AI cut the UK's war planning cycle from 72 hours to just one, British Army's top general says

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Three Royal Marines open fire from behind cover of a military vehicle.

The British Army's new AI-powered system has shortened war planning cycles at the corps level from 72 hours to just one hour, its Chief of the General Staff, Gen. Roly Walker, said on Tuesday.

"Now, I said last year that ASGARD would help us sense twice as far, decide twice as quick, and strike twice as deep. And I was wrong," said Walker at the Royal United Services Institute's Land Warfare Conference in London.

"A corps planning cycle that once took 72 hours can now take one," he added. "What they're going to do with the other 71 hours, I do not know."

Dubbed a "digital targeting web" by the UK, ASGARD is designed to gather and process battlefield data to help commanders find targets, make decisions, and coordinate attacks. It's one of several efforts by militaries to use AI to manage war zones, such as Palantir's Maven system for the Pentagon and Ukraine's Delta platform.

The UK announced last year that it plans to spend 1 billion pounds, or about $1.3 billion, on developing such systems for its own military.

Walker said ASGARD would allow a corps to attack 10 times as many targets in a single day.

"In fact, they're limited only by the munitions that are available to fire into the sky," he said. "ASGARD is literally a digital juggernaut that is evolving every 8 to 12 weeks."

In the British Army, a corps is at the top of the battlefield command structure and typically oversees logistics, intelligence, strategic strikes, and the deployment of tens of thousands of troops.

That means ASGARD is a headquarters-level platform, used by top commanders who can be away from the actual battlefield. Last month, the UK conducted an exercise that deployed the system from a tube station under Trafalgar Square, which Walker said on Tuesday was managing troops in Estonia.

The makeshift headquarters in the train station was processing 10 terabytes of data, or "nearly three months of non-stop high-definition Netflix," a day, the British Army said.

Government officials and media observe an exercise conducted in a tube station.

"If I ever think this was a moment where we had a conversation about what is our century's 'tank versus horse' moment, I feel it's about this area," Walker said.

The British Army head also said the UK is sending thousands of drones to its units and introducing 50 operational-level electronic warfare systems that were used in Ukraine.

To prepare against Russia, a British corps needs to be "capable of doing what a Ukrainian corps can do today," he added.

"So in the next year, I expect to see much greater numbers of our remote and autonomous systems forward on our eastern flank, ready to strike and act within 30 minutes," Walker said.

Matthew is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau, primarily covering defense and how the war in Ukraine is rapidly changing battle technology and tactics.He joined the team in June 2021, previously focusing on internet crime and labor, examining how these issues impact modern society in Asia, with a particular emphasis on China.In 2024, he won the Singapore Press Club's Young Journalist of the Year Award. His work from 2023 also won a silver award from the North American Travel Journalists Association and accolades from Longreads.Matthew's previous work has been featured in the South China Morning Post, as well as Singaporean news companies TODAY and The Business Times.As a student, Matthew's coverage of migrant workers' nutrition in Singapore during the COVID pandemic won the SOAP Story of the Month award and the Student Category prize in the International Labor Organization's 2021 Global Media Competition on Labour Migration.Selected features: