SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Information warfare, drone strikes and advanced weapons are becoming more lethal through artificial intelligence and will provide key advantages in a future war with China or other adversaries, the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command said Saturday.

Adm. Sam Paparo, the Hawaii-based commander, described in detail during a defense forum how AI is changing the nature of warfare.

Warfare remains a continuation of policy by other means, but advanced warfare is being enhanced by three trends, with AI providing an overall megatrend.

Information warfare, cognitive warfare — targeting enemy decision-making — and cyber warfare are as significant as the emergence of the printing press in the mid-1400s in changing the international system, the four-star admiral said.

A second new military trend is the increase in assault power from drone warfare highlighted by the use of deadly attack drones in the Ukraine war.

“The commoditization of drone warfare has made assault warfare — one force takes another’s geography and subjugates it and its people — more costly,” Adm. Paparo said during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “Who competes best in this meta domain is who is going to have an advantage.”

Drones vastly boost assault combat from the past ratio of needing three troops to overcome one defender.

“Our traditional ratios of 3 to 1 to assault look like 20 to 1, 100 to 1, and it becomes more costly,” he said. “It doesn’t deny an actor’s desire to do it, but who masters that is who’s going to prevail.”

The last new trend is what Adm. Paparo called “penetrating strike.” New forms of attack will involve drones, stealth weapons, electronic warfare and other advanced arms that can be done at low cost.

The strategy to conduct a “precise, penetrating strike against key vulnerabilities, against key pain points, has become a more salient instrument of affecting political outcomes,” he said.

Artificial intelligence provides the megatrend for all three smaller military advances by combining masses of high-quality data, computing power and special algorithms.

The result will be seen in swarms of attack drones, advanced data analysis for pinpoint targeting and force movement, he said.

At the strategic level, AI power will provide “decision superiority — defined as “who understands best what the nature of the conflict is, who is making the best decisions, who is best able to see, understand, decide, act, learn and assess,” he said.

“It will be our intention in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to put that to the best use in order to prevail on the battlefield,” Adm. Paparo said.

The commander did not mention China specifically, but the topic of a panel of experts and officials appearing with Adm. Paparo was “Deterrence by Design: Advancing AI for Competitive Advantage Over China.”

Adm. Paparo said his forces are working to adopt AI tools for warfighting.

“We’re satisfied with where we are, and we’re working very hard on adoption,” he said.

“I’m confident in my ability to prevail in that conflict, but I’m concerned about the bill that we could potentially pay, and I want to drive that bill down by making sure we continue to invest in the things that are timeless,” he added.

Emil Michael, Pentagon under secretary for research and engineering, said that in addition to an aggressive procurement reform, the Pentagon will soon announce a similar initiative to advance artificial intelligence.

“We are moving out and fast on this,” Mr. Michael said, noting that the Pentagon has launched a “drone dominance” initiative focusing on small and large attack drones.

“What we’ve learned from the Ukraine-Russia war is that the front lines of a conflict over territory are robot of robot now,” he said.

Mr. Michael said the Indo-Pacific Command has been leading the U.S. military in adopting artificial intelligence into its warfighting.

Adm. Paparo also said he is satisfied with the new White House National Security Strategy made public this week calling homeland defense the No. 1 priority for the American military.

“The strategy makes that quite clear,” he said. “And then the strategy makes clear that the priority theater is the Indo Pacific … area of responsibility … making quite clear that that’s where the priority threats are to the security, freedom and prosperity of the United States of America.”

The strategy highlights what the admiral called a strategy of denial defense in confronting China along a line of islands in the western Pacific.

The strategy also calls for being proactive in deterring threats, he said.