Paul Scharre

Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Former US Army Ranger who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, then led the Pentagon working group that drafted the Department of Defense’s 2012 directive on autonomous weapons. His book Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (2018) is the field’s most cited primer; Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2023) follows the US-China AI competition.

Bridges policy and technology in a way few writers manage; his framing of “human judgment” versus “human in the loop” has shaped how Western militaries publicly describe their own AI doctrines.