By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior
(Washington DC)
It is widely known that the now airborne US Air Force F-47 will operate as part of a “family of systems” sharing information with nearby drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, an emerging technological capability which introduces paradigm-changing new Concepts of Operation. As part of this equation, many have indicated that the F-47 itself may be unmanned or at least “unmanned-capable.” This would make sense, yet the Pentagon and many senior weapons developers seem to retain the important view that human decision-making simply cannot be replaced or replicated by mathematically-generated algorithms. Therefore, while there may be value in operating an F-47 capable of unmanned missions in certain tactical scenarios, there does appear to be a consensus that the aircraft does need to be “manned” as well.
Manned-Unmanned Teaming
As far back as 10 or more years ago, an Air Force Chief Scientist discussed the service’s conceptual planning for scenarios in which F-22s and F-35s could essentially control and operate groups of drones from the “air,” generating the prospect of high-speed, low latency command and control from the sky across an air attack operation.
The concepts of operation explained by this former Chief Scientist, Dr. Gregory Zacharias, are now essentially a full reality. The Air Force Research Laboratory has, for example, already demonstrated the ability of a manned F-35 to exchange data “in-flight” with a Valkyrie drone. The technology has matured quickly and its even leading some to speculate or posit that manned fighter jets could become obsolete or fully replaced by drone fighters.
In recent years, some experiments have shown that a fully AI-enabled unmanned fighter jet can “out-perform” a manned fighter in a dogfight in the air, given the speed with which advanced algorithms can discern and analyze angles, points of advantage, vectoring variables and points of attack. This happened years ago during Air Force experiments with an F-16.
Unmanned F-35s?
Does this mean that, over time, AI-advances will indicate that all manned F-35s should be replaced by ultra high-speed unmanned fighters? The concept has been suggested and is now being debated among senior military weapons developers and members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Certainly groups of more attritable unmanned systems would be less expensive to a large degree as they would not require the survivability standards woven into manned stealth fighter jets.
Purely unmanned fighters might be able to perform certain missions which manned aircraft cannot, such as travel at hypersonic speeds. The possibility of humans flying at hypersonic speeds may not be entirely impossible with modern advances, yet scientists have maintained for years that humans would simply be unable to survive the extreme temperatures associated with traveling at hypersonic speeds.
Why are Human Pilots Needed?
AI enabled systems can clearly perform procedural and certain data analysis and processing exponentially faster than humans, yet there are still subjective phenomena fundamental to perception and human decision-making which AI-systems simply cannot replicate. This means there still seems to be an irreplaceable and completely indispensable need for human decision-making in the cockpit.
The optimal approach, according to cutting edge weapons developers, is to “blend” the two into a single integrated system. This way the unique attributes and advantages associated with both AI-enabled computing and human decision-making can be harvested to ensure the best combat-scenario decision making.
The Air Force is conscious of this, which is why they have in recent years been experimenting with having a manned fighter jet fly with an AI-enabled co-pilot called Artuu. . This experimentation has proven useful and worthwhile, as it is something which continues to inform Air Force air war modernization efforts.
Philosophical Connection
There is an interesting philosophical parallel to some of these key questions, which can be traced in an interesting way to Immanuel Kant, when it comes to understanding those specific ways in which human consciousness and perception remains entirely unique and something which computer technology is likely at a loss to replicate. The following is a parallel to Immanuel Kant previously explained in a Warrior essay:
It does not seem like a stretch to view the US military’s ethics and beliefs regarding the inherent “subjectivity” or “artistic” elements of human consciousness in relation to Western philosophical renderings of human consciousness, perception and epistemology (theory of knowledge). 18th-Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, arguably expanded US, European, and global thinking about human consciousness through his intellectual renderings of human thought and perception. In his famous 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant makes the case for the inherent “subjectivity” of individual perception by suggesting that human beings do not all perceive and interpret the external world in precisely the same fashion. In several of his works, Kant explained that once elements of the external word are “perceived” or “taken-in” by the human mind, they become part of subjective cognition and are therefore subject to the wide ranges of factors and different variables determining human consciousness and perception.
For this reason, Kant occupies a special and valuable place within the trajectory of Western thought, as he operates as a bridge in a certain way into more modern notions of the human mind. Many philosophers preceding Kant known as the Empiricists(Locke, Hume), maintained that the mind was merely a kind of “mirror” of a certain reflecting the same external reality or set of conditions for everyone. Kant however, and the English Romantics who followed him, alternatively viewed human consciousness as inherently “subjective” and, as Kant puts it, part of “subjective cognition.” Simply put, Kant argued that the same set of external circumstances, which might be thought of as uniform, are not interpreted or understood the same way by “individuals.” Instead of functioning primarily as a mirror reflecting the same external reality, the mind operates more like a “lamp” shedding its own light upon the process of human perception. Sure enough, a famous US Cornell University scholar in the 1950s known as M.H. Abrams wrote the now famous “Mirror and the Lamp” critique on the evolution of epistemological understanding throughout the 1700s and 1800s into today. The human mind and imagination, Abrams maintained, functioned more like a “lamp” than a “mirror,” and that Individuals each perceive and interpret the surrounding set of external conditions differently, a reality we mostly take for granted these days. How do AI-enabled algorithms approximate this…? Can AI-generated systems evaluate the somewhat ineffable or less “quantifiable” variables woven into human imagination, intention, emotion, ethics or intuition?
The Pentagon’s doctrinal approach to AI and its “human-in-the-loop” philosophy could arguably have been influenced by generations of American and European philosophical thinking about consciousness. While we may see computing automation and AI-enabled weapons for purely defensive reasons in the future, humans are arguably best positioned to determine which “human” is the correct one to attack to save lives in war. What if a computer interprets an innocent civilian for an enemy combatant? Will it make an accurate determination in every instance all the time? What if an explosion of an enemy target will generate fragmentation in an urban area, killing civilians? What if an AI-enabled targeting system is spoofed or gets a “false” positive? The Pentagon is aware of these things, which is why US military weapons developers and their industry partners are pursuing what’s called “zero trust,” a term identifying ongoing efforts to make AI more consistently reliable and accurate.
Kris Osborn is President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in 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
