Stanley McChrystal

Retired US Army four-star general. Commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008, then commanded all US and ISAF forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. At JSOC he rebuilt the targeting cycle — find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, disseminate — around shared, near-real-time intelligence fusion, the model later canonised in his book Team of Teams (2015). The doctrine became the template for how Special Operations Forces partner with commercial software firms today.

His operational use of Palantir-style data fusion at JSOC is the proximate origin of how the US defence establishment thinks about AI in war: a faster picture of the battlespace from which a human still decides.