By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior
“Artificial intelligence is going to be on the next major battlefield, and you don’t want to get there second,” Ret. Gen. John Murray, Former Commanding General, Army Futures Command
Retired Gen. John Murray, former Commanding General, Army Futures Command, has over the years told Warrior that he envisioned possible future warfare as taking place on what he called a “hyperactive battlefield”… characterized by ubiquitous, omni-present sensors across domains, robotic platforms and AI-driven combat.
“Artificial intelligence is going to be on the next major battlefield, and you don’t want to get there second,” Ret. Gen. John Murray, Former Commanding General, Army Futures Command, told Warrior in a recent discussion of future warfare.
Murray explained this in relation to a broader context in which modern concepts of operation and Combined Arms Maneuver continue to take shape as technology matures; sure enough, Murray spent many years leading his Command to anticipate how emerging technologies inform and change maneuver formations, tactics and concepts of operation. One such instance of this pertains to “sensors,” as Murray put it, because there will be “nowhere to hide” in modern warfare — due to the expected presence of different kinds of “sensors” dispersed throughout a multi-domain theater of warfare. Robotics are yet another fast-evolving area of expected future warfare, given the pace of maturation of advanced algorithms enabling more and more functions to be performed without needing human intervention.
These kinds of variables are perhaps most significant with regard to how AI continues to change platforms, sensors, networking and concepts of future warfare.
In an initial, somewhat self-evident sense, AI is driving a new paradigm of high-speed, information-driven warfare, autonomy and massively truncated or shortened “sensor-to-shooter” times. The advantages and potential applications of AI are not only vast and wide-spread, but continuing to expand quickly.
One such paradigm-changing example, Murray explained, relates to AI-enabled automatic target recognition technology now integrating into ground attack platforms such as the Abrams tank. As a former 3rd Infantry Division Commander, Murray explained how soldiers were considered capable of being a “gunner” and manning the 120mm cannon if, when looking at flash cards, they were able to correctly identify 80-percent of the correct targets.
Warrior Talks to Ret. Gen. John Murray About Future Warfare, Robotics & AI
“When I was growing up in armored formations, a 19yr old could be behind a 120mm cannon if they correctly identified 80-percent of the flash cards of enemy targets,” Murray said.
Now, with AI-enabled computer automation, tank targeting systems can correctly identify enemy targets by bouncing incoming sensor information off of vast data base, performing analytics and making nearly instant verifications.
“You can train AI algorithms that can get 99 percent right. AI can make us safer when you look at reducing the risk of fratricide. The ability to go through data quickly makes the PED process faster.,” Murray said.
Increasingly, AI is able to perform what could be called a kind of “collective analytics” wherein different pools of data can be compared against a historical database and compared against one another to, as Murray described it, “predict enemy courses of action.”
“An AI system can take massive amounts of data, to include social media, and give you indications of what an opponents tendencies are. For example, does a certain enemy commander go left 70-percent of the time? Does he lead with reconnaissance? What formations does this Commander use and what are his tendencies?” An AI system will soak in massive amounts of data to include history and sources of information we never had access to in the past”
While praising the merits of AI, the limits of which seem to defy boundaries, Murray also cautioned about the dangers of future war as they pertain to AI. As helpful as AI is showing itself to be in warfare and targeting operations, there are also ongoing efforts to ensure AI is increasingly “reliable” and able to correctly discern incoming sensor data which is not part of its existing data base. This effort, referred to as the Zero Trust initiative, is aimed at establishing technologies and adaptations capable of ensuring greater accuracy and reliability for fast-emerging AI systems and applications.
“AI can be susceptible to spoofing over time, or there can be corruption of the training data. On the future battlefield, you will not to be able to hide. It will be saturated with sensors, so deception is going to become more and more important. Enemies will try to spoof algorithms.”
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University
