Will Roper plays video games like the future of the country depends on it, because, well, it kind of does.

As ‎director of the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, Roper spends his days predicting how war will work in the not-so-distant future, and developing the technological capabilities that will enable the American military to lead the way. Because Silicon Valley’s companies evolve so much faster than the bureaucracies of Washington can, Roper and the SCO draw inspiration from the private sector picking apart the genius of Pokémon Go.

“I think they’ve solved one of the toughest challenges for warfare,” Roper said of the app in a conversation with WIRED's Nick Thompson at South by Southwest Monday. “How do you take amazingly complex information and make it so integrated with the person interacting with it?”

Roper envisions a day when soldiers will be able to drop a digital marker on the battlefield that future deployments and faraway units could also see, similar to how Pokémon Go enables millions of strangers to spot the same Jigglypuff in the middle of Times Square. Or perhaps augmented-reality advances could help soldiers access a global map of the surrounding area in the lower corner of their field of view, familiar to any fan of first-person shooters like Call of Duty.

For Roper, it’s all part of puzzling out the delicate interplay between man and machine in the future of war. Already, the Obama administration’s escalation of drone strikes in the Middle East has created something of a soul-searching moment for Americans who oppose sending troops overseas, but who shudder at the mass casualties that drone fighting leaves in its wake. Roper's objective? Take advantage of the best that technology has to offer, while preserving the American military’s moral core.

“I’m confident we don’t want to delegate everything to the machine,” Roper said.

Yet the SCO increasingly finds ways to delegate tasks to technology—including drones. Using largely commercially available technology, it developed autonomous drone swarms comprising more than 100 micro-UAVs. If attackers shoot one down, the other drones know it, and work together to cover the blind spot left behind. This type of technology, Roper says, can help fighter pilots with tasks like low-level surveillance, which they have previously been unable to do. Roper sees humans here as the quarterbacks setting up the play, while the rest of the team—the machines—carry it out.

Even as Roper and his team forge ahead with these tools, though, they simultaneously work to prevent adversaries like ISIS from turning them on the US. That means focusing more on the software that runs these tools than the hardware itself. "We need to do a better job in the Defense Department of not over-designing things so that we can't lose them," he says. Of course, as the recent Wikileaks dump of Central Intelligence Agency spy tools demonstrates, the country's software protection capabilities are hardly foolproof.

'We don't want to delegate everything to the machine.' Will Roper, Pentagon Strategic Capabilities Office

For any of this to work, Roper knows the military needs to work side-by-side with the private sector—whether that means learning from UPS’s logistics expertise or adopting the best of machine learning capabilities being developed at companies like Google and Facebook. First, though, the government desperately needs to win back the trust of the very companies that its intelligence agencies have been sneakily trying to game. Then, it needs to try like hell not to screw it up again. He's also not alone in trying to solidify those partnerships; the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board has sought insight from Silicon Valley since 2015.

"Once we have those bridges built, we’re going to have to keep them strong and treat them as a strategic resource," Roper said. "They’re not worth burning for small gains, given the companies we'll be learning from are truly changing the world."

Yes, even the folks behind Pokémon Go.