. The box checker promoters of the past, who favored fancily named strategic studies, and who focused on work-churn at the expense of learning, reading, and family were left ruminating in the middle ranks. The ripple effect would take a volume to describe but, suffice to say, without so many duplicative spreadsheets, pre-briefs, and points of indecision, things got better, faster, smarter  Had it not, what came next would have been over quickly, and I wouldn’t even be here to tell you about it.~