The Triage Trap: When AI Speed Replaces Command Judgment

A targeting screen fills with structures, heat signatures, and a rapidly closing window. Aircraft have only minutes of fuel left when an AI highlights a single building, and suddenly the decision space collapses to one bright box.This is the triage trap: a pattern in which AI-enabled workflows determine which options reach command judgment in the first place, before a commander weighs alternatives. What the model elevates becomes the decision — what it filters out disappears.

This is not captured in mission command or command and control doctrine. Those frameworks govern who may decide and how authority is delegated, but they The post The Triage Trap: When AI Speed Replaces Command Judgment appeared first on War on the Rocks .