FORTH HUACHUCA, Ariz. (KGUN) — Army doctrine writers at Fort Huachuca are using AI to cut document production time nearly in half, getting critical training guidance to service members faster.
Artificial intelligence is changing how the U.S. Army writes the documents that guide training for service members across the entire military.
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At Fort Huachuca, doctrine writers have been using AI for about six months to help create foundational training materials — and the results are already significant.
Adam Wells, a doctrine writer at Fort Huachuca, said he uses the technology as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for human expertise.
"I use AI as a sounding board for ideation, to get my rough drafts out and to have someone to speak with when I'm first forming my ideas before they go on paper," Wells said.
The use of AI is encouraged by top officials with the Department of the Army — not as a replacement for the people using it, but as a tool to enhance their work. Implementation is being done in phases.
Doctrine writers prepare documents that serve as foundational guidance for units across the military, covering everything from standard operating procedures to warfare training.
"These are the foundational standard operating procedures that units will be looking to for guidance," Wells said.
One of the most notable impacts has been on production speed. Wells said the traditional doctrine development process took between two and two and a half years to produce a single document.
"Now our current practices — we're in the process of publishing the new field manual 2-0 Intelligence in 11 months, which is a huge decrease in time," Wells said.
That speed matters because outdated doctrine means outdated training.
"Training should always be grounded in doctrine. And when you have outdated doctrine that training is based upon, that's not quality training. And so by having more accurate doctrine, more current doctrine, the force gets better training as a result of that," Wells said.
Accuracy and concision are both priorities for Wells and his team.
"We always want to have accurate doctrine for sure, but concise concision helps soldiers get the most important information that they need faster," Wells said.
AI also helps the team cover subject matter expertise they might not otherwise have access to.
"We can't carry or cover subject matter expertise for every single mission, and so when AI agents are able to be tailored specifically to what they need to be, we're able to upload doctrine from other proponents, other agencies, other organizations, and create those subject matter experts in real time to help us start that ideation and that rough draft process, while we then find those real life subject matter experts to double check our assumptions and make sure the things that we're producing are factually correct and are going to be beneficial to the force," Wells said.
Wells does not rely solely on AI for his work. On a recent project, the final product reflected input from both the technology and military leadership.
"It was both a blend of what the AI was saying, hey, this might be what we want to skew the conversation towards, as well as what our senior leaders were asking for more clarity on in that piece," Wells said.
He said making revisions is easier with AI, though he would like to see the technology evolve to better sort comments so they can be implemented more efficiently.
Wells also cautioned that the technology still has significant limitations.
"AI is still a long ways away from being able to produce full fledged, complete doctrine, and generative AI should always be treated with a healthy degree of skepticism, with subject matter human experts looking over the final outputs for both completeness and correctness, especially for something like doctrine, before it's sent out to the force," Wells said.
Wells said he expects his team's use of AI to grow as the technology continues to improve, helping them even more in their day-to-day jobs.
Wells said his own path to using AI required significant personal investment.
"My skepticism came from a lack of technical competency using some of these tools. This wasn't something that I was classically trained as when I first joined the Army, and so it was a lot of self development that I had to do in order to become proficient with some of these tools," Wells said.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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Alexis Ramanjulu is a reporter in Cochise County for KGUN 9. She began her journalism career reporting for the Herald/Review in Sierra Vista, which she also calls home. Share your story ideas with Alexis by emailing alexis.ramanjulu@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook.
