The network is the weapon: The missing link in the military’s AI revolution

The Navy announced recently that it is creating a new Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story. This month, the War Department added ChatGPT and Grok to GenAI.mil alongside Gemini. The Defense Information Systems Agency’s fiscal 2026 technology watchlist, meanwhile, places agentic AI and AI-augmented software engineering in proof-of-concept work, network detection and response in pilot, and AIOps among technologies already in deployment.

Those are different initiatives, but they share one dependency: The network has to be ready enough to carry the intelligence, permissions, data, and recovery paths that make artificial intelligence useful in the first place.