MAY 20, 2026 – During a panel today on the lethality of artificial intelligence as it relates to special operations forces, Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering and War Department chief technology officer, said that AI use across the department is up by roughly 1,420,000 users, a 1,775% increase over the past calendar year.
The panel was part of Day 2 of the Special Operations Forces Week 2026 convention, a three-day annual event held in Tampa, Florida.
“You can see that every month, we have a new sort of amazing advancement in AI, and how we translate that down to the Department of War and to the warfighter is a fairly new concept,” Michael said.
He noted that before he took the job nearly a year ago, the department had an average of about 80,000 AI-users across its more than 3 million personnel. Today, it has about 1.5 million users out of the 3 million.
Michael said the War Department uses AI across three layered dimensions: the enterprise level, the intelligence level and the warfighting level, which he described as the most important of the three.
“[We’re] embedding [AI] into our systems, so that warfighters can use it to be more precise, to be faster, to make better decisions and [to] bring combat power to the battlefield in a way that shortens time of any conflict, protects our warfighters to the maximum extent possible … and, frankly be as lethal as possible — which is what our warfighters want to do,” Michael said.
As an example of how SOF, and the War Department as a whole, are using autonomous AI, Michael spoke about the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program, which has allocated $1.1 billion for the purchase of 200,000 small, lethal drones by 2027.
He said the department is working to make drone acquisition more competitive among multiple industry companies. In the past, he noted, there were only a handful of companies authorized to sell drones to DOW, and they rarely had to spend money on upgrading their products.
“So, we kind of blew all that up, and the idea [now] is to create a scenario where we could use this money, take all the vendors out there [and] give them a shot [at] becoming one of the [DOW’s] prime vendors of drone and counter-drone capabilities,” Michael explained.
With AI advancing at such a rapid pace within the War Department, Michael was asked how it is dealing with competition from the private sector to recruit top-tier talent. He said while DOW may not be able to match the private sector dollar for dollar so far as financial compensation is concerned, the department is working to appeal to the next generation’s sense of patriotism.
“What we’re trying to do is create sort of a … more patriotic point of view, or option, for kids coming out of college or out of grad school to come do something for their country — with their country — and then have that be valuable, so that [if] they go back to a private sector later, they don’t feel like they’ve lost time or energy,” Michael explained.
He added that several hundred recent graduates have already been hired, and he hopes to hire several hundred more before the end of the calendar year, describing it as pretty exciting.
Also on the panel were Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of a prominent defense acquisition software company, and Peter Tague, managing partner at a growth-stage venture capital firm. Both co-panelists shared Michael’s sentiment regarding appealing to a sense of patriotism among the labor pool.
“It is now cool again to care about your country and to work on things related to this mission. We have had no trouble attracting talent, and frankly, the mission angle has been a cherry on the top,” Tague said of his company’s involvement with the War Department.
Dougherty agreed, saying, “It has been, I think, valuable for us — certainly culturally — … to say that the mission comes first,” she said, adding that new employees know that when they arrive at orientation.
“We are here to build a business that serves the warfighter. If that is not a mission you are interested in supporting, call somebody else,” she said.
As the panel prepared to wrap, each guest was asked to leave a brief message to the SOF operators and industry personnel in the panel audience and beyond.
“Special operations forces are really the sort of heart and soul of what we do, and they do some incredible stuff,” Michael said.
“Just having been in the room in the last year and been able to witness some of this and read about it, has been extraordinary; and I hope we can — we at the department can — serve you better than we have in the past, and that’s [what] I wake up every day thinking about,” he added.
By Matthew Olay
Pentagon News