The U.S. military is leveraging artificial intelligence to identify personnel with the mental and physical toughness to become a Marine Raider.

David Spirk, the chief data officer with U.S. Special Operations Command, recently spoke with Military.com about “exciting” new A.I. experiments designed to find Marines with exemplary mettle.

Algorithms will glean vast amounts of information for Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, which may revolutionize the search for America’s elite warriors.

“It’s really going to be our first experiment. It’s exciting,” Mr. Spirk, also a Marine veteran, told reporter Hope Hodge Seck for an interview published Thursday.

Mr. Spirk was on hand at a Special Operations Policy Forum hosted by the New America think tank.

“We want the machine to do the regression backward for us, and so it might pick up something extremely unique, [such as the made-up example] that we didn’t realize every Marine Raider is from Arkansas,” he said. “What it would allow us to do is allow the machine to say, this is actually the series of things, that, when they come together, make this Marine Raider who made it all the way through successful.”

Officials want to abandon the cumbersome and costly alternative of “showing up at a gym with a bunch of pamphlets and saying, ‘Who wants to be a Raider today,’ ” he said.

The A.I., machine-learning and automation expert added that U.S. Army Special Operations Command is conducting similar experiments.

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