By: Timothy Martin
Edited by: Natalie Cowan
With the increasing presence of AI throughout every facet of life, there is no doubt that it will have a significant impact on the ways in which war is waged for years to come. AI’s integration into military systems is poised to redefine the nature of warfare. In a short amount of time, AI is already reshaping tactical and strategic decision making, accelerating the pace of conflict, and raising critical ethical questions.
The most often cited positive of AI involvement in war is its ability to immensely decrease the time it takes between identifying a target and engaging it. The U.S. Air Force has already put drones in place called Loyal Wingman, which analyze battlefield data at speeds significantly faster than any human could. The U.S. military has also made use of autonomous vessels called Sea Hunters, which are used to autonomously surveil and detect mines, demonstrating how AI can be used across different battlefields. During the Russia-Ukraine war, AI-Enhanced first-person-view (FPV) drones have demonstrated the abilities of new technology by autonomously distracting air defences, identifying threats and planning routes of attack. AI has also been used for increased coordination among drones, with “swarm technology” to coordinate dozens of drones to act as a unified force. The Ukrainian military use this technology to target infrastructure and deplete ammunition stocks. This premature prevalent usage, however, has resulted in issues of officers who do not fully understand AI technology making decisions of how they should be used. This has led to many officers not trusting the technology and following the belief that AI weapons will make great soldiers but poor leaders.
Many of the world’s leading countries are investing heavily in the future of AI technology, the U.S. doing so with its Third Offset Strategy which focuses on developing AI weapons to maintain its military superiority. China is doing the same with its Intelligentized Warfare doctrine which aims to close the gap to the American military capabilities by winning the A.I. arms race. Russia is making active use of AI-enabled drones to try and circumvent the mass losses of soldiers they are facing, with President Vladimir Putin framing AI dominance as one of the primary geopolitical imperatives. Despite the concerns many officers have over AI in strategic positions, it is still being increasingly used for decision-making purposes. The U.S. Department of Defence’s Mosaic Warfare concept and the Joint All-Domain Command Control (JADC2) initiative use AI to synchronise operations across land, and sea as well as in the cyberspace. While there is certainly hope and investment for the future of AI, it is important to recognize the significance for the future of warfare, as AI can be unpredictable and its continued use could lead to the erosion of human oversight, increasingly making war an affair of machine vs machine.
There are significant concerns with AI particularly when it comes to the protection of non-combatants, as autonomous weapons cannot be fully trusted to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. This is reflected in warnings from the Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as they do not believe that systems that autonomously kill weapons are moral or trustworthy. History demonstrates the dangers of relying on automated decision-making, as seen with the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident where the Soviet missile warning system suggested there were nukes launched at Russia by the U.S. and had the report been believed nuclear war would have begun. AI systems also have significant issues with dynamic situations that require contextual judgment.
With the unavoidable increase in AI across the military, there are three areas in which we will likely see the largest commitments. The first is using AI to allow autonomous weapons across all fields of battle (land, sea, and sky) to interact without human interaction. Second is working on human and machine teaming with concepts such as “centaur warfare,” which is AI weaponry with human oversight, and eventually the potential of “minotaur warfare” where AI strategy is used to direct human soldiers. Finally, there will be heavy investment in counter-AI technologies that can be used to trick autonomous weapons into misclassifying targets and malfunctioning.
AI’s integration into warfare offers unprecedented advantages in speed, precision, and strategic coordination, but it also challenges longstanding norms of morality and ethics in war. The global shift towards autonomous weapons systems demands a robust international framework to mitigate unintended escalation risks and ensure humanitarian law compliance. As with any aspect of life, it is essential that human nature is not lost and AI works to better human life and not worsen it.
References:
Image Source: Freepik, https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/drone-with-camera-is-flying-iceberg_11768944.htm#fromView=image_search_similar&page=1&position=0&uuid=effde175-1592-4c29-8aa3-cb5d9538d999&query=drones+warfare
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