Disruptive technologies drive doctrinal and operational changes for modern militaries. Particularly in the last 120 years, industrial and technological advancements have revolutionized warfare. In the last century, the United States military has developed a military machine that is centered on a guiding command-and-control principle: centralized control, decentralized execution. However, the next decade will bring significant advancements in autonomous decision-making and artificial intelligence, chauffeuring in resilient, distributed command and control and dislodging the human operator from mission command.
While artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are already broadly employed in health, transportation and digital services, true autonomy in military systems is still in development. A foundational challenge in AI applications within systems that are capable of taking human life is trust. Military autonomous applications can and should be subjected to extensive verification and validation, to include comparing machine-enabled decision-making tendencies to those of the human operator.
This is still a concept that is not widely accepted for military systems; artificial intelligence and reliance upon machines to “think” and “decide” in roles once uniquely assigned to human operators is a drastic paradigm shift. Once fully validated and developed within defense applications, artificial intelligence will enable a shift to automated decision tools from the error-prone human mission commanders. This might require some ethical investigation into how America wants to apply logic and into the creation of what are literally soulless killing machines.Read more…
