Artificial intelligence will not only change the production and life of human beings, but also fundamentally change the winning mechanism and fighting mode of modern wars, and give birth to new fighting means and ideas. Behavior tree will be a good medium for the application of artificial intelligence in the military field. This paper first introduces the basic principle of Behavior Tree (BT), and then elaborates and analyzes the development status of Behavior Tree from the aspects of implementation and design application. Secondly, the characteristics of behavior tree, finite state machine and hierarchical finite state machine are compared from the aspects of hierarchy, maintainability, code coupling, expansibility and reusability. Finally, the development trend of behavior tree combined with machine learning and expert system and its application prospects in interactive software platform, unmanned autonomous systems and combat simulation systems are analyzed.