The future of combat

War and AI
The character of warfare is about to be profoundly changed by artificial
intelligence

The computer was born in war and by war. Colossus was built in 1944 to crack
Nazi codes. By the 1950s computers were organising America’s air defences. In
the decades that followed, machine intelligence played a small part in warfare.
Now it is about to become pivotal. Just as the civilian world is witnessing rapid
progress in the power and spread of artificial intelligence (ai), so too must the
military world prepare for an onrush of innovation. As much as it transforms
the character of war, it could also prove destabilising.

Today’s rapid change has several causes. One is the crucible of war itself, most
notably in Ukraine. Small, inexpensive chips routinely guide Russian and
Ukrainian drones to their targets, scaling up a technology once confined to a
superpower’s missiles. A second is the recent exponential advance of ai,
enabling astonishing feats of object recognition and higher-order problem
solving. A third is the rivalry between America and China, in which both
see ai as the key to military superiority.

The results are most visible in the advance of intelligent killing machines. Aerial
and naval drones have been vital to both sides in Ukraine for spotting and
attacking targets. ai’s role is as the solution to jamming, because it enables a
drone to home in on targets, even if gps signals or the link to the pilot have been
cut. Breaking the connection between pilot and plane should soon let armies
deploy far larger numbers of low-cost munitions. Eventually self-directing
swarms will be designed to swamp defences.

But what is most visible about military ai is not what is most important. As our
briefing explains, the technology is also revolutionising the command and
control that military officers use to orchestrate wars.
On the front line, drones embody just the last and most dramatic link in the kill
chain, the series of steps beginning with the search for a target and ending in an
attack. ai’s deeper significance is what it can do before the drone strikes.
Because it sorts through and processes data at superhuman speed, it can pluck
every tank out of a thousand satellite images, or interpret light, heat, sound and
radio waves to distinguish decoys from the real thing.

Away from the front line, it can solve much larger problems than those faced by
a single drone. Today that means simple tasks, such as working out which
weapon is best suited to destroying a threat. In due course, “decision-support
systems” may be able to grasp the baffling complexity of war rapidly and over a
wide area—perhaps an entire battlefield.

The consequences of this are only just becoming clear. ai systems, coupled with
autonomous robots on land, sea and air, are likely to find and destroy targets at
an unprecedented speed and on a vast scale.

The speed of such warfare will change the balance between soldier and software.
Today, armies keep a man “in the loop”, approving each lethal decision. As
finding and striking targets is compressed into minutes or seconds, the human
may merely “sit on the loop”, as part of a human-machine team. People will
oversee the system without intervening in every action.

The paradox is that even as ai gives a clearer sense of the battlefield, war risks
becoming more opaque for the people who fight it. There will be less time to
stop and think. As the models hand down increasingly oracular judgments, their
output will become ever harder to scrutinise without ceding the enemy a lethal
advantage. Armies will fear that if they do not give their ai advisers a longer
leash, they will be defeated by an adversary who does. Faster combat and fewer
pauses will make it harder to negotiate truces or halt escalation. This may
favour defenders, who can hunker down while attackers break cover as they
advance. Or it may tempt attackers to strike pre-emptively and with massive
force, so as to tear down the sensors and networks on which ai-enabled armies
will depend.

The scale of ai-based war means that mass and industrial heft are likely to
become even more important than they are today. You might think new
technology will let armies become leaner. But if software can pick out tens of
thousands of targets, armies will need tens of thousands of weapons to strike
them. And if the defender has the advantage, attackers will need more weapons
to break through.

That is not the only reason ai warfare favours big countries. Drones may get
cheaper, but the digital systems that mesh the battlefield together will be
fiendishly expensive. Building ai-infused armies will take huge investments in
cloud servers able to handle secret data. Armies, navies and air forces that today
exist in their own data silos will have to be integrated. Training the models will
call for access to vast troves of data.
Which big country does ai favour most? China was once thought to have an
advantage, thanks to its pool of data, control over private industry and looser
ethical constraints. Yet just now America looks to be ahead in the frontier
models that may shape the next generation of military ai. And ideology matters:
it is unclear whether the armies of authoritarian states, which prize centralised
control, will be able to exploit the benefits of a technology that pushes
intelligence and insight to the lowest tactical levels.

If, tragically, the first ai-powered war does break out, international law is likely
to be pushed to the margins. All the more reason to think today about how to
limit the destruction. China should heed America’s call to rule out ai control
over nuclear weapons, for instance. And once a war begins, human-to-human
hotlines will become more important than ever. ai systems told to maximise
military advantage will need to be encoded with values and restraints that
human commanders take for granted. These include placing an implicit value on
human life—how many civilians is it acceptable to kill in pursuing a high-value
target?—and avoiding certain destabilising strikes, such as on nuclear early-
warning satellites.

The uncertainties are profound. The only sure thing is that ai-driven change is
drawing near. The armies that anticipate and master technological advances
earliest and most effectively will probably prevail. Everyone else is likely to be a
victim. ■