On July 21, 2026, the Special Competitive Studies Project convened a private roundtable on Agentic AI and the Future of the U.S. Military. General CQ Brown, Jr., 21st Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Joe Dunford, 19th Chairman, co-chaired the session; General David H. Petraeus, who commanded the Surge in Iraq, U.S. Central Command, and coalition forces in Afghanistan, and subsequently served as Director of the CIA, framed the discussion.
Participants included more than two dozen former senior commanders and defense officials — among them former combatant commanders, military service chiefs, intelligence agency directors, and allied defense chiefs — together with leading technologists from America's frontier AI companies and practitioners with direct experience of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Collectively, the room represented more than 900 years of service to national, allied, and international security.
The convening came at a hinge moment. The character of war is changing — not incrementally, but fundamentally — and artificial intelligence is advancing from reactive, generative systems that produce text and content to proactive agentic systems that pursue goals, perceive their environment, plan across multiple steps, act in the real world, and learn continuously from what they do. Militaries that grasp and adapt to this shift will fight differently. Those that do not will discover the difference the hard way, as militaries throughout history always have.
The roundtable was held under the Chatham House Rule; this report — prepared by SCSP staff — summarizes the substance of what was said without attributing remarks to individual participants or their organizations.
Strategy divorced from evidence is aspiration.
SCSP
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.