Artificial intelligence is accelerating U.S. special operations while making it harder for military and civilian leaders to determine which digital information can be trusted, Adm. Frank Bradley, the U.S. Special Operations Command leader, said at a symposium in Honolulu. He warned that the resulting loss of confidence could affect military operations and the United States’ ability to generate unity of effort against an adversarial attack. Defense One reported his remarks from the Global SOF Foundation’s Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium.
Bradley said faster intelligence gathering and analysis enabled by AI already allows special operators to conduct missions that would have been impossible several years ago. At the same time, he said malign actors using simple AI tools are undermining leaders’ confidence in digital information and increasing uncertainty about what is true.
Bradley described the problem through an example involving AI-generated deepfake content. “I have been plagued by my own staff hijinks on the use of artificial intelligence,” he said. “If you weren’t part of the inside crew, you probably couldn’t tell the difference because of how capable AI is at creating deepfake content.”
He said increasingly persuasive AI-enabled content is quietly shaping perceptions of events and has become a dominant feature of a new information battleground. The ability to expose hostile behavior accurately and early, he said, can provide a critical advantage. “Information advantage leads to decision advantage,” Bradley said.
A U.S. military official who works in counterintelligence and foreign-influence analysis said AI has made deception scalable. The official described a threat that includes synthetic voices, cloned faces and entire fake identities, in addition to familiar cyber tactics such as phishing. The official said such developments could undermine confidence in intelligence gathering and make every source of information increasingly suspect.
The report described Russian and Chinese efforts to deceive Western audiences for tactical gain and to influence public sentiment as examples of influence operations that can benefit from AI tools. It also cited Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the junta controlling Burkina Faso, as an example of a smaller-scale ruler using AI tools to influence a population.
A former State Department intelligence official separately described the broader information environment as less transparent than it had been in the past. The official pointed to reduced visibility into content moderation and disinformation on social-media platforms. The official also said changes under the Trump administration had affected tools used to watch and detect foreign influence, including efforts associated with the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and USAID.
According to that official, the changes could make analysts and intelligence officers less likely to raise concerns about foreign influence activity. The official characterized the current situation as one in which the United States is “largely flying blind.”
Bradley also discussed the benefits of AI-supported intelligence. He pointed to the April rescue of a downed F-15 pilot behind enemy lines, which he said was made possible by tightly synchronized intelligence, cyber-enabled support and coordination among multiple elements. Such operations require a shared intelligence picture that can change as quickly as conditions on the ground, he said.
An intelligence official described systems that combine dozens or thousands of data sources into an operator-level picture that updates every 15 minutes. The official said virtual imagery and related capabilities, once limited largely to analysts and specialists, are now being made available more broadly.
Bradley said the government is working to protect those data sets and systems against attacks by agentic AI. The challenge, he said, includes both finding new intelligence streams and ensuring that the information and systems supporting them remain secure and trustworthy as adversaries develop new ways to access and alter data.