Abstract: While emerging technologies are transforming the character of war and officer education, the core principles of war remain constant. Focusing on European military academies, AI-enabled decision support systems, unmanned platforms, and cyber capabilities can be integrated into the basic education of future officers. These tools will reshape the teaching of the enduring principles of war, such as human nature, chance, leadership, and morale, and highlight risks, including technological overconfidence and the erosion of fieldcraft. The paper aims to highlight modern tools that will enhance the education of our future officers, while also stressing the importance of considering their limitations.
Problem statement: How can European military academies integrate emerging training technologies without eroding timeless principles of war, human judgement, and leadership?
So what?: European militaries should adopt deliberate integration strategies that prioritise fieldcraft, ethics, and critical thinking, set limits on automation, and share lessons across institutions to ensure technology strengthens, rather than weakens, officer education.
Capability Atrophy
In the human skull, there are small muscles that once helped our ancestors move their ears: Auricularis anterior, auricularis superior, and auricularis posterior.[1] Because unused capabilities atrophy over time, most people cannot voluntarily use these muscles. The same logic applies to military fundamentals. When militaries train for long periods with technology, doing what soldiers and junior leaders once had to do by themselves, like navigation, observation, and decision-making under uncertainty, those skills degrade structurally until they fail, often in stressful environments.[2], [3]
While technological superiority can decisively shape battlefield outcomes, it does not eliminate the enduring human dimensions of war. Uncertainty, friction, fear, fatigue, deception, and moral responsibility remain central to military operations. As NATO’s Allied Joint Doctrine emphasises, doctrine is “authoritative guidance that nonetheless requires judgment in application,” underscoring that critical decisions cannot be delegated to technology alone.[4]
This tension between the undeniable value of technology and the fragility of fundamentals is now central to European officer education. Emerging training tools can accelerate learning and expand exposure to complex, multi-domain scenarios. However, they can also create predictable educational distortions: technological overconfidence, automation bias, degradation of the basic military skills, and training settings that teach the wrong reflexes. The war in Ukraine shows how quickly new tools diffuse and how rapidly adversaries adapt, while also demonstrating that cohesion, leadership, deception, and discipline remain decisive.[5]
Technological Overconfidence
Conflict in the 21st century has amply demonstrated that technology is a force multiplier, but it becomes a liability when commanders treat it as a substitute for judgment or place excessive trust in it, leading them to become overconfident and even arrogant. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the highly automated US Patriot air-defence system produced lethal “blue-on-blue” incidents, including the shootdown of a Royal Air Force Tornado. The UK accident summary pointed to broad, computer-programmed classification criteria and permissive rules of engagement, while crew training emphasised rapid reaction and “trusting the Patriot system,” a mindset that, in this case, proved deadly.[6]
A different kind of excessive confidence surfaced in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Post-war reviews note that reliance on airpower alone was widely condemned, and that expectations about what airpower and intelligence could deliver were naïve, forcing a late and costly shift to ground operations against a prepared, dispersed adversary.[7] Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced the point: a US House Armed Services hearing highlighted that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) remained the number-one cause of coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan even after years of massive counter-IED investment, proof that an enemy can keep killing with low-tech adaptation while we chase silver bullets.
Ukraine has made the lesson brutally current. Electronic warfare and jamming routinely sever drone control links and disrupt satellite navigation, pushing both sides toward workarounds such as fibre-optically controlled first-person-view (FPV) drones, greater autonomy, and AI-assisted targeting to keep strikes viable when manual control breaks down. In each case, the mistake was not using advanced tools; it was blindly trusting the platform and failing to consider its limitations. Recent developments in the War in Ukraine show that Russian forces have diminished communication capabilities and limited drone usage after SpaceX curbed illicit use of the satellite internet network, which consequently affected their capabilities on the battlefield.[8]
War as a Laboratory
Ukraine demonstrates that emerging technologies are reshaping the character of war by compressing time, increasing transparency, and raising the cost of exposure. At the same time, the Ukrainian battlefield demonstrates that modern technology goes hand in hand with primitive methods of war, such as trench warfare.
Analysis from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) describes a dense reconnaissance-strike environment in which drones rapidly detect, track, and direct fires, forcing both sides to innovate in concealment, dispersion, deception, and rapid displacement. The educational takeaway for young officers must not be a shopping list of devices; it must be an operational principle: what is observable becomes targetable, and what is targetable must either be protected, displaced, or deceived.[9]
Uncrewed systems are central to this dynamic. Ukrainian officials report that drones account for the majority of verified battlefield strikes.[10] Whatever the precise statistical accuracy of wartime claims, the underlying operational reality is clear: drones have become ubiquitous across reconnaissance, fire direction, Battle Damage Assessment (BDA), and direct strike, and they have proliferated to the point that many tactical problems begin with drones overhead.
The ubiquity of drones on the modern battlefield is also inseparable from electronic warfare (EW). Reuters reporting on Ukraine’s AI-enabled drone efforts stresses that Russian jamming has become widespread, even at the tactical level, reducing hit rates and driving the search for autonomy, computer vision, and alternative guidance methods (such as fibre-optic drones).[11] The lesson for officer education is that EW is indeed more than a mere technician’s concern; it is a commander’s condition of action. Young officers must be able to issue intent, execute basic tactics, and manage risk when communications are intermittent, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is unreliable, and the “common operating picture” is partially wrong.
Digital battle-management software has also accelerated coordination. A system like that is the Ukrainian “DELTA”, a system characterised by the NATO Allied Command Transformation as a battlespace management platform that enhances situational awareness, planning, and decision-making, and has been tested for interoperability within NATO environments, demonstrating its ability to integrate data across allied systems. Additionally, analysis of Ukraine’s GIS Arta illustrates how software can shorten sensor-to-fire timelines and enable fire units to “shoot-and-scoot,” reducing their vulnerability to counter-battery fires.[12]
The positional and attritional features of the Russo-Ukrainian war also matter for education. Analyses of the 2023 counter-offensive and subsequent fighting emphasise the difficulty of breaching layered defences under pervasive surveillance, dense fires, and extensive mining.[13] A U.S. Army analysis of the combined-arms breach in 2023 highlights reconnaissance, obstacle reduction in depth, and synchronisation of warfighting functions as prerequisites for manoeuvre; requirements that are profoundly affected by drones and EW.[14]
Finally, Ukraine shows the speed at which training systems must adapt. NATO has noted that its training mission for Ukrainian soldiers has evolved repeatedly to keep pace with drone threats.[15] The lesson is organisational: officer education must train not only competence, but learning agility; how to update tactics and evaluate new tools.
Enduring Principles
The temptation in every era is to treat novel tools as a discontinuity in the nature of war. Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and others argued that the aeroplane represented a revolutionary discontinuity: massed strategic bombing would bypass land armies entirely, striking enemy will and industry directly and making future wars short, decisive, and relatively bloodless for the victor. This “airpower alone” vision was treated as a fundamental shift away from Clausewitzian attrition.[16] Reality in the Second World War proved otherwise—bombing campaigns required massive ground and naval support, suffered from friction (weather, navigation errors, enemy adaptation), and rarely broke civilian or military will without combined-arms operations. Airpower transformed the character of warfare by adding a new domain, but its nature (interactive, uncertain, political) remained unchanged.
Yet the enduring features of conflict are rooted in human cognition, emotion, and social organisation. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War remains influential because it treats war as a human activity shaped by fear, honour, interest, and misperception; forces that persist regardless of the weapons in hand.[17]
Contemporary doctrine echoes this continuity. NATO acknowledges that fog of war, imperfect, contradictory, and delayed information cannot be eliminated; it can only be managed through training, planning, mission command, and adaptation. In practice, the more data-rich the environment becomes, the more officers must learn to discriminate signal from noise and resist false certainty.
Leadership and morale remain decisive. Unit cohesion, discipline, and trust determine whether a unit sticks to the plan under enemy fire, maintains professional standards under fatigue, and adapts when the initial plan collapses. Technologies can magnify these strengths by improving feedback and situational understanding, but they cannot replace the social contract between the leader and the soldiers.
Accountability is equally enduring. As AI-enabled decision support becomes more common, a subtle failure mode appears: responsibility drifting from humans to tools and systems. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warns that AI-based decision-support systems can challenge human judgment in decisions about the use of force, and that safeguards must preserve meaningful human responsibility.[18] These concerns are not only legal; they are educational, because cadets must be trained to make their own decisions under pressure, even when assisted by algorithms.
Recommendations for Better Basic Officer Education
European military academies face a practical challenge: cadets must become multi-domain literate without becoming gadget-dependent. The solution is to define outcomes first, then choose technologies that support those outcomes/learning objectives. At the platoon level, the most valuable outcomes include: tactical competence; leadership that sustains cohesion under stress; disciplined judgement under uncertainty; ethical control, accountability, and resilience when communications are degraded.[19]
Because contested communications are increasingly normal, academies should treat mission command as a practical skill, not only a doctrinal slogan. Cadets should practice issuing intent and delegating authority with pre-briefed triggers for action when communications fail. This is not new. It was practised and implemented in the past (Auftragstaktik[20]) by the Prussian Army. In general, the mission command is what modern battlefields demand: decentralised decision-making, trust, and initiative to accomplish the commander’s intent in complex, rapidly changing environments.
Additionally, simple design choices such as planned “silent periods,” analogue control measures, and navigation without GPS can reduce reliance on highly sophisticated devices. This is how technology integration supports the fundamentals: digital tools are used when available, but the unit’s competence is not contingent on their use.
At the same time, simulation and wargaming can expand scenario exposure and compress learning cycles when used to train decisions rather than procedures. The UK Ministry of Defence wargaming handbook describes how wargaming at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst was used to encourage manoeuvrist thinking and an understanding of doctrine in an adversarial setting.[21]
Regarding unmanned systems, the educational objective should be UAS literacy for all officers: understanding how drones enable reconnaissance-strike loops, how drones are countered, and how to manage electromagnetic signatures. This does not require turning every cadet into a drone pilot, but it does require that every cadet can plan and lead with drones in mind and can function when drones are absent.
Another important topic is cybersecurity, which should be treated as a soldier’s skill. NATO explicitly frames cyber defence as part of deterrence and defence, emphasising resilience and operational effectiveness. In practice, platoon leaders must enforce cyber hygiene, recognise disinformation, and operate when networks are compromised or degraded.[22]
Finally, European academies can shorten their learning loops by sharing scenarios and lessons. The EMILYO (European initiative for the exchange of young officers) framework and related EU-level military education networks provide existing pathways for the exchange of cadets, instructors, and curricula.
The specific recommendations below are designed for European academies and early-career pipelines (cadets through initial platoon leadership):
1. Fieldcraft-first progression, then technology augmentation, then forced degradation. Train fundamentals “unplugged” (navigation, concealment, reporting), then add digital tools, then deliberately remove or corrupt them under stress (jamming, GPS denial, intermittent comms). Assess cadets on their performance during the degraded phase, not just the connected phase.
2. Make signature discipline a graded leadership competency. Academies should use drone-observed lanes to evaluate cadets on dispersion, timing, deception, emissions control, and time-in-exposure. UAV footage should be incorporated in After Action Reviews to show how small patterns become targetable.
3. Teach UAS and indirect fires as one integrated system. Build an integrated module that links small UAS reconnaissance to fire requests, displacement, and counter-UAS/EW responses. Include an Opposing Force (OPFOR) that jams, deceives, and hunts enablers.
4. Institutionalise adversarial wargaming early. We should first start with low-cost analogue games to teach adversarial thinking, then move to digital simulation where appropriate. Evaluate reasoning, adaptability, and doctrine application rather than ‘winning’.
5. Teach AI literacy as calibrated trust and disciplined doubt. Use scenarios where AI is confidently wrong, biased, or incomplete; require students to justify acceptance or rejection and grade on reasoning and ethical accountability.[23]
6. Build ‘decision-making under degraded truth’ exercises. Introduce contradictory reports, spoofed tracks, manipulated imagery, and time pressure. Reward commanders who communicate intent clearly and manage uncertainty.
7. Treat cyber hygiene as a soldier’s skills. Embed cyber injects into field exercises (compromised devices, disinformation, altered data) and require cadets to adapt and execute PACE (Primary-Alternate-Contingency-Emergency) plans.
8. Embed ethics and law inside technology training. When cadets use drones, digital targeting tools, or AI aids, they require explicit articulation of distinction, proportionality, and accountability, and use structured reflection to prevent ethical displacement.[24]
9. Train for dependency shocks. Use vignettes based on commercial denial or constraint (satcom restriction, software outage, supply-chain interruption) and require redundancy planning (mission command, analogue backups).
10. Professional AARs. We should make AARs the centre of learning cycles: plan in simulation, execute in the field, review with objective data (UAV footage, logs), and re-train. Instructors should also be trained to run evidence-based AARs. Learning depends on disciplined reflection. The US Army’s AAR doctrine emphasises structured professional discussion of what happened, why it happened, and how to improve.
11. Share lessons across the EU. By using existing exchange and academic networks to share scenario libraries, training lanes, and standards, we can reduce duplication and improve interoperability across academies. In this process, the lines of development created by the European Union have already created fertile ground for harmonising the EU’s basic officer education, increasing interoperability among the armed forces of the EU member states, and promoting a common security and defence culture.[25]
The aforementioned recommendations emphasise first mastering the basics, then embedding new technologies, with an understanding of their limitations, and finally stripping them out of the equation to assess how the cadets perform without those “luxuries”. Together, they translate the technology-driven realities of the modern conflict (especially the Russo-Ukrainian war) into durable educational practices without turning a specific war’s tactics into dogma.
What Can Go Wrong?
If academies implement new technologies without a specific plan, they risk producing officers optimised for ideal conditions rather than real war. A first failure mode is friction denial: training environments that are always connected, always visible, and always recoverable teach cadets to expect clarity. Ukraine indicates the opposite: contested networks, EW disruption, and rapid punishment for exposure are the norm.[26]
A second failure mode is deskilling. When navigation, observation, and target acquisition are outsourced to systems, fieldcraft atrophies. In Ukraine, an army that cannot navigate, camouflage, or move under observation bleeds; when systems fail or are denied, competence must fall back on basic skills.[27]
A third failure mode is responsibility drift. AI decision-support can accelerate tempo and create the illusion that a recommendation equals a decision. Ethical analysis highlights opacity, bias, and reduced challenge as risks that can erode accountability and compliance with the law of armed conflict.
Young officers should be trained to assume that key enablers may be constrained and to develop analogue backups for critical functions.
Another risk is the misuse of automation. Parasuraman and Riley’s framework on use, misuse, disuse, and abuse of automation remains relevant: humans tend to over-trust automation in some conditions, under-trust it in others, and stop monitoring when they become complacent. This is exactly the failure mode academies must train against when introducing AI-enabled decision-support tools.[28]
Highly sophisticated training systems create security and integrity issues: data leakage, manipulation of training environments, and over-collection of sensitive performance data. Cyber resilience should therefore be built into training infrastructure and governance, not treated only as a vague topic.
Finally, the integration of those systems could also go wrong. Training transfer depends on alignment between training conditions and operational reality, deliberate practice, feedback, and reinforcement. Meta-level research on training and development shows that design and implementation matter as much as content; a warning against buying advanced tools without reengineering pedagogy and assessment.[29]
Conclusion
Europe’s security environment is changing fast. European armed forces must adapt, and that adaptation begins with how we educate young officers. Military academies and initial training pipelines are where command skills, responsibility, and professional character are built: the habits that will shape platoon leaders and, later, company commanders on deployments across the continent and beyond.
Emerging technologies belong in officer education, but only with guardrails in place. Ukraine shows that new tools can generate a real advantage; it also shows how quickly that advantage collapses when fundamentals atrophy, leaders over-trust systems, or training systems fail to reproduce friction. At the end of the day, even the best networks and sensors will sometimes fail or be denied. Officers still need to be able to go off-grid, and operating off-grid demands skill, discipline, and tactical proficiency.
For European officer education, the central task is disciplined integration. Academies should modernise in ways that strengthen judgment, leadership, ethics, and fieldcraft, and then stress-test those qualities under degradation. Simulation and AI can accelerate learning, but must be governed by values, scepticism, and accountability. Unmanned-systems literacy and cyber resilience should become baseline competencies, while analogue skills remain the safety net when systems are denied.
The conclusion for officer education is clear: teach the modern battlefield in full, but always teach it with limits, fallbacks, and adaptation. Pair every new capability with its failure modes and practical workarounds; stress-test cadets in communications-denied exercises; and institutionalise learning through experimentation, red-teaming, and rigorous after-action reviews. Assessment should reward disciplined initiative and sound decisions in the face of uncertainty, not simply technical fluency. The goal is for officers to exploit tomorrow’s tools without becoming dependent on them, keeping fundamental skills sharp while adapting faster than the enemy. If Europe integrates technology as an amplifier rather than a substitute, it can produce officers capable of leading under fog, friction, and with moral responsibility; the constants of war across centuries.
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[4] North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Allied Joint Doctrine (AJP-01), ed. F, ver. 1 (Brussels: NATO Standardization Office, 2022), Lex-3.
[5] Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Tactical Developments during the Third Year of the Russo-Ukrainian War (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2025), 23.
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[8] Pjotr Sauer, “Russian Military Scrambles to Find Starlink Alternative after Access Blocked,” The Guardian, February 9, 2026.
[9] Watling and Reynolds, Tactical Developments during the Third Year of the Russo-Ukrainian War, 23.
[10] Rudy Ruitenberg, “Ukraine Says More Than 80% of Enemy Targets Now Destroyed by Drones,” Defense News, January 28, 2026, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/01/28/ukraine-says-more-than-80-of-enemy-targets-now-destroyed-by-drones/.
[11] Max Hunder, “Ukraine Rolls Out Dozens of AI Systems to Help Its Drones Hit Targets,” Reuters, October 31, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-rolls-out-dozens-ai-systems-help-its-drones-hit-targets-2024-10-31/.
[12] Paolo Giordano, “Battlefield Innovation: Ukraine’s DELTA System Paves the Way for Allied Interoperability at CWIX24,” NATO Allied Command Transformation, July 12, 2024, https://www.act.nato.int/article/delta-system-cwix/.
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[14] U.S. Army, “Blocked and Bloodied: Lessons from the Combined Arms Breach during the 2023 Ukrainian Counter-Offensive,” July 8, 2025, https://www.army.mil/article/286857/blocked_and_bloodied_lessons_from_the_combined_arms_breach_during_the_2023_ukranian_counter_offensive.
[15] North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Training Mission for Ukrainian Soldiers Evolves to Keep Pace with Drone Threats on the Battlefield,” December 3, 2025, https://www.nato.int/en/multimedia/multimedia/videos/2025/12/03/training-mission-for-ukrainian-soldiers-evolves-to-keep-pace-with-drone-threats-on-the-battlefield.
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[18] International Committee of the Red Cross, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Armed Conflict: A Human-Centred Approach (Geneva: ICRC, 2019), https://www.icrc.org/en/document/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-armed-conflict-human-centred-approach.
[19] Watling and Reynolds, Tactical Developments during the Third Year of the Russo-Ukrainian War, 23.
[20] Antulio J. Echevarria II, Mission Command and the German Tradition (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2012).
[21] UK Ministry of Defence, Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, Wargaming Handbook (Shrivenham, UK: DCDC, 2017).
[22] National Institute of Standards and Technology, “Cybersecurity Framework,” updated 2023, https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework.
[23] Wen Zhou and Anne Greipl, “Artificial Intelligence in Military Decision-Making: Supporting Humans, Not Replacing Them,” ICRC Law & Policy Blog, August 29, 2024, https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2024/08/29/artificial-intelligence-in-military-decision-making-supporting-humans-not-replacing-them/.
[24] Klaus M., “Transcending Weapons Systems: The Ethical Challenges of AI in Military Decision Support Systems,” ICRC Law & Policy Blog, September 24, 2024.
[25] European Military Initial Leadership Education (EMILYO), “Strategic–Operational and Tactical Goals of the Implementation Group’s Lines of Development,” 2025.
[26] Watling and Reynolds, Tactical Developments during the Third Year of the Russo-Ukrainian War, 23.
[27] Frederick W. Kagan et al., Ukraine and the Problem of Restoring Maneuver in Contemporary War (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of War, 2024).
[28] Raja Parasuraman and Victor Riley, “Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse,” Human Factors 39, no. 2 (1997): 230–53.
[29] Eduardo Salas et al., “The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13, no. 2 (2012): 74–101.
