Marines’ AI Training Mandate Requires Adaptability, Expert Says

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The Marine Corps has mandated that all active-duty and reserve Marines complete a basic course on artificial intelligence by the end of this year. But as the service and the Defense Department as a whole race to adopt AI, the training needs to evolve with the technology, one expert said.

The Marine Corps’ Basic AI Course “provides Marines with a foundational understanding of artificial intelligence and its relevance to today’s operating environment,” according to a May 8 Marine Administrative Message announcing the training mandate. It introduces key concepts, practical applications and use cases for the technology, with a focus on how AI can support decision-making and mission effectiveness.

The course emphasizes awareness rather than technical expertise, preparing Marines to operate, adapt and lead in an increasingly AI-enabled Marine Corps, the message stated, adding that intermediate and advanced AI courses are in development and will be available in 2027.

Andrew Powell, CEO and co-founder of training systems developer Ethos, said the Pentagon’s push to adopt and field AI quickly is great, but the technology is changing on a monthly and even daily basis, and most U.S. critical institutions move on a yearly or multi-year cycle of change.

The challenge then becomes “how do you effectively define what people need to know and be able to do?” Powell said. “How do you develop training that’s effective for equipping people to do their jobs, whatever that is, and how do you continually keep people up to date as things move?”

Legacy training approaches won’t work in an AI world, he said. For example, if the military rolls out a new drone system, “you’re not going to pull 1,000 people out of the field to send them to a schoolhouse to talk them through a PowerPoint. By the time you do that, the tech has already evolved such that you need to run the whole process again.”

For rapidly evolving technologies like artificial intelligence, the Defense Department needs a continuous training approach that is in itself AI-enabled, he said.

Ethos has developed what it describes as a “human readiness platform” that utilizes AI agents to automatically update and deploy new training modules as requirements, policy or technology evolve, Powell said.

In the example of a new drone system coming online, the Ethos platform could identify a training gap for the group of 1,000 operators and within minutes deploy updated training materials to take someone from where they currently are to where they need to be to operate the new platform, he said.

The training can also be highly targeted for specific mission areas, he said, in contrast to an annual cyber awareness training “that is exactly the same thing they did a year before with no contextual understanding of what they actually know, what their mission is, what the tech they’re using is.”

In a demonstration for the Navy, Ethos’ AI agents recreated in 51 minutes a training curriculum that took another contractor 18 months to build, according to Powell. Along with producing training materials more efficiently, this method also provides customers more time to conduct quality assurance, he noted.

While there is interest within the military in AI-enabled training tools like Ethos’ system, realizing the benefits they can provide will require systemic change within the Defense Department, Powell said.

The military has a very challenging mission, he said, “and a lot of times the way that we have weighed the risks between moving faster or moving more methodically is that the moving methodically is the better way to go.”

For example, updating military doctrine is a multi-year cycle with a lot of checks and a lot of assurance, “but now that the world is moving so quickly, we need to come up with a new system, because the divergence between the pace of change itself is now part of the problem,” he said.

“There is a version of the future where we’ve got the very best tech, but for whatever reason we haven’t had the courage to equip our people, and we get left behind by the tech,” he said. “I don’t think that is good for our economy, and that’s certainly not good for our military.”

The United States is well-positioned to win the global AI race, but it also needs to win the human learning race, Powell said.

“We’ll have the best tools and we’ll have the best tech — and we definitely have the best entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world — we just got to make sure that we deploy those in a way that the people who have to fight on our behalf are as equipped as possible to make the best use of those tools,” he said. 

 

Topics: Marine Corps News, Training and Simulation