July 14, 2025
What is Decision Dominance, and why is it necessary in the Age of AI
AI is changing the character of war, and Decision Dominance will be necessary to win on the information and cognitive battlefronts.
AI is changing the character of war.
According to Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command: “We are in the middle of another epochal change, and that is the dawn of the information revolution. Who competes best in this, who adapts better, who is better able to combine data, computing power, [and] AI…shall prevail.”
This new, AI-enabled information revolution means that, in addition to traditional combat power advantages, US forces must be able to dominate on the information and cognitive battlefronts as well. That’s where Decision Dominance comes in.
What is Decision Dominance?
Decision Dominance is the ability to analyze and contextualize vast streams of structured and unstructured data—including sensor data—to make the right decisions across the Kill Chain faster, more accurately, and more effectively than our adversaries.
Doing so successfully will allow US forces to gain, maintain, and exploit the operational initiative, but it’s easier said than done. Achieving Decision Dominance requires:
- Understanding commander’s intent and campaign context
- Fusing sensor data directly into actionable COAs
- Filtering signal from noise, including malicious misinformation
- Factoring in risks and variables (weather, telemetry, unknown targets, etc.)
- Coordinating actions across echelons, domains, and forces-including partners and Allies.
- Processing feedback and providing battle damage assessments
- Updating plans in real-time
And much more. And all of this must be accomplished without overwhelming the cognitive capacities of human decision makers.
Why is Decision Dominance so important?
Decision Dominance isn’t just important—it’s a necessity. Over the past 25 years, as the US has focused on the war on terror, our adversaries have closed the technological capabilities gap.
China today is already out-producing the US with traditional and exquisite weapon systems, and they are rapidly moving into emerging spaces such as autonomous systems (drones). Any Pacific conflict in the next five years will see the US overstretched and pitted against a military peer, where we will be challenged by munitions sufficiency and the tyranny of distance.
Coordinating hundreds of platforms in pulses (waves) to strike thousands of targets across a 100-million square-mile theater in a highly contested battle for information will require Decision Dominance.
How can Decision Dominance be achieved?
Data integration tools alone won’t solve the problem.
What’s required to achieve Decision Dominance is an AI orchestration platform that teaches thousands of reinforced agents how to learn and reason in a coordinated way, even without a constant communications connection. This reduces the risk of human cognitive overload and allows decision makers to choose courses of action that are well informed, well understood, and optimized for success.
That’s why we built Smack: The AI stack for Decision Dominance.
Smack rapidly fuses and analyses multimodal sensor data, enabling commanders to generate pulse cycles in under 5 minutes and updates in under 5 seconds. It does this using a combination of proprietary reinforcement learning models and computer vision.
Our breakthrough technology is an agent-based learning and reasoning core that leverages state-of-the-art, multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradients built specifically for modern warfare. We then put this breakthrough tech to work in two core products:
Omega
Omega is the command-level stack powered by our proprietary deep-RL models. Think of Omega as the mothership. It builds multi-day pulse cycles in minutes and repairs them during execution.
Alpha
Alpha is the edge stack for front line units and platforms. It uses lightweight agents trained by our deep-RL models to execute coordinated decision making and enable feedback at the edge, even in degraded comms environments.
Smack has already been awarded contracts with the Joint Fires Network and the US Marine Corps to develop Omega prototypes that are scheduled to go into production in the fall of 2025.
For a better understanding of how Smack is delivering Decision Dominance to the US DoD, visit:
https://smacktechnologies.com.
