An examination of government documents, private sector contracting records, and the little noticed statements of military commanders suggests that the same artificial intelligence that allowed frictionless decapitation in Iran is now coming to the nuclear arsenal—with potentially world-altering consequences. While much noise has been made about safeguarding the nuclear command from AI, with constant reassurances of “human-in-the-loop” safeguards, a different escalatory threat has fallen by the wayside: left of launch operations.
With the integration of AI into the nuclear command and control infrastructure, escalation may soon begin on the ground, before the launch codes have been entered and the bunkers sealed. This new doctrine is known as “left of launch” and AI is increasingly being integrated into the systems used to predict when a nuclear weapon is being launched, as well as the assets that could be degraded to prevent a first strike.
What Is “left of launch?” The first public use of the term appears to be a 2014 memo between Army and Navy chiefs discussing the need for new technologies for U.S. missile defense. That memo states that “Now is the opportunity to develop a long-term approach that addresses homeland missile defense and regional missile defense priorities—a holistic approach that is more sustainable and cost effective, incorporating ‘left-of-launch’ and other non-kinetic means of defense. The proposed strategy would serve as the capstone for the Department to balance priorities, inform resourcing decisions, and restore our strategic flexibility.”
Five years after the term “left of launch” began cropping up inside the Department of Defense, the Trump administration commissioned and released a review of American “policies, strategies, and capabilities…to counter the expanding missile threats posed by rogue states and revisionist powers.” The report called for an escalatory build-out of new capabilities. Among those was a new framework for advancing the notion that preemptive action is actually just another form of defense.
Grego also pointed out that the report’s interpretation by other nuclear powers, namely Russia and China, will not abide by America’s framing that new satellites and hypersonic ballistic missiles are for defensive capabilities, something Russia quickly made explicit.
In June of 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then America’s top commander in Afghanistan, was forced to resign after a long string of incidents suggested contempt for civilian control of the American military. First, he publicly called for tens of thousands of troops to surge in Afghanistan before a confidential document codifying his opinion leaked to the press, two breaches in protocol that resulted in accusations of subversion of the chain of command. Soon after he and various other commanders and staff were revealed to have disparaged the president andvice presidentv in an article for Rolling Stone. He prepared his resignation the same day it was published.
Rhombus CEO Anshu Roy cites Sun Tzu to summarize his firm’s premise: “Battles are won before they start.” Roy’s firm has won a $200 million dollar contract from the U.S. Air Force for “an artificial intelligence platform for strategic decision making in defense and national security enterprises,” and has been sanctioned by the CCP for his firm’s work on behalf of the Taiwanese military. In 2024, Carrier management wrote that Rhombus Power also tracks North Korean missile launches for an unnamed government client, suggesting its potential for left of launch applications has been in motion now for some time.
In his article, McChrystal acknowledges that “while AI can make the picture clearer, it only makes decision-makers’ choices more complex”—an apparent nod to civilian control of the military. Nonetheless, there is a subtle un-truth to the idea that AI integration into systems used to detect adversaries’ nuclear command and control infrastructure will be a merely passive tool to provide commanders options in the situation room.
But while the generals advising Rhombus about the promise of AI’s use on the battlefield are charging full steam ahead, not every retired general is in alignment. Prior to his retirement, Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan served as director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a Department of Defense component studying the integration of AI onto the battlefield.
His conclusion ultimately found that even small scale errors at the input level of AI systems could “produce disproportionate upstream consequences once multiple AI models are embedded across interconnected platforms and decision-support systems.”
These job offers include a General Dynamics listing for an AI engineer to work at Stratcom to reduce the complexity of command and control through AI and machine learning, and an AI advisor to oversee AI integration into the Tomahawk weapon systems threat mission planning center.
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin posted a listing for a staff AI research engineer based out of STRATcom’s headquarters in Nebraska to work on integrating AI into the nuclear deterrence mission. Taken together, these postings show that AI is being increasingly integrated into both the nuclear command and control infrastructure and into the conventional weapons systems that could be used in a “left of launch” first strike scenario.
In his second term, Donald Trump unveiled his plans for the Golden Dome, a network of space detection satellites, high energy weapons, and ground and sea based interceptor missiles to shield America from missile threats. The program is expected to cost $185 billion, with an initial capability delivered by 2028 and the full system in place in 2035. (Some analysts have put the figure closer to $3.5 trillion.)
Also involved in AI, data processing, and command control systems for the Golden Dome are Palantir, Anduril, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The Space Force General in charge of the Golden Dome, Michael Guetlein, let slip in an interview to the Washington Examiner that “left of launch counterattacks” will also be a core component of the Golden Dome.
Over the past year, members of congress have introduced tepid legislation to curb the integration of AI into weapons systems and the nuclear arsenal. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Secure and Accountable Military AI Act. The bill would essentially mandate something that already exists: a human in the loop for AI targeting and control systems. This will accomplish little more than introduce a new button-pusher into vast and allegedly omniscient AI systems.
As “left of launch” capabilities are streamlined with AI, potential response times for action may decrease. The grace period for escalatory phone calls and meetings also becomes condensed. Both America and its enemies will have access to vast flows of satellite data, social media intelligence, internal communications from hostile actors, and even psychological profiling, all wrapped together into a blaring warning strobe. Maybe this technology really will make us safer, enabling first strike or cyber attacks to prevent and degrade a future launch. But maybe it won’t.
In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove—the most famous on-screen critique of the nuclear arms race—the president asks the mad Dr. Strangelove about the contours of the doomsday machine, an ultimate deterrence mechanism that would bring about the total annihilation of the world. “How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?” He asks. “Mr. President,” Dr Strangelove replies, “it is not only possible, it is essential.” As AI creeps into “left of launch” operations, in addition to every other nook and cranny of the Department of Defense, the logic underpinning this drive to replace human judgment with a tangle of AI algorithms sounds very Strangelovian indeed.
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