Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Military Documents Reveal How the US Army Plans To Deploy AI In Future Wars (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the behind-the-scenes dept.

In a just-released white paper, the Army describes how it's working to make a battlefield network of machines and humans a reality. The Next Web reports: "Most of such intelligent things will not be too dissimilar from the systems we see on today's battlefield, such as unattended ground sensors, guided missiles (especially the fire-and-forget variety) and of course the unmanned aerial systems (UAVs)," reads the paper. "They will likely include physical robots ranging from very small size (such as an insect-scale mobile sensors) to large vehicle that can carry troops and supplies. Some will fly, others will crawl or walk or ride."

The paper was authored by the Army's chief of the Network Science Division of the Army Research Laboratory, Dr. Alexander Kott. It outlines the need to develop systems to augment both machines and people in the real world with artificially intelligent agents to defend the network: "In addition to physical intelligent things, the battlefield -- or at least the cyber domain of the battlefield -- will be populated with disembodied, cyber robots. These will reside within various computers and networks, and will move and acts in the cyberspace."

Kott takes pains to underscore the fact that the AI powering U.S. war efforts will need to be resilient in ways that today's AI simply isn't. He states: "The intelligent things will have to constantly think about an intelligent adversary that strategizes to deceive and defeat them. Without this adversarial intelligence, the battle things will not survive long enough to be useful." Ultimately, aside from outlining what the future battlefield will look like, the paper's conclusion is either disappointing or a giant relief, depending on your agenda: "Clearly, it is far beyond the current state of AI to operate intelligently in such an environments and with such demands. In particular, Machine Learning -- an area that has seen a dramatic progress in the last decade -- must experience major advances in order to become relevant to the real battlefield."

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. It's just science fiction by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In other words, the paper is just science fiction, trying to guess the future. Current capabilities are not enough.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re: It's just science fiction by BlueStrat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      These things are going to have mechanical CPUs, are they? Because if they have electronics the EMP will likely fry them too.

      Just use vacuum-tubes. They're pretty much immune to EMP. :)

      Seriously though, protection from EMP is pretty standard stuff. It's not that hard. Pretty much all military electronics from missile guidance packages to fighter-jet avionics to infantry field radios have EMP mitigation built into the design.

      In the real world EMP doesn't work like in The Matrix.

      In the example of a nuclear/thermonuclear bomb detonating, the effective radius (close enough that EMP could disable minimally-hardened electronics) of the EMP pulse is much smaller than the effective full-destruction radius of the detonation.

      In other words, you'd almost certainly need to be close enough to ground-zero so that the blast itself would incinerate the electronics to hot radioactive plasma before the EMP would be strong enough to kill it.

      What are truly vulnerable are electrical power grids and civilian radio/cellphone/satellite/cable-TV comm/broadcast systems that lack any serious EMP mitigation.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
  2. Translation by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Translation: how to better use technology to end human lives and mutilate fellow humans instead of improving human lives. It's unfortunate that a lot of new technology is first used to murder and maim.

    1. Re:Translation by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, let stop designing high level weapons. We can be reassured, Russia and China will also stop working on that right away (btw, motorbikes might also be used to carry people, and not frighten them by gangs of riders doing lots of noise ;-)

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  3. Re:EMP EMP by djinn6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You have a poor understanding of EMP if you think it can take out a 10-foot wide UAV. Commercial jets run into EMP all the time when they get hit by lightning and nothing happens to them.

    As for blinding them, yes, it might have an effect on radio or radar, but the current crop of UAVs have visible light cameras. Meanwhile, whoever's fighting them will lose radio too, so it's not really an advantage.

  4. The time is now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    We must dissent