The Fight Tonight Force: Reimagining Military Readiness for the AI Age
America’s military stands at a crossroads.
After two decades of grinding land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “fight tonight force” or the combat-ready units that form the backbone of deterrence has lost its edge against major power competitors.
While the Pentagon has officially recognized China as the “pacing threat” since 2018, the hard truth remains: in a numbers game against Beijing, America is losing.
The solution isn’t waiting for miracle weapons in 2040.
It’s making today’s forces qualitatively superior through a fundamental reimagining of how we build, sustain, and deploy military power.
Modern democracies have a dirty secret: they’re not focused on contested logistics.
Robust supply chains, abundant stockpiles, and the unglamorous business of keeping forces fed, fueled, and armed don’t capture headlines or congressional appropriations.
Yet without them, even the most advanced military becomes a paper tiger.
The bedrock of any effective ready force is sustainability or the ability to fight, endure, and win extended conflicts.
This means prioritizing the mundane but vital: spare parts, ammunition stockpiles, and maintenance capabilities.
Defense budgets must rebalance away from shiny future projects toward the nuts and bolts of force sustainability.
The second pillar of readiness is the ability to project and sustain forces where they’re needed most.
America has invested in impressive new platforms like the CH-53K helicopter and CV-22B Osprey, while European allies have developed the A-400M transport.
But these systems need expanded procurement and innovative employment.
The Pacific theater demands revolutionary thinking.
Instead of manufacturing weapons in the continental United States and shipping them across vast ocean distances, America and its allies should embrace “embedded logistics” or joint investments in forward-deployed production facilities.
Building weapons and parts in Australia for American, Japanese, and South Korean forces while supporting the Australian Defence Force represents exactly this kind of paradigm shift.
The war in Ukraine has become an unexpected laboratory for military innovation, demonstrating how a defending nation can punch above its weight through hybrid operational design. Ukraine’s approach offers a blueprint for “fight tonight force” transformation.
At its core, Ukraine’s success stems from a dual foundation: Western conventional weapons providing reliable firepower and backbone, combined with indigenous technological innovation that rapidly adapts to battlefield realities.
This combination has proven devastatingly effective against a numerically superior adversary.
The most profound lesson from Ukraine concerns unmanned systems. These aren’t traditional platforms with software bolted on, rather they’re AI and software systems embodied in physical platforms. The innovation process is driven by operational users, with developers responding to real-world battlefield feedback to drive continuous improvement.
This represents a fundamental shift from the industrial-age model of lengthy development cycles to software-age rapid iteration.
Traditional platforms can participate in this dynamic process through the “payload revolution” which is about rapidly swapping and upgrading sensors, weapons, and capabilities without redesigning entire aircraft or ships.
The Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (MISR) program at the Navy’s Weapons Development Center in Fallon, Nevada, exemplifies this new approach. Unlike traditional weapons training tied to specific platforms, MISR is deliberately platform-agnostic, focusing on what CDR Timothy “HaveQuick” Bierbach calls “the shift in warfighting associated with the digital domain.”
The program’s flagship exercise, Resolute Hunter, has evolved dramatically since its inception.
What began as better utilization of ISR platforms has transformed into comprehensive payload innovation and rapid capability development. External participants regularly introduce new payloads into training environments, creating accelerated innovation cycles.
“What you saw in 2020 was the utilization of manned ISR dedicated platforms in the battlespace,” explains Bierbach. “We now are focused on how we can leverage new payloads and a wider variety of platforms to deliver the decisive information which commanders need.”
This evolution reflects a broader strategic shift from linear “kill chain” thinking to dynamic “kill web” approaches. In distributed force structures, combat clusters operate with Local Area Networks (LANs), reducing dependence on centrally delivered intelligence. Autonomous and remotely piloted systems become key decision-making aids, enabling faster responses at the tactical level.
As one MISR officer noted: “A distributed force works with Local Area Networks, which means that the force can operate with combat clusters leveraging LANs rather than having to rely on centrally delivered ISR content.”
The transformation requires unprecedented industry-military collaboration. For example, Lockheed Martin’s partnership with NAWDC demonstrates the new methodology: rapid prototyping with early warfighter feedback. Richard Whitfield, a principal systems engineer and former naval officer, describes their approach: “Go from concept to a prototype in a box within 15 to 18 months. At the nine-month mark, if it’s not working out, we can scrap it, and nobody’s worse for the effort.”
This leverages the inherent flexibility of platforms like helicopters. “The helicopter is a truck,” Whitfield notes. “As such, they are easy to test things on. We just need more effective ways to do so.”
The human element remains crucial.
MISR focuses on producing “warrior solution architects” or personnel who understand payload capabilities and can connect them with other systems to create effective constellations for desired effects.
As LCDR Jason “Cuddles” Falk explains: “If you tell us the capabilities and the effects of the payload, we can connect them with other payloads to create the constellation that can deliver the desired effect. In other words: kill web design, execution, and management.”
This distributed approach offers a decisive advantage: speed.
As CDR Bierbach observes, “a local reconnaissance strike network now can operate much more rapidly in terms of decision cycle than a single national reconnaissance strike complex.”
In high-end conflicts, this speed-of-light decision-making capability could prove decisive.
The implications extend far beyond any single service or program.
Traditional military development which is focused building future platforms and working backward to current forces is obsolete.
The AI-software and payload revolutions demand a new approach: driving change in current forces with AI-software and payload focus while imagining new platforms that can accelerate and provide new vectors of change.
This isn’t about building better iterations of legacy platforms.
It’s about fundamentally reimagining how military power is conceived, developed, and deployed.
In a multipolar world being shaped by authoritarian competitors, America’s “fight tonight force” must be operationally ready for immediate conflict while continuously evolving through rapid innovation cycles.
This requires abandoning comfortable assumptions about lengthy development timelines and embracing the speed and adaptability that AI-software and payload revolutions make possible.
The future of military superiority belongs not to those with the biggest platforms, but to those who can adapt fastest, fight smartest, and innovate continuously.
America’s advantage lies not in matching China’s numbers, but in leveraging technological agility, alliance cooperation, and innovative thinking to maintain qualitative superiority.
The fight tonight force isn’t just about being ready for war.
It’s about being ready to win it.
The quotes were taken from the following articles:
The Payload Revolution: Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Decision-Making