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CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org –
Robot Generals Will They Make Better Decisions Than
Humans…Or Worse?
Posted
By Michael T. Klare On August 26, 2020
Image Source: Kyle McDonald – CC BY 2.0
With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern
weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relyingever
more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations.
Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous
weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance
drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are
merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however,
in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an
entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons,
but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.
Admittedly,
those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now
rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency. Every
component of a modern general staff — including battle planning,
intelligence-gathering, logistics, communications, and decision-making — is,
according to the Pentagon’s latest plans, to be turned over to complex
arrangements of sensors, computers, and software. All these will then be
integrated into a “system of systems,” now dubbed the Joint
All-Domain Command-and-Control, or JADC2 (since acronyms remain the essence
of military life). Eventually, that amalgam of systems may indeed assume most
of the functions currently performed by American generals and their senior
staff officers.
The notion of using machines to make command-level decisions is
not, of course, an entirely new one. It has, in truth, been a long time coming.
During the Cold War, following the introduction of intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) with extremely short flight times, both military strategists
and science-fiction writers began to imagine mechanical systems that would control
such nuclear weaponry in the event of human incapacity.
In Stanley Kubrick’s satiric 1964 movie Dr.
Strangelove, for example, the fictional Russian leader Dimitri Kissov
reveals that the Soviet Union has installed a “doomsday machine” capable of
obliterating all human life that would detonate automatically should the
country come under attack by American nuclear forces. Efforts by crazed
anti-Soviet U.S. Air Force officers to provoke a war with Moscow then succeed
in triggering that machine and so bring about human annihilation. In reality,
fearing that they might experience a surprise attack of just this sort, the
Soviets later did install a semi-automatic retaliatory system they dubbed “Perimeter,” designed to launch Soviet ICBMs in
the event that sensors detected nuclear explosions and all communications from
Moscow had been silenced. Some analysts believe that an upgraded version of
Perimeter is still in operation, leaving us in an all-too-real version of a
Strangelovian world.
In yet another sci-fi version of such automated command systems,
the 1983 film WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenage
hacker, portrayed a supercomputer called the War Operations Plan Response, or
WOPR (pronounced “whopper”) installed at the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) headquarters in
Colorado. When the Broderick character hacks into it and starts playing what he
believes is a game called “World War III,” the computer concludes an actual Soviet
attack is underway and launches a nuclear retaliatory response. Although
fictitious, the movie accurately depicts many aspects of the U.S. nuclear
command-control-and-communications (NC3) system, which was then and still
remains highly automated.
Such devices, both real and imagined, were relatively primitive by
today’s standards, being capable solely of determining that a nuclear attack
was under way and ordering a catastrophic response. Now, as a result of vast
improvements in artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning, machines can collect and
assess massive amounts of sensor data, swiftly detect key trends and patterns,
and potentially issue orders to combat units as to where to attack and when.
Time Compression and Human Fallibility
The substitution of intelligent machines for humans at senior
command levels is becoming essential, U.S. strategists argue, because an exponential
growth in sensor information combined with the increasing speed of warfare is
making it nearly impossible for humans to keep track of crucial battlefield
developments. If future scenarios prove accurate, battles that once unfolded
over days or weeks could transpire in the space of hours, or even minutes,
while battlefield information will be pouring in as multitudinous data points,
overwhelming staff officers. Only advanced computers, it is claimed, could
process so much information and make informed combat decisions within the
necessary timeframe.
Such time compression and the expansion of sensor data may apply
to any form of combat, but especially to the most terrifying of them all,
nuclear war. When ICBMs were the principal means of such combat, decision
makers had up to 30 minutes between the time a missile was launched and the
moment of detonation in which to determine whether a potential attack was real
or merely a false satellite reading (as did sometimes occur during the Cold War). Now, that may
not sound like much time, but with the recent introduction of hypersonic missiles, such assessment times could shrink to
as little as five minutes. Under such circumstances, it’s a lot to expect even
the most alert decision-makers to reach an informed judgment on the nature of a
potential attack. Hence the appeal (to some) of automated decision-making
systems.
“Attack-time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in
a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough,” military
analysts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argued at War on the Rocks, a
security-oriented website. “Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based
on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that
detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the
attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an
impossible position.”
This notion, that an artificial intelligence-powered device — in
essence, a more intelligent version of the doomsday machine or the WOPR —
should be empowered to assess enemy behavior and then, on the basis of “predetermined
response options,” decide humanity’s fate, has naturally produced some unease in the community of military analysts (as it
should for the rest of us as well). Nevertheless, American strategists continue
to argue that battlefield assessment and decision-making — for both
conventional and nuclear warfare — should increasingly be delegated to
machines.
“AI-powered intelligence systems may provide the ability to
integrate and sort through large troves of data from different sources and
geographic locations to identify patterns and highlight useful information,”
the Congressional Research Service noted in
a November 2019 summary of Pentagon thinking. “As the complexity of AI systems
matures,” it added, “AI algorithms may also be capable of providing commanders
with a menu of viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the
battlespace, in turn enabling faster adaptation to complex events.”
The key wording there is “a menu of viable courses of action based
on real-time analysis of the battlespace.” This might leave the impression that
human generals and admirals (not to speak of their commander-in-chief) will
still be making the ultimate life-and-death decisions for both their own forces
and the planet. Given such anticipated attack-time compression in future
high-intensity combat with China and/or Russia, however, humans may no longer
have the time or ability to analyze the battlespace themselves and so will come
to rely on AI algorithms for such assessments. As a result, human commanders
may simply find themselves endorsing decisions made by machines — and so, in
the end, become superfluous.
Creating Robot Generals
Despite whatever misgivings they may have about their future job
security, America’s top generals are moving swiftly to develop and deploy that
JADC2 automated command mechanism. Overseen by the Air Force, it’s proving to
be a computer-driven amalgam of devices for collecting real-time
intelligence on enemy forces from vast numbers of sensor devices (satellites,
ground radars, electronic listening posts, and so on), processing that data
into actionable combat information, and providing precise attack instructions
to every combat unit and weapons system engaged in a conflict — whether
belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or the newly formed Space
Force and Cyber Command.
What, exactly, the JADC2 will
consist of is not widely known, partly because many of its component systems
are still shrouded in secrecy and partly because much of the essential
technology is still in the development stage. Delegated with responsibility for
overseeing the project, the Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin and other large defense contractors to
design and develop key elements of the system.
One such building block is its Advanced Battle Management System
(ABMS), a data-collection and distribution system intended to provide fighter pilots with
up-to-the-minute data on enemy positions and help guide their combat moves.
Another key component is the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile
Defense Battle Command System (IBCS), designed to connect radar systems to
anti-aircraft and missile-defense launchers and provide them with precise
firing instructions. Over time, the Air Force and its multiple contractors will
seek to integrate ABMS and IBCS into a giant network of systems connecting
every sensor, shooter, and commander in the country’s armed forces — a military
“internet of things,” as some have put it.
To test this concept and provide an example of how it might
operate in the future, the Army conducted a live-fire artillery exercise this August in Germany
using components (or facsimiles) of the future JADC2 system. In the first stage
of the test, satellite images of (presumed) Russian troop positions were sent
to an Army ground terminal, where an AI software program called Prometheus
combed through the data to select enemy targets. Next, another AI program
called SHOT computed the optimal match of available Army weaponry to those
intended targets and sent this information, along with precise firing
coordinates, to the Army’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS)
for immediate action, where human commanders could choose to implement it or
not. In the exercise, those human commanders had the mental space to give the
matter a moment’s thought; in a shooting war, they might just leave everything
to the machines, as the system’s designers clearly intend them to do.
In the future, the Army is planning even more ambitious tests of
this evolving technology under an initiative called Project Convergence. From what’s been said publicly about
it, Convergence will undertake ever more complex exercises involving
satellites, Air Force fighters equipped with the ABMS system, Army helicopters,
drones, artillery pieces, and tactical vehicles. Eventually, all of this will
form the underlying “architecture” of the JADC2, linking every military sensor
system to every combat unit and weapons system — leaving the generals with
little to do but sit by and watch.
Why Robot Generals Could Get It Wrong
Given the complexity of modern warfare and the challenge of time
compression in future combat, the urge of American strategists to replace human
commanders with robotic ones is certainly understandable. Robot generals and
admirals might theoretically be able to process staggering amounts of
information in brief periods of time, while keeping track of both friendly and
enemy forces and devising optimal ways to counter enemy moves on a future
battlefield. But there are many good reasons to doubt the reliability of robot
decision-makers and the wisdom of using them in place of human officers.
To begin with, many of these technologies are still in their
infancy, and almost all are prone to malfunctions that
can neither be easily anticipated nor understood. And don’t forget that even
advanced algorithms can be fooled, or “spoofed,” by skilled professionals.
In addition, unlike humans, AI-enabled decision-making systems will
lack an ability to assess intent or context. Does a sudden enemy troop
deployment, for example, indicate an imminent attack, a bluff, or just a normal
rotation of forces? Human analysts can use their understanding of the current
political moment and the actors involved to help guide their assessment of the
situation. Machines lack that ability and may assume the worst, initiating
military action that could have been avoided.
Such a problem will only be compounded by the “training” such
decision-making algorithms will undergo as they are adapted to military
situations. Just as facial recognition software has proved to be tainted by an over-reliance on images of white males
in the training process — making them less adept at recognizing, say,
African-American women — military decision-making algorithms are likely to
be distorted by an over-reliance on the combat-oriented
scenarios selected by American military professionals for training purposes. “Worst-case thinking” is a natural inclination of such
officers — after all, who wants to be caught unprepared for a possible enemy
surprise attack? — and such biases will undoubtedly become part of the “menus
of viable courses of action” provided by decision-making robots.
Once integrated into decision-making algorithms, such biases
could, in turn, prove exceedingly dangerous in any future encounters between
U.S. and Russian troops in Europe or American and Chinese forces in Asia. A
clash of this sort might, after all, arise at any time, thanks to some
misunderstanding or local incident that rapidly gains momentum — a sudden clash
between U.S. and Chinese warships off Taiwan, for example, or between American
and Russian patrols in one of the Baltic states. Neither side may have intended
to ignite a full-scale conflict and leaders on both sides might normally move
to negotiate a cease-fire. But remember, these will no longer simply be human
conflicts. In the wake of such an incident, the JADC2 could detect some enemy
move that it determines poses an imminent risk to allied forces and so
immediately launch an all-out attack by American planes, missiles, and
artillery, escalating the conflict and foreclosing any chance of an early
negotiated settlement.
Such prospects become truly frightening when what’s at stake is
the onset of nuclear war. It’s hard to imagine any conflict among the major
powers starting out as a nuclear war, but it’s far easier to envision a
scenario in which the great powers — after having become embroiled in a
conventional conflict — reach a point where one side or the other considers the
use of atomic arms to stave off defeat. American military doctrine, in fact,
has always held outthe possibility of using so-called tactical
nuclear weapons in response to a massive Soviet (now Russian) assault in
Europe. Russian military doctrine, it is widely assumed, incorporates similar options. Under such
circumstances, a future JADC2 could misinterpret enemy moves as signaling
preparation for a nuclear launch and order a pre-emptive strike by U.S. nuclear
forces, thereby igniting World War III.
War is a nasty, brutal activity and, given almost two decades of
failed conflicts that have gone under the label of “the war on terror,” causing
thousands of American casualties (both physical and mental), it’s easy to
understand why robot enthusiasts are so eager to see another kind of mentality
take over American war-making. As a start, they contend, especially in a pandemic world, that it’s only humane to replace human
soldiers on the battlefield with robots and so diminish human casualties (at
least among combatants). This claim does not, of course, address the argument that robot soldiers and drone aircraft lack
the ability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants on the
battlefield and so cannot be trusted to comply with the laws of war or
international humanitarian law — which, at least theoretically, protect
civilians from unnecessary harm — and so should be banned.
Fraught as all of that may be on future battlefields,
replacing generals and admirals with robots is another matter altogether. Not
only do legal and moral arguments arise with a vengeance, as the survival of
major civilian populations could be put at risk by computer-derived combat
decisions, but there’s no guarantee that American GIs would suffer fewer
casualties in the battles that ensued. Maybe it’s time, then, for Congress to
ask some tough questions about the advisability of automating combat decision-making
before this country pours billions of additional taxpayer dollars into an
enterprise that could, in fact, lead to the end of the world as we know it.
Maybe it’s time as well for the leaders of China, Russia, and this country to
limit or ban the deployment of hypersonic missiles and other weaponry that will
compress life-and-death decisions for humanity into just a few minutes, thereby
justifying the automation of such fateful judgments.
This article first appeared on TomDispatch.
Article
printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL
to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/26/robot-generals-will-they-make-better-decisions-than-humans-or-worse/
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