As military medical personnel prepare to face complex battlefields where wounded troops can wait hours or even days to be evacuated, the Army school charged with preparing special operations medics for future combat is turning to AI to include more lessons in its training.

The Army’s preparations for large-scale combat operations and new injuries, such as those caused by drones, are forcing military medical personnel to hone skills that received less attention during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, instructors at the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center cannot simply extend their already grueling training course, a prime pipeline for new military medics headed to special operations units, to accommodate more material. As it is, it lasts almost nine months.

Therefore, instructors rely on AI to optimize the experience, decide what to teach more or less, and determine where students are struggling.

The first thing the school needs “is a way for students to learn more and learn faster,” Col. Ken Dwyer, the school’s commander, told Business Insider. “We have a limited time with them before we are asked to incorporate them into the force.”

Course instructors face a unique challenge: taking students who typically have no prior medical experience and turning them into highly trained paramedics. Graduates must be able to stop catastrophic bleeding, treat wounds that cannot be controlled with a tourniquet, provide a level of basic care for local civilians and also manage the health needs of potentially hundreds of troops outside the battlefield.

(The school also trains senior medics, in its four-month Special Forces Medical Sergeant Course, where troops develop skills to master a higher degree of clinical care.)

In addition to all those medical skills, students — Army medics who will serve with the Rangers and Green Berets and Navy medics headed to Marine reconnaissance and special operations units — must possess the tactical combat skills expected of special operators, making the school calendar have little wiggle room.

To make the most of that time, course leaders are analyzing student performance data, including how long it takes them to master specific skills and how many repetitions they require, using AI-assisted analytics to determine how they can get the most out of their curriculum.

The goal is not to replace instructors, but to help leaders identify how they can allocate valuable classroom hours to the skills students need most.

Entering that granular information, which requires tedious data entry by leaders, into a calculator “gives us back the idea of ​​’this is where our blind spots are,'” said the course director, who spoke on condition of anonymity for privacy reasons. This data collected over multiple iterations of the intense course can make a big difference in training, he said.

“We can allocate resources and time to put emphasis where students need it and where their areas of weakness are,” he said.

Tourniquet training offers a simple example. The skill was a central part of battlefield medicine during the Global War on Terrorism, so students can arrive with more familiarity or master the application faster than other forms of care, such as tourniquet removal in the field, something Ukraine is demonstrating is necessary for long-term casualty care when evacuation is not an option. These extractions, called conversions, must be followed and scheduled carefully to avoid serious organ damage.

Training could focus more on conversions or other areas of concern for doctors, such as infection and medication management, part of a growing field called long-term casualty care, aimed at keeping wounded troops alive when advanced trauma care is out of reach.

Refining training in such thorough ways allows the curriculum to evolve more quickly, the course director explained. If data shows that students are mastering a skill faster than expected, instructors can reclaim that time and devote it to new priorities determined by the lessons emerging from Ukraine.

“We owe it to them to make sure we’re creating systems” that show instructors “where we need to go,” the chief said. “Those are educational advances that simply would not have been possible three years ago.”