Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • September 5, 2026 9:21 PM

@ ResearcherZero, ALL,

You ask the not unreasonable questions of,

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blockquote>”The military and intelligence services are looking to AI to improve capabilities. Will these new tools actually fulfill the purposes they are tasked with and will the information that these tools supply be reliable?”

The short answer on my point of view based on what we’ve observed so far of “Current AI LLM and ML Systems” is,

“No and No”.

One set of answers can be seen fairly easily by asking what should be asked by a War Crimes tribunal which is,

“Why did the girls school get obliterated?”

AI was put in the decision process that was once described by John Boyd and known by many as the OODA loop.

Where the OODA 4 stages in turn are,

1, “Observe” Gain situational awareness via all available sources.
2, “Orient” Put (1) observations in context along with all previous knowledge.
3, “Decide” Plan a course of action on the the known (2) Orientation.
4, “Act” Put the (3) Plan into operation with minimum delay.

Important to note is OODA is actually not implicitly a loop, but can be used in a loop when a dynamic situation evolves sufficiently fast. The issue / problem is that using OODA in a loop actually puts constraints on all but the first stage.

The first stage however has it’s own issues not least being the conversion of tangible physical objects in to intangible informational objects. There is always a process “gap” where the authenticity or accuracy can easily be lost or deliberately broken in ways that do not show up to traditional testing.

The reason AI was introduced in OODA can be seen at all stages but primarily because of the assumption it would reduce delay as well as increase processing speed (no they are not the same thing though they might look like it to a casual observer).

Thus the question arises as to,

“Are those assumptions valid?”

And clearly they are not.

One reason is that implicit to OODA is “valid context” from stage 2 “Orient” onwards. If it is wrong or just not taken into the further stages then OODA fails and stage 3 “Decide” provides an incorrect action Plan.

On thing that should be obvious is that the scope or depth and breadth of LLM context is at best very limited…

Worse attempts at “scaling-up” actually produce,

“Diminishing returns on resources utilised.”

Which to many appears counter intuitive (but is actually not).

So the long answer is still “No and No” to your questions.