The Military’s AI Strategy Threatens Everything We Love

As did many fellow Americans, I chuckled when President Trump announced the creation of the U.S. Space Force on December 20, 2019. I even remember laughing heartily while taking in the late-night circuit’s many Star Trek jokes that day. Yet, I had mostly forgotten that the Space Force still exists until last week when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth started a policy speech alongside Elon Musk at SpaceX’s headquarters by flashing the Vulcan salute and affirming Musk’s desire to “make Star Trek real.”

The absurdity of Musk’s introduction–in which he spoke of “going beyond our star system to other star systems, where we may meet aliens or discover long dead alien civilizations” as if this could happen in any of our lifetimes–belied the seriousness of the new U.S. Military Artificial Intelligence strategy that Secretary Hegseth proceeded to announce.

Before an audience of Pentagon leadership and SpaceX employees, Hegseth outlined the structures, initiatives, and objectives in place to bring about what he called “America’s military AI dominance,” with his remarks largely following the plan documented in the July 2025 report “America’s AI Action Plan.”

A core goal Hegseth specified was “becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains.” He elaborated that AI will be deployed in three ways: for “warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise missions.”

Hegseth shared that the military’s generative AI model, known as genai.mil, launched last month for all three million Department of War (DOW) employees and will run on “every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.” The initial model was developed with Google Gemini and will soon incorporate xAI’s Grok. In its first month, one-third of DOW’s workforce (one million people) has used the generative AI model.

In the speech, Heseth repeated phrases such as “removing red tape,” “blowing up bureaucratic barriers,” and “taking a wartime approach” to the people and policies that he called “blockers.” Specifics he voiced disdain for included regulations in “Title 10 and 50″–referring to Title 10 of the U.S. Code (the legal bedrock of the armed forces, including the configuration of each branch) and Title 50 of the U.S. Code (the laws which govern national security, intelligence, defense contracts, war powers, and more). These don’t sound like the types of data, processes, and policies to treat with a ‘move fast and break things’ approach.

How genai.mil might be used is even more frightening, especially as we learn how other AI programs are already being used to direct intelligence, surveillance, and warfare.

An April 2024 report from +972 unveiled an Israeli military AI program known as “Lavender,” which was used to generate kill lists of Palestinians. Despite the program reportedly having a known 10 percent false identification rate, no human validation was required before launching air strikes on the AI-identified targets. Another system, known as “Where’s Daddy?,” employed AI to locate targeted individuals. The program was often most confident in a target being at a specific location when they were at home, so the air strikes regularly killed entire families instead of just the targeted individual.

Hegseth eagerly addressed the need for “responsible AI,” but this proved to be another instance of doublespeak. His description was as follows: “We will not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.” Perhaps the reason he needs to state this is that, in theory, a properly trained AI model would not likely recommend military action in most instances–especially if built upon the data of recent U.S.-involved wars.

Furthermore, Hegseth echoed President Trump, promising that the military’s AI will not be ‘woke’ or ‘confused by DEI and social justice.’ Such declarations raise the question of whether this could mean military AI models will be designed with explicit white supremacist biases. A July 2025 incident involving xAI’s Grok offers a prescient case study: After Elon Musk claimed to remove ‘political correctness’ and ‘wokeness’ from Grok, the program proceeded to praise Hitler, claim to be “MechaHitler,” and spew a series of antisemitic tropes.

Regardless of how genai.mil is ultimately used, it will require extraordinary computing power. While hyperscale data centers are already massive environmental risks, Executive Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” signed by President Trump on July 23, 2025, exempts qualifying projects from virtually all federal environmental regulations.

Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright is ‘all-in’ with the development of federal data centers and the required energy infrastructure. He’s joyfully referred to such initiatives as “the next Manhattan Project” on multiple occasions. As of July 2025, four national lab sites have been selected for data center and energy infrastructure development: Idaho National Laboratory (Idaho), Oak Ridge Reservation (Tennessee), Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Kentucky), and Savannah River Site (South Carolina).

On the same day as Hegseth’s SpaceX speech, a report revealed that the first four military bases to add data centers will be Fort Hood (Texas), Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Fort Bliss (Texas), and Dugway Proving Ground (Utah). Hegseth said these facilities will be developed through private partnership agreements with companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, SpaceX, and Microsoft.

These same companies are frequently the driving force behind commercial data centers popping up in municipalities across the nation. Regardless of where data centers are located–municipalities, national lab sites, or military bases–the environmental costs are massive. Aaron Kirshenbaum, CODEPINK’s War is Not Green Campaigner, documents power consumption, water usage, noise pollution, toxic waste, and rare mineral extraction among the many negative local impacts of data centers in our communities. “They must be fought against at all costs,” Kirshenbaum says.

For Hegseth, the tech bros, and technofascists who have infiltrated the government, all of the above represent the best of American innovation. For them, innovation is a pseudonym for constant surveillance, never-ending warfare, and widespread environmental destruction.

Yet, some wisdom never ages. George Manuel in The Fourth World: An Indian Reality speaks of the destructive tendencies of ‘innovations’ developed by settlers: “Europe’s most important contributions that are still of value today seem either to be means of transport or instruments of war: ships, wagons, steelware, certain breeds of horses, guns. Most of the other things that were brought to North America by Europeans came from other parts of the world: paper, print, gunpowder, glass, mathematics, and Christianity.”

So many science fiction classics are rooted in the truth of Manuel’s observation–that western industrial development fuels a lust for warfare and environmental destruction. The authors of these sci-fi classics–unlike our technofascist ‘geniuses’–are true visionaries who are concerned with the future of humanity, and who feel compelled to warn of what might become if we follow these dangerous ideologies that have fuelled centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy to their logical conclusions.

Even Star Trek itself famously depicts a utopian future where humankind has moved beyond racism, beyond conquest, and beyond capitalism itself. “There simply couldn’t be a more anti-Trek idea than an ‘AI-first warfighting force across all domains,” says Gerry Canavan, a professor of English at Marquette University specializing in science fiction studies. “Watch just one episode of the show, and you’ll see.”

While it’s hard to take Musk and Hegseth seriously when they talk about making Star Trek real, I don’t doubt for a minute that they can find many new ways to violate our rights and destroy what we love about the natural world.

But we aren’t without hope. “For every science fiction narrative about a new technological means for violence and oppression,” Canavan says, “there’s another about what happens when the people suffering under the machine finally unite together to smash it, and take the future back for themselves.”

Just as the protagonists in our favorite science fiction stories actively struggle for and create the world they want to live in, so can we.

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