Daniel Møller Ølgaard

Workshop title: Studying military transformation amid ongoing technological uncertainty

Organiser: Dr Matthew Ford, Associate Professor in War Studies

Swedish Defence University, Stockholm

Dates: 15 -16 December 2025

Purpose

This workshop brings together scholars examining the conduct of war under digital conditions with those studying the integration of military AI into modern armed forces. The aim is to explore the wide range of challenges involved in understanding these transformations, fostering dialogue across diverse disciplinary perspectives. The event will provide an opportunity to share insights, test ideas, and outline the state of the field as we see it in December 2025. Participants will each have up to fifteen minutes to set out a position they would like to have discussed. Participants are not expected to prepare formal presentations or papers, though discussions may inform a future roundtable or forum article for Digital Wars or the European Journal of International Security.

Workshop Context

Armed conflict is being reshaped by digital connectivity. At its simplest, this can be seen in how digital devices are changing patterns of participation in war. At a more complex level, emerging forms of artificial intelligence have the potential to dramatically accelerate military decision-making. These transformations risk shifting significant power away from governments toward the tech giants who possess the expertise and capacity to maintain these systems and program the AI of the future. Unclear about how the future will unfold, most armed forces are caught between the promises of the technologists and the realities of contemporary war.

This workshop is designed to bridge the gap between the present and the future promises of the tech giants. The technologies now framing military transformation are highly complex and have the potential to radically restructure both the armed forces and the state’s relationship to industry. Their development and use extend beyond the military and government and reflect a new geography of war in which the digital stack, that network of fibre cables, cell phone towers, data centres, satellite constellations and the businesses that make these systems possible, shape the conduct of war. These systems intersect and blur the boundaries between defence, commerce, and civilian life. As a result, they generate wide-ranging legal and ethical challenges that must be mapped to the political economies that are responsible for building these systems.

How are contemporary wars being fought under digital conditions? As academics, what lessons might we take from this? How should we interpret these lessons in light of the promises being made by tech giants? What are the potential challenges facing the military organization and the states? What makes these technologies possible? How is this reshaping the geoeconomic map? Given the distributed nature of the information infrastructures that make these technologies possible, how do we trace accountability, responsibility and maintain democratic control? Above all, as scholars how should we study these rapid changes? What methods and considerations ought to frame our investigations?

Presented ongoing work on AI decision-support systems in relation to the ability of military commanders to act responsibly and reasonably in warfare.

Abstract:

Scholarly and legal debates about advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and its military applications have so far mostly focused on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) with the ability of choosing and engaging targets on their own. The predominant concern have been whether such weapons can sufficiently live up to the principle of distinction, make the necessary assessment of proportionality and take the adequate precautions before engaging. There has also been a lively discussion on how to ensure the necessary tests and screenings can be performed to ensure the legality of autonomous weapon systems. However, considerably less attention has been paid to the legal implications of military AI decision support systems (DSS). This is unfortunate because there is a growing recognition that this is an area where AI technologies will have a profound influence on military affairs and warfare, not as weapons but in relation to the task of how commanders, and combatants more widely, make decisions – including those about life and death.

To mitigate this shortcoming, our paper interrogates the impact of AI DSS in relation to the reasonable commander test that haven been the standard for assessing decisions made by commanders since the Hostage case. When assessing a commander’s decisions and in particular decisions where commanders have a degree of discretion, both the commander’s subjective beliefs and their objective reasonableness have been included. It allows for commanders’ decisions to be measured by the knowledge they had at the time and acting in good faith while also measuring decisions against what decision other reasonable commanders would have come to in the same situation with the same information. The objective element of the reasonable commander test also guard against purely subjective elements making decisions inscrutable. It ensures that a commander cannot escape scrutiny neither through willful ignorance nor the frailties of the human mind and body such as fatigue, anger or fear.

Concretely, the paper asks: What happens to the validity of the reasonable commander test when the commander makes decisions based on AI-driven DSS? How and to what extent does AI DDS put the assumed reasonable commander, including their agency and control, under pressure? To address these questions, the paper engages with literature on the ethics of AI in warfare as a starting point for discussing the weaknesses of IHL in regulating AI DSS, and how IHL might address these shortcomings. Of particular interest in this regard is the impact of new socio-technological dynamics arising from human-machine interactions and the pace at which future AI-enabled conflict will be fought on the ability of IHL and the RCT to meaningfully regulate armed conflict. This includes discussions about ‘automation bias’, through which critical and reflexive thinking is claimed to deteriorate as trust in automated systems and the desire for accelerated decision-making increase, and ‘moral deskilling’ whereby commanders’ ability and agency to comply with legal and ethical frameworks erode in and through the use of AI.

This conference explored the transformative impact of connected devices on crises, conflicts, and humanitarian efforts in the 21st century. Featuring leading scholars and practitioners, the discussions will take us from Ukraine's data-saturated battlefields to Somalia and Mali's disinformation wars, and from #BLM activists on the streets of the US to digital humanitarianism. The debates draw on the forthcoming Special Section of International Affairs titled "The Crisis in the Palm of Our Hands."

Organised the "Imagining Future War: New Perspectives on Military Technology in an Era of Great Power Competition" workshop with Thomas F.A. Watts and Rubrick Biegon.

This event, part of the European International Studies Association’s European Workshops in International Studies series, brought together scholars from across Europe and beyond. 

Our discussions spanned various analytical perspectives, focusing on technology, strategic competition, and imaginaries of future war. Underpinning the workshop was an interest in the study and conceptualisation of socio-technical imaginaries – a subject we discussed at length during our plenary session.

On May 2, 2024, I had the pleasure of welcoming Antoine Bousquet (Swedish Defence University), Elke Schwarz, PhD (Queen Mary, University of London) and Dr Ingvild Bode (University of Southern Denmark) to the Royal Danish Defence College to the research seminar "Smart War? The Promises and Pitfalls of Military AI". Each of them shared thought provoking insights from their research into the history, ethics and regulation of military AI.