AI and the Future of Warfare

Long but very interesting interview with US defense official Michael Horowitz and Shashank Joshi, who is The Economist's defense reporter, about military AI. Here is Joshi on the range of possible applications:

We could split the applications of that general-purpose technology up a million different ways. The way I have tended to do it in my head is thinking about insight, autonomy, and decision support.

Insight is the intelligence application. Can you churn your way through satellite images? Can you use AI to spot all the Russian tanks?

Autonomy is, can you navigate from A to B? Can this platform do something itself with less or no human supervision or intervention? The paradigmatic case today, which is highly impactful, is terminal guidance using AI object recognition to circumvent electronic warfare in Ukraine.

The third interesting thing is decision support. This includes things that nobody really understands in the normal world, like command and control. It’s the ability of AI to organize, coordinate, and synchronize the business of warfare, whether that’s a kind of sensor-shooter network at the tactical level for a company or a battalion, or whether it’s a full theater-scale system of the kind that European Command, 18th Corps, and EUCOM has been assisting Ukraine with for the last three years.

This involves looking across the battlescape, fusing Russian phone records, overhead, radio frequency, satellite, IM satellite returns, synthetic aperture radar images, and all kinds of other things into a coherent picture that’s then used to guide commanders to act more quickly and effectively than the other side. That’s difficult to define. But if we’re talking about transformative applications, that is really where we need to be looking carefully.

Here is Horowitz on drone swarms:

If the question is “Where are the swarms we were promised?” and what we end up with is a world where one person is overseeing maybe 50 strike weapons that are autonomously piloting the last two kilometers toward a target, there may be actually military reasons why we don’t want them to communicate with each other. If they communicated with each other, that would be a signal that could be hacked or jammed, which then gets you back into the EW issue that you’re trying to avoid.

So maybe drone swarms as they exist now are not militarily relevant.