Death by PowerPoint: The Army Gave AI to the Generals and Left Lower Enlisted Behind

The first time I was taught Battle Drill 2A, the squad attack, my drill sergeant moved rocks and sticks around in the dirt at Fort Benning. The next time, it sounded completely different on a whiteboard at RTAC, the Ranger Training Assessment Course. The time after that, it was a PowerPoint at ROTC with ambiguous snippets of doctrine pasted onto slides. Three schools, three versions of a drill that is supposed to be muscle memory for every soldier in the Army.

That’s what happens when the standard lives in a 598-page PDF and every trainer has to translate it on his own.

The manual was not written for the private

ATP 3-21.8, Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad, is the book. The current edition is 598 pages. It came out in January 2024, and the one it replaced was from April 2016. The Ranger Handbook I carried through Ranger School was the 2017 edition; the new one came out in September 2025.

In 2024, a professor at the Command and General Staff College ran samples of Army doctrine through standard readability tests. The result: you need two to four years of college to read it comfortably. The civilian articles he compared it to, on subjects like quantum physics, needed only a high school education. Now look at who is supposed to read it. Almost 70 percent of the Army is E-5 and below, W-2 and below, or O-3 and below. And according to the Pentagon’s 2024 demographics report, only about one in 10 active-duty enlisted soldiers holds a bachelor’s degree. We write bachelor’s-level manuals for a force that is mostly high school graduates and then act surprised that nobody reads them.

A Military Review article from 2018 did the math: reading all of the Army’s doctrine at 90 minutes a day, six days a week, would take more than two years.

And the pictures don’t help. Open the Ranger Handbook or ATP 3-21.8 to any scheme of maneuver and you get a grainy black-and-white figure with arrows and abbreviations. Forty men moving through a dozen phases, frozen into one flat drawing. For a nineteen-year-old trying to picture the movement, the format doesn’t help.

So the trainer fills the gap. Rocks, a whiteboard, slides. Death by PowerPoint, all the way down, with every instructor’s interpretation baked in. ATP 3-21.8 says battle drills are “performed instinctively” with minimal leader direction. We are teaching instinct by lecture.

The AI went to the top

Meanwhile, the Army went AI-first. The Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform launched in December 2025 and had 1.7 million users by September 2026. A brigade of the 101st Airborne took AI tools to JRTC and got a first-draft brigade operations order 30 minutes after the plans officer talked through the scheme. Two student staff groups at the Command and General Staff College ran nine wargame turns with an AI agent in under three hours; the analog teams beside them finished one or two.

Brigade staffs. Majors at Leavenworth. That’s where the most visible AI successes are. The private learning React to Contact is still reading a PDF on his phone, and the cadet who grew up on YouTube tutorials is watching a slide deck. The youngest soldiers grew up with digital tools, and they’re the ones drowning.

What AI should be doing for the bottom of the Army

This doesn’t need a program of record. It needs the tools we already bought pointed at the people who need them most.

For trainees. Every battle drill animated straight from the manual, so a private can watch React to Contact happen before he walks it. Not instead of the rocks. Before the rocks. He shows up to the sand table knowing what he’s about to see, and the drill sergeant corrects instead of explains.

For cadets. Replace the slide deck with a simulation. Let a cadet run the platoon attack, pause on the phase he doesn’t understand, and see the same drill his drill sergeant taught, drawn the same way. One version. The one in the book.

For junior enlisted. A doctrine assistant a soldier would actually use. Ask it in plain English what the team leader does when the ambush is near, and get the answer from the current edition with the paragraph cited. The Army’s own doctrine writers said in February that they’re using AI to write faster. Now aim it at the reader.

For trainers. Give the instructor a rehearsal tool so the PowerPoint goes away. A drill sergeant, a Ranger instructor and an ROTC cadre who all pull the same animated drill are finally teaching the same standard.

For new lieutenants. A first-draft platoon OPORD from a verbal brief, in five-paragraph format, so the hours go into the rehearsal instead of the formatting.

I know it can be done because I did it, a Guard infantryman and cadet with a laptop and no budget. Over the last few months, I built animated battle drills and patrolling tactics at warfighterforged.com, straight from ATP 3-21.8 and the Ranger Handbook. The patrol base animation moves all 40 men of a platoon through 23 phases. You press play and watch it, instead of decoding it from paragraphs and one flat figure.

Quality checks are not optional

The 101st learned the hard part at JRTC. Over the planning cycle, their AI tools got unit designations wrong, inverted phase lines, and made up control measure names that sounded real but didn’t exist. The section chiefs caught it. That’s the rule: the machine drafts, a human who knows the doctrine checks every line. An animation that gets the bounding element wrong is worse than a grainy figure that gets it right. Every phase, checked against the manual by someone who has run it.

The Marine Corps ordered every Marine to complete a basic AI course by the end of this year. The Army should do the same, then go a step further: put a doctrine-checked, animated version of every battle drill in every trainee’s hand.

AI should shrink the gap between the officers who write the doctrine and the soldiers who have to live it. Right now it’s widening it. The rocks still work. Give junior soldiers and leaders something standardized that works better than the rocks, and give it to them first.

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Sources

Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad, ATP 3-21.8, January 2024, incorporating Change 1, June 2025 (Department of the Army). Official publication.

Ranger Handbook, TC 3-21.76, September 2025 (Department of the Army). Official publication.

Army Writing and the Zombie (Noun) Apocalypse, by Trent Lythgoe (Modern War Institute), March 22, 2024.

2024 Demographics Report: Profile of the Military Community, Table 2.56 (Department of Defense), 2024.

Fixing Army Doctrine: A Network Approach, by J. Tollefson (Military Review), January-February 2018.

GenAI.mil Launch (DefenseScoop), Dec. 9, 2025.

GenAI.mil Attracts About Half a Million ‘Power Users’ as Pentagon Pushes Forward With Frontier Models, by Jon Harper (DefenseScoop), Sept. 23, 2026.

Artificial Staff, Human Command: An AI Integration Experiment, by Lajeunesse, Palazini and Tulskie (Modern War Institute), April 24, 2026.

AI-Enabled Wargaming at CGSC (Small Wars Journal), Jan. 16, 2026.

Army Doctrine Writers Embrace AI to Speed Knowledge to the Force (Army News Service), Feb. 18, 2026.

Marine Corps Mandates Basic AI Training Course for All Troops (DefenseScoop), May 13, 2026.

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James B. is a National Guard infantryman and ROTC cadet who is projected to commission as an officer in 2028. He is a graduate of Ranger School and the Sapper Leader Course and earned his Ranger Tab as a private first class through the Ranger Team Leader Initiative. For The Havok Journal, he writes about Ranger School, junior enlisted service, leadership, and the National Guard and ROTC path to commissioning, drawing primarily from his experience as a young soldier and cadet. He also writes at warfighterforged.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.