AI sped up US forces’ airfield planning after Spain said no to helping in Iran war

Summary

Europe AI sped up US forces’ airfield planning after Spain said no to helping in Iran war Stars and Stripes July 23, 2026 When Spain blocked its airspace and bases to U.S. aircraft supporting attacks on Iran this spring, planners turned to artificial intelligence to seek alternate airfields. That on-the-fly approach to finding a contingency plan in the heat of battle represented an early use of technological tools that officials say are transforming military logistics. AI helps them do in a matter of minutes what might have previously taken days, U.S. Transportation Command officials told Stars and Stripes this week. In turn, that assist accelerates TRANSCOM’s decision-making. Contested access is one of the most important factors the command plans for, officials said. Missile and drone strikes on U.S. military facilities throughout the Middle East over the past several months have killed several U.S. troops and forced mass evacuations. They offer a glimpse of the sort of conflict that has spurred wholesale transformation of waging war across the Defense Department. The command’s first operational use of the AI agents came shortly after Spain’s decision March 2 to block access three days into the U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran, known as Operation Epic Fury, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported. The move led to over a dozen KC-135 tankers departing military airfields in the country’s south, Naval Air Station Rota and Moron Air Base, which are jointly run with the U.S. and serve as key logistics hubs. “Within a very short time period of hearing that, we here at TRANSCOM got into our AI toolset and said, ‘If I had to move tankers to these various locations, how much capacity do I have,’” said Ryan Samuelson, the chief data and AI officer for the joint command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. TRANSCOM officials declined to discuss the specific options or rankings the planners got back, but some media outlets reported that tankers were tracked heading to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and elsewhere. The wherewithal to rapidly change course could prove vital in conflicts in which adversaries have greater capabilities to deny access than did the insurgents and militants that U.S. forces have battled for much of the past two decades. For years, the military services have been revamping for potential large-scale combat operations requiring a lighter footprint, dispersed forces and greater agility. The Marine Corps shed its heavy tanks and the Air Force is bringing mothballed World War II airfields back to life. But the U.S. has also had to navigate access constraints among allies during the Iran war. Spain isn’t the only NATO member country that balked at helping the American war effort in Iran. In late March, Italy denied the use of NAS Sigonella in Sicily as a stopover for warplanes taking part in the conflict, saying the use fell outside existing U.S.-Italy agreements and the Americans had not sought permission until the planes were airborne. As part of the military’s evolution toward greater maneuverability, the command has been exploring how it can leverage its resources and AI tools to position and sustain combat forces. It’s using the Defense Department’s War Data Platform and Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which helped planners collect and combine data to predict the Air Force and other services’ battlefield needs during Epic Fury, sometimes weeks ahead of time. That would allow planning and positioning of the materiel to take place before a request came in, which Samuelson told the magazine is a fundamental change from how the command operated just a few years ago. Before, planners did “a whole lot of work, making phone calls and waiting for a request to come in, which would then have to be validated,” said Samuelson, a retired Air Force brigadier general. The command has also developed a dashboard for its air component, Air Mobility Command, that alerts leaders when aircraft mission-capable rates drop by more than 5%. AI can also help planners predict aircraft maintenance needs three weeks out. “The tools that we have brought online in the last two years, particularly in AI machine learning, both predictive and prescriptive analytic models that we’re using, are game changers for the Air Force that I grew up in for 28 years,” Samuelson said. While AI tools are being used daily for exercises and real-world operations, the command told Stars and Stripes that “the human element and institutional knowledge remain integral to decision-making.” TRANSCOM commander Gen. Randall Reed seemed to echo that when speaking with Air & Space Forces Magazine about how artificial intelligence is assisting in its mission. “In some cases, it provides us options; in some cases, it becomes a little bit predictive,” Reed said “And in other cases, it validates years of experience, modeling, experimentation and exercises.”