What the Military Can Teach Us About Education’s (Coming) Upheaval
Education in an era of perpetual turbulence
Most people still think AI is a clever assistant. Some see it as a productivity booster. A mere “tool.” A few even treat it as a passing fad.
They are wrong.
AI is rapidly becoming the cognitive layer of human society—the invisible infrastructure through which we think, learn, decide, and create. And the institutions built on older models of cognition—schools, universities, governments, militaries—are already starting to buckle under the weight of this shift.
The military offers the clearest preview of what’s coming.
From Tanks to Drones: The End of Institutional Stability
As Jonathan Boyle argues, we’re entering a world where the smallest, cheapest tools can destabilize the most expensive, entrenched systems. A few hundred dollars spent on a drone can destroy a multimillion-dollar tank. The Global Peace Index now speaks openly of “forever wars”—conflicts that never resolve into clear victories or stable peace because asymmetric technologies multiply unpredictability faster than institutions can respond.
This is what the military now faces:
Cheap, adaptive tools eroding expensive hierarchies and legacy systems.
Asymmetric actors changing the balance of power overnight.
Instability as the new baseline—a world of rolling disruptions rather than lasting resolutions.
Military planners now realize the challenge isn’t how to integrate drones—or any single AI-enabled tool—into the old logic of war. It’s how to redesign the entire architecture of warfare for a world where AI transforms intelligence, targeting, logistics, decision-making, and even strategy itself. The goal is no longer updating tactics; it’s rethinking what conflict looks like when speed, autonomy, and adaptive technologies redefine every assumption about power, defense, and control.
And here’s the thing: Education faces its own version of this story.
Generative AI Is the “Cheap Drone” of Education
Generative AI collapses barriers to entry in the same way drones did for warfare:
A free AI tool can bypass years of carefully designed curricula, standardized tests, and traditional grading systems.
It can also create entire learning systems in seconds—curricula, assessments, feedback loops—fully adapted to each learner’s pace, interests, and gaps. What institutions have promised for decades, AI can deliver instantly.
Students can now produce essays, problem sets, even research projects in moments—activities entire academic infrastructures were built to control.
Teachers and administrators scramble to adapt, layering piecemeal policies over systems being outpaced by technology moving at exponential speed.
This isn’t just disruption. It’s outcompetition. The old model isn’t being reformed; it’s being bypassed.
And just as the military isn’t simply figuring out how to integrate drones into old battle plans, educators can’t simply tack AI tools onto existing systems. The question isn’t how to “add AI” to the classroom; it’s how to redesign the entire architecture of learning when knowledge delivery, assessment, and even intellectual labor itself can be done faster, cheaper, and often better by machines.
From Control to Continual Adaptation
The military once aimed to eliminate threats, to neutralize disruptions, to return to stability. That logic doesn’t work in modern conflicts shaped by cheap, adaptive tools; instability isn’t a temporary phase—it’s the new environment.
Education must learn this lesson fast.
For decades, schools aimed for control:
Standardized curricula.
Predictable assessments.
Hierarchies of knowledge and authority.
Generative AI makes that impossible. Like the military, education now operates in what Boyle calls a world of dynamic equilibria—states of ongoing fluctuation rather than permanent order.
And AI accelerates this instability because it doesn’t just disrupt old systems; it creates alternatives faster than institutions can respond, drawing students, parents, and employers toward tools that feel more relevant, immediate, and personalized than anything traditional education can offer.
Interactionalism: A Model for Learning in Flux
This is where the Gamby et al idea of interactionalism points the way forward. Instead of clinging to stability, education should cultivate:
Dialogical Learning
AI tools invite constant back-and-forth. Students question, critique, refine, and rethink rather than passively consume information.Interactive Skill-Building
With AI handling routine work, human learning shifts to judgment, ethics, creativity, and collaboration—the skills turbulence demands.Meta-Human Capacities
Learners need metacognition (thinking about thinking), emotional regulation, and ethical reasoning—so they can navigate systems in constant flux rather than wait for stability that never comes.
Curricula become dynamic, co-created, adaptive, always in motion. Assessments focus on process over product: not just what students know, but how they think, how they work with AI, how they adapt when the ground shifts again.
The Deeper Mission: Education in an Age Without Closure
If military strategists now accept forever wars as the price of cheap, destabilizing technologies, educators must accept forever redesign as the price of generative AI.
There is no “post-AI” equilibrium coming to schools or universities.
No curriculum or assessment system will be final.
No single policy will “solve” AI in education.
Because the disruption isn’t just about speed. It’s about machines generating viable alternatives at a pace no institution can match.
The task is not to restore stability but to foster resilience, ethics, creativity, and relationality amid ongoing change—to prepare students for lives where learning itself never stops shifting under their feet.
As Boyle puts it, we must view fluctuations not as failures but as a stable rhythm of continual adaptation—a world where learning institutions don’t fight turbulence but learn to move with it.
Because when AI becomes the cognitive layer, the real risk isn’t losing control.
It’s failing to evolve when everything else already has.
Six Lessons Education Must Learn from Military Disruption in the Age of AI
When cheap drones began overturning modern battlefields, military planners realized the problem wasn’t how to add drones to old systems. It was how to redesign all of warfare for a world where speed, autonomy, and adaptive technologies redefine every assumption about power, control, and risk.
Generative AI is creating the same existential moment for education. Schools and universities face a world where a free AI tool can:
Write an essay in seconds.
Generate a personalized curriculum for any learner.
Automate grading, feedback, and content delivery.
Outcompete legacy systems designed for scarcity and control.
Here are six lessons education must learn—fast—from how militaries are responding to disruption:
1. Stop Thinking About “Integration” and Start Thinking About Total Redesign
Military parallel: The challenge isn’t bolting drones onto old doctrines; it’s rewriting doctrine itself.
Education takeaway: AI isn’t a teaching assistant. It’s a force requiring new curricula, new assessments, and entirely new roles for teachers and institutions. The question isn’t Where does AI fit? but What does learning even mean now?
2. Accept Permanent Turbulence as the New Normal
Military parallel: Modern conflicts no longer resolve into clear victories; they become “forever wars.”
Education takeaway: Schools won’t reach a “post-AI” equilibrium. Policy, assessment, and curriculum will live in rolling cycles of adoption, backlash, redesign, and renegotiation. Institutions must learn to thrive in dynamic equilibria instead of chasing stability that will never return.