‘Let the AI do it’: Former Air Force secretary pits machine against human operators

As the U.S. Air Force moves to increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence into operations, the force needs to train human operators effectively to use the tools. But the technology might make a better fighter than the human at times, a former Air Force secretary said.

At a Thursday roundtable discussion hosted by Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Frank Kendall, the 26th Secretary of the Air Force, claimed there are some instances when machines can outperform human operators, since the latter aren’t “perfect.”

“When you get to the point where the AI is doing a better job of deciding who to kill than the person, let the AI do it,” Kendall said during the roundtable. “But you got to be confident of that.”

To ensure that AI capabilities aren’t outpacing the human operator in the loop, the service needs to verify and test that the tool has been designed to do exactly what it’s meant to, with specific rules it should perform with, Kendall said.

The former secretary — who served in the role from 2021 to 2025 during former President Joe Biden’s administration — highlighted that the service needs to train the human operator to use the tool in the way it was intended and allow them to have many opportunities for practice.

Intensive simulation can be used to monitor the human operators during continuous machine learning to evaluate how well they are using the tools, what decisions are being made and if the interventions made are necessary or not, he said.

For example, Kendall said that in an Army range when a rifleman is going against pop-up targets and deciding whether to shoot, “It is easy to imagine AI shall be perfect at that.”

“Operators are not perfect, and so I think when you get to that, let the AI do it,” he said.

Kendall said AI would never be afraid nor tired, unlike a human operator. The machine, he added, needs to start out better than the human, even when the human is at their best.

“When you send armed people out to do something, you run some risk because of human emotions and so forth,” he said.

The former secretary used the example of a cop pulling over a citizen. He said there’s an “awful lot” of people in America that would rather be stopped by a robot than a cop in traffic because you can program the robot to not shoot at all — or only if a certain event happens.

Kendall highlighted that versions of AI have been used in the military for years. He relayed an experience during which he boarded an F-16 fighter jet modified with AI. With the touch of a button, the aircraft flew itself, he said.

The AI controlling the F-16 he flew in was as good as the experienced pilot in another aircraft, he insisted. As both pilots are pulling RGs and losing altitude as a result, their 10,000 foot-floor would be hit.

“As soon as we hit the floor, the AI would pop the airplane back up and go back into the maneuver,” Kendall said. “It did it really well.”

“My lesson from that, if you will, was this is already as good as our best pilots at this at least, and if the other pilot is inexperienced or tired or whatever, the AI’s gonna win,” Kendall concluded.