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Artificial Intelligence and U.S. Military Cadets' Attitudes About Future War
The first experimental evidence of how much cadets trust AI-enabled military technology, testing the common assumption that junior personnel are trusting "digital natives".
By Paul Lushenko and Robert Sparrow ·
Research often assumes that junior military personnel will trust AI in future wars, and trust it more readily than senior officers do.
In this article, published in Armed Forces & Society, Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Paul Lushenko tests the claim that cadets are digital natives who bring high levels of trust to partnering with AI. The study uses an original survey experiment among a representative sample of cadets assigned to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps programme in the United States.
Cadets do turn out to be more trusting of AI-enhanced military technologies than senior officers. Their trust, though, is shaped by a more conservative understanding of the appropriate use and oversight of AI than the digital-native framing would predict.
The article provides the first experimental evidence of cadets' trust in AI, with implications for future research, for policy, and for military modernisation.