A “journey to trust” for AI: Civil–military relations and epistemic authority in American socio-technical imaginaries of artificial intelligence

The adoption of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDT) by the militaries of liberal democratic states has the potential to alter civil–military relations. In Samuel Huntington’s influential discussion, militaries in liberal democracies should be apolitical institutions. Military affairs are delimited as a functional sphere of political order. As experts in this sphere, military professionals are accorded epistemic trust, which sits at the foundation of their authority. This article will analyze how this imaginary of civil–military relations held by the American Department of Defense (DoD) is impacted by the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It finds that DoD imaginaries are focused on producing epistemic trust in AI as an expert in its own right. Huntington’s view of the military sphere as apolitical will not be disrupted by AI. Establishing trust in non-human experts may, however, disrupt the authority of human military professionals in the production of military knowledge.