Intellectual Frontiers Press Fieldbooks

You Are Not the Warfighter

Why the People Who Fight Should Build What They Fight With, and How AI Makes It Possible

Where AI has made integration cheap, warfighters should integrate the systems they fight with. Industry should be their supply chain.

A unit identifies a need. Years later, after requirements writers, program offices, a prime contractor, its suppliers, and test ranges far from any fight have each done competent work, the system arrives. By then the threat has changed.

Forthcoming. The book is in review; its companion and tools are open now.

The people who know the fight have always had to wait for someone else to build what they fight with. AI now makes integration cheap enough for those people to build more of it themselves.

The prime contractor role grew up because integration was the scarcest, most expensive skill in the chain. Where AI, cheap hardware, and open interfaces make integration cheap, the scarce skill becomes knowing the fight, and the people who know the fight are in uniform.

This fieldbook shows which systems warfighter teams should integrate themselves, which should stay with industry, and what authorities, contracts, safety rules, and people it takes to make the change without breaking what must not break.

The best-trained force in history should integrate its own systems. Industry should be its supply chain.

What you will be able to do

• Sort a portfolio by who should integrate each system, and say plainly where warfighters shouldn’t
• Measure how far a test was from the fight before trusting its result
• Stand up a Warwright team with the people, authority, money, and time it needs
• Buy components, open interfaces, and data rights instead of closed integrated systems
• Keep weapons review, cyber authorization, and safety real without rebuilding the old chain
• Make field-built systems survive the rotation of the people who built them

The premise

A unit identifies a need. Years later, after requirements writers, program offices, a prime contractor, its suppliers, and test ranges far from any fight have each done competent work, the system arrives. By then the threat has changed.