Vice President JD Vance used the most high-profile commencement address of his year — delivered Thursday to more than 900 graduating cadets at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs — to issue a pointed warning about the growing role of artificial intelligence in modern warfare: technology must never be allowed to replace the moral judgment of human war fighters. The remarks came as the Pentagon is simultaneously executing one of its most aggressive AI integration campaigns in history, creating a sharp and deliberate tension at the heart of Vance’s message.
The Class of 2026 graduation marked the Academy’s 68th commencement ceremony, where more than 900 cadets commissioned as officers in the United States Air Force and United States Space Force. Vance, himself a Marine Corps veteran, was the sole commencement speaker on his schedule this year, and he made clear that the weight of the moment was not lost on him. “This is the only commencement speech that I’m giving this year,” he told the assembled graduates, their families, and senior military leadership gathered at Falcon Stadium.
Vance opened his remarks on artificial intelligence by acknowledging that the subject has become a lightning rod at graduation ceremonies across the country. He noted that corporate leaders who bring up AI at commencements are frequently met with boos from their audiences — before quipping that the graduates before him had no such option. “You can’t boo me,” he said. “I’m the Vice President of the United States.” But beyond the humor, Vance said he understands why the public is uneasy. “Your fellow Americans are understandably worried about AI — about how it will affect the labor market, how it will distribute resources, and how it has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another, our social lives,” he said. “But the thing I worry about most with AI is how it will change warfare.”
The vice president then invoked a recent papal document as grounding for his argument. Vance endorsed Pope Leo XIV’s message warning against outsourcing moral decisions to technology, and said he wanted to apply that principle directly and specifically to the new officers before him. “Pope Leo the 14th in a recent document encouraged us as human beings not to outsource the most important moral decisions to digital technology,” Vance said. “And I want to endorse that sentiment and make it more specific to each and every one of you.”
The core of Vance’s argument rested on what he described as a uniquely American approach to warfare — one defined not only by lethality, but by conscience. “One of the things that makes Americans unique, that makes you as war fighters unique, is that we wage war justly,” he said. “You are the ones who execute. You are the ones who lead on the battlefield. You are the ones who ensure that our lethality in war, which is amazing and necessary, also coexists with our heart and with our conscience.” That burden, he said, could not be transferred to a machine. “If the warfare of the future is to live up to the moral values of our ancestors, decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines.”
Vance’s warning arrives at a moment when the very department these graduates are joining is moving rapidly in the opposite technological direction. In a January 2026 memorandum, the Department of War directed the military to accelerate America’s military AI dominance by becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force across all components, outlining a strategy that includes an “Agent Network” program for AI-enabled battle management and decision support, described as spanning from campaign planning to kill chain execution. The memo declared that “2026 will be the year we emphatically raise the bar for Military AI Dominance.”
The U.S. Air Force’s own doctrine, updated in April 2025, acknowledged that both China and Russia are aggressively wagering on AI for military applications — with China accelerating efforts to become an “intelligentized” force optimized by human-machine teaming, and Russia integrating AI into unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous ground vehicles, and electronic warfare systems. The Air Force doctrine document noted that the service’s approach would center on human-machine teaming, a framework that mirrors — and complicates — exactly the balance Vance was urging graduates to protect.
Vance told the graduates they were entering an entirely new era of warfare in which technologies powered by artificial intelligence are “evolving far faster than military institutions have historically been accustomed to.” He called on them to approach that reality with the same adaptability and innovation the Academy had spent four years developing in them — but always with human will at the center of decision-making. “As AI transforms the battlefield, in some ways positively, in some ways not, I ask that you be jealous and selfish about your role as the decision maker in warfare,” he said. “Use technology to make you better, but never submit to it. You are the masters of warfare, and both your minds but also your hearts are the opposite of artificial.”
The vice president also gave graduates a concrete illustration of the kind of operational environment they are entering — one already shaped by new technologies and high-stakes real-world missions. He described a mission by the 494th Fighter Squadron in which two pilots were downed in Iran. Rescue aircraft flew into denied airspace, helicopters were assembled on-site, and airmen retrieved a downed pilot from behind enemy lines. “Your Air Force went in there and did the impossible,” Vance said, calling it one of the most daring things he had ever witnessed. The operation, he noted, only succeeded because planners moved rapidly from one contingency plan to the next. “Sometimes plan A doesn’t always work out. Sometimes plan B doesn’t always work out,” he said. “But the reason why the Air Force and the Space Force are so powerful is because they go from plan A to plan B to plan C and they execute time and time again.”
That adaptability, Vance argued, is precisely what makes human judgment irreplaceable — and precisely what no algorithm can replicate under pressure. Defense Department research has noted that AI requires a fundamental shift in military organizational structure and culture that cannot be implemented through technology alone, and that militaries will ultimately have to rethink how they function as autonomous systems become more effective and lethal. Vance’s message was, in essence, a preemptive answer to that reckoning: the humans must stay in charge.
Vance also took time to connect the graduates’ commissioning to the broader technological transformation now underway in the Air Force and Space Force. He pointed to the administration’s push forward on the F-47 aircraft and the Golden Dome missile defense system as examples of the civilian leadership fulfilling its end of the bargain with the military. He told the graduates that the nation is asking extraordinary things of them precisely because it believes in them — and that their generation is inheriting a mission that is no longer theoretical. “One of the defining facts for this particular class is that nobody can tell you the skills that you learned over the last four years will remain theoretical,” he said. “They will become very practical and very real, very soon.”
The class of 2026 was recognized at the ceremony as having the highest average GPA of any graduating class in 20 years, along with the highest physical fitness scores in more than a decade. Five cadets were unable to attend the ceremony because they were competing in the NCAA Track and Field Championships. The ceremony concluded with a flyover by the Air Force Thunderbirds.
In closing, Vance returned to the weight of the responsibility now resting on the new officers — framing it not as a burden to fear, but as a testament to the trust the country places in them. “Your nation gives you incredible responsibility because we believe in you,” he said. The charge he left them with was clear: master the machines, but never surrender to them. “Use technology to make you better, but never submit to it. You are the masters of warfare, and both your minds but also your hearts are the opposite of artificial.”
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