Artificial intelligence and human factors: European Defence Agency and humans as defence infrastructure

This text starts from an AI error incident of September 2026 within US Special Operations Command that ‘almost started a war’. It examines the growing significance of ‘Human Factors’ in European defence as artificial intelligence reshapes relations between humans, military institutions and technological systems. Drawing on European Defence Agency programmes and recent work on trustworthy AI, I suggest that AI changes where and how humans enter military systems, embedding them in increasingly complex sociotechnical relations. Human capacities themselves start to acquire an infrastructural quality, as military systems depend increasingly on how these capacities are organized and managed.