The interesting (and sinister) thing to consider is how wild this will look if fully built out. We're not just talking about some machine intelligence shuffling troops around in lieu of a general. The advantage of a computer is its vision: it can see the "playing field," the reality it's fighting in, much more broadly and deeply than a human can. It can hold more things in its mind at once. AI warfare isn't computers flying some drones or robotic tanks. AI warfare probably looks like a bunch of small, odd occurrences as both sides probe each other's weaknesses in economics, infrastructure and politics, circling each other like two knife fighters. A bunch of weird, disjointed bursts of propaganda crop up across various media channels, fragmented and often seemingly incoherent, but perfectly targeted. Small, isolated incidents of problems at important institutions start cropping up, shutting them down for weeks or months: Hospitals, minor government agencies, oil pipelines, food processing. Never enough to look like a coherent attack. Knife jabs and dodges, the fighters probing, learning, a/b testing.

And then one day it isn't a test anymore. The real strike comes. It isn't a nuke or an invasion. There's no need. Those things are as outdated as tying sharp stones to sticks. The AI knows just where to hit, in just the right way, and like a Vulcan death grip one pinch sets the whole system collapsing on itself. It will take humans a decade to even fully understand what happened. If they have that luxury.

The atom bomb changed warfare via incomprehensible destruction. AI will change warfare via incomprehensible strategy.