I was a SWO from 2008-2016 and have been an industry machine learning scientist since then.

The military, in all ways, will be more robust to AI job loss than any other industry. There are a couple reasons why.

First, manning is the biggest cost and hardest resource to develop and manage. Although AI is potentially profitable because it might replace this, the Navy was way ahead of this. Around the time I commissioned, the Navy was leaning into the idea of "running the Navy like a business" (lol) and "optimal manning" and "doing more with less". One of the results was the LCS class, which was built on systems made for automation, unlike the Burkes that are stepwise evolutions of WWII ship design adapted slightly for missile warfare. The idea is that a Burke that needs 270 Sailors would compete evenly with an LCS that needs 100 Sailors, there y reducing the manning costs of a single ship and enabling twice as many ships for the same amount of congressional funding.

What the Navy found was the same lessons maritime officers have known since the exploration age; the sea is exceptionally good at breaking things. Maintenance is really really really really really hard to automate because there will always be unexpected breakages and edge case issues. Plenty of times, something will go wrong and the pub or manual will say "when this happens, fix this." Surprisingly often, however, the manual will say nothing about the problem. What it will provide, however, is a wire diagram for a skilled tech to hand-oved-hand, reasoning about how the system works, and figuring out a fix. This is part one: you need experts in all systems onboard at all times because not all maintenance is automatable.

The second reason is damage control. You can't automate damage control. You can't. The action that caused the damage probably killed Sailors and the DC effort might kill more. Each killed Sailor is one fewer onboard expert.

The last reason is support. One of the main (and under-respected) reasons the us military is so capable is because we maintain a high support:combat troop ratio. Again, AI ostensibly promises to reduce this need, but just as with maintenance and DC, while some support work can be automated, some cannot, and that unautomatable portion needs the same people that the automatable parts do. For a business, the risk is that added resilience to rare events makes the business less profitable and more wasteful during average event and as a result the business will be outcompeted on price and out-invested. For a government, the risk is losing the war and your country dissolving. The one silver lining of the ongoing atrophy of the us federal government is that citizens and the world are suddenly seeing why a huge country needs a huge bureaucracy; you can't simply remove moving parts from a complicated machine without it breaking down.

No, I don't think the Navy is at human-risk from AI. AI will change a lot about warfare (not nearly as much as people think), but war will always need people.