MONTGOMERY, Ala. – As part of Maxwell Air Force Base’s Air Force Doctrine 2035 war game, academics, industry representatives and military leaders gathered Wednesday in downtown Montgomery to discuss military strategy and emerging military technology.
As a whole, AFD35’s goal is “evaluate how emerging technologies may disrupt Air Force doctrine in the coming decade.”
Maj. Gen. Parker Wright, commander of the Curtis E. LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education and deputy commander of Air University, said this war game has been a yearlong effort.
“It’s the culmination of a project where we intentionally look to industry to see where the technology landscape would be in 2035 and then we’re putting those technologies in a battle space and a conflict set in 2035 to see how they’ll play,” Wright said. “It’s an unclassified war game. We’re excited to have industry from all over the country as well as academia and get them in a room and see how that new, advanced emerging technology will play in the future.”
Wednesday’s panel, hosted by the Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce, gathered academic experts to discuss these issues off base. Industry leaders from companies including Google, Open AI, Anduril and Nvidia attended the event.
Anna Buckalew, president and CEO of the chamber, said the city was proud to host the war game. Emphasizing Montgomery’s military history, Buckalew said that “people forget sometimes that this is the center of intellectual thought leadership for the entire U.S. Air Force.”
“Montgomery is a huge military town. I think that does get lost somewhere in the translation because we’re a capital city, but we’re a national defense city,” Buckalew said. “We were named one of America’s greatest defense communities. We’re really proud that we have probably more diverse military missions here in Montgomery than many states altogether, certainly in Alabama.”
The panelists – Trent Hone, Heather Venable, Jack Long and George Dougherty – have all written books about military strategy, theory or innovation. They offered their takes on the future of technologies like artificial intelligence and drones in the military and talked about the challenges the U.S. Department of War may face in implementing them.
Bill DeMarco, a retired Air Force colonel and professor at Air University, moderated the panel and said bringing academia, industry and the military has been “fascinating.”
“Bringing all those people to Montgomery is always interesting,” DeMarco said. “I think Montgomery is a very famous city, but so few people from outside are familiar, and they come here, and they’re always amazed by the hospitality, by the people, by the history…”
The three-day war game ends on Thursday.