In February, Operation Epic Fury, the United States’ war against Iran, revealed that the cloud—the rented stack of data centers, compute, and software services—is a core part of operations, not a back-office IT service. During the campaign, peak daily usage of one Pentagon AI targeting system rose 4,425 percent . Cameron Stanley , the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, summed up the lesson: “My biggest fear is really not the adversary at this point. My biggest fear is, can we keep up?”