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“I feel as though I was catapulted into a dystopian future in which the battlefield (or ‘kill zone’ as Ukrainians call it) is dominated by drones and sensors, and will increasingly be shaped by AI [Artificial Intelligence], too. It’s where those in command centers digest huge quantities of data to plan operations, allocate drones to target areas, and hunt Russian soldiers and their supplies on myriad computer screens. It’s a type of warfare where the speed of innovation and the ability to scale those innovations are critical assets.”
That was Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief of The Economist, writing last week about a recent trip she and several of her colleagues took to Ukraine, where they were the first foreign journalists to spend a day at the command headquarters of the Nemesis Brigade, one that nation’s top drone units.
She said it felt like being in “a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a gamers’ gathering,” where, “in the ‘battle room,’ a cavernous space full of banks of monitors and men with consoles, Pavlo Laktionov, the brigade’s deputy commander, explained to me the ‘e-point’ system: The unit can upload video evidence of successful strikes to win points. The value of the Russian target determines the number of points awarded and a leader-board displays which brigade is ahead. He [also] talked me through the way the unit was structured to optimize the speed of speed-back loops between front-line units, the command center, and the brigade’s R&D [research and development] facilities.”
I was fascinated by Beddoes’ modern warfare description coming to me last week at the same time that Air Force Secretary Dr. Troy Meink and Joint Chief Chairman Gen. Dan Caine spoke publicly at an Air & Space Forces Association conference about U.S. gains in developing autonomous warfare capabilities. Meanwhile, I must add, runaway AI has emerged as a new national concern.
When Secretary Meink spoke last Wednesday, most press coverage was directed at his saying, “The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”
What caught my eye was Meink’s earlier observation: “In the European theater, one-way attack drones have replaced artillery as the primary killer on the battlefield, while armor often sits idle on the side. When I first came into this office, AI really wasn't a commercial thing. Today, it competes with some of the world's top programmers, cyber operators, and hackers. And these technologies are revolutionizing the battlefield.”
He went on to say, “We will be dramatically increasing our combat power by adding large numbers of highly autonomous systems,” and “using novel concepts such as [AI] open systems
architecture to accelerate procurement which has also increased competition from industry resulting in better choices, better prices and in the end more combat power.”
Meink talked about having a significantly different force by 2032, describing “special operators,” not pilots, who will “have the ability to employ thousands of autonomous one-way attack systems, and we will have autonomous fighters like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft or CCAs,” which are un-crewed aircraft powered by jet engines, and potentially equipped for missions including air-to-air combat; air-to-ground combat; electronic warfare; targeting; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
He said, “We intend to have at least 500 of these in service by 2032, and they'll be performing many of the same missions that we do with manned fighters today,” adding, “The first FQ42 and FQ44 increments are already rolling off the assembly line, and I'm excited to name them here for the first time…Fury [FQ-44] and Vengeance [FQ-42].”
Meink pointed out, “These aircraft went from contract award to first flight in 18 months or under; 18 months or under, that's almost unheard of in aircraft development.”
He also said, “And this is not the only class of autonomous aircraft we are aggressively pursuing,” indicating that in the joint U.S.-Israeli Epic Fury, against Iran, “ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] strike platforms have been essential.”
“Building on these lessons,” Meink continued, “we are developing a family of low-cost, multi-role, strike platforms called the Mass Modular Aircraft or MMAs [that] will provide affordable attritable [low-cost enough to lose in combat], long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale.”
He added, “Our intent is to field 100 MMAs in 2029 at even a lower cost than the CCAs, and a fraction of cost of air-manned aircraft we build today. Then by 2032, 500 of these [unmanned] platforms will join our force operational field fleet.”
Meink also noted, “We are making…progress in our space data network and we are launching our [initial] AMTI [satellites] for our Air Moving Target Indication constellation this month.” AMTI satellites will track airborne threats, such as drones, missiles and aircraft from Low Earth Orbit and replace surveillance aircraft such as the E-3 AWACS. The operational goal is 2028.
“When people look back at this moment,” Meink said, “they will not judge us on whether or not we implemented these autonomous systems, because eventually we're going to. But what we're going to be judged on is how quickly we operationalize them, right? That is whether we operationalize them fast enough to maintain our advantage.”
Meink noted, “We've had autonomous weapons -- I mean whether it's a Tomahawk [long-range, subsonic, precision-guided missile] or any of our air missiles that operate independently at some point in time -- terminal guidance things like that. But the big difference here is really taking
advance advantage of the autonomous capability that the deep-learning [computers] and all these other things [AI] offer.”
He then described having “more autonomy both in the platform as well as in the weapon system itself where even if the weapon loses its outside information stream” but having “enough autonomy to do what we've told it to do in absence of that.”
Reflecting today’s public debate about AI, Meink said, “That's where people start getting nervous, but that is something we have to figure out -- how to get comfortable [with], how to test it, how to verify, certify, that these weapons are going to do what they want when they go into an autonomous mode.”
In his speech last Thursday, Gen. Caine said, “While the fundamental nature of war will always remain the same, a clash of human wills, the character of war, how we fight, the speed at which we fight is changing really, really fast.”
He pointed out, “Information moves so fast that leader decision times has compressed from weeks, down to days, down to seconds. In the future fight, advantage will go to the side who can see first, who can understand first, decide first, and act first -- and along the way be a learning organization. And no factor is accelerating change as fast as Artificial Intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities.”
As Meink had done, Caine said, “AI is here now and it's already changing the way militaries see, sense, decide, and act. And across the joint force, we're putting AI to work every single day to move faster, to make better decisions through active adaptation on every single battlefield by leaders in your joint force.”
As an example, he spoke of what happed last June 8, after a U.S. Army Apache AH64 helicopter on patrol went down near the coast of Oman.
“U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) launched a rapid, responsive, joint search-and-rescue effort to recover the [two-man] crew,” Caine said, adding, “That response drew on the totality of the joint force and ultimately was required to use enabled, unmanned, vessels to participate in the rescue of [the] downed U.S. service members for the first time ever.”
He explained, “That capacity did not appear overnight. It came from the men and women of Task Force 59, CENTCOM's forward-leaning, unmanned, joint maritime unit, who spent the last several years testing, integrating, and operationalizing unmanned systems and AI, in one of the most demanding and kinetic environments on Earth right now.”
Caine added, “What made this possible was a bunch of entrepreneurial sailors and members of
the joint force on watch floors… managing networks of unmanned systems across thousands of miles of water and using AI to turn massive amounts of data into a crisp, clear, perfect maritime picture that allowed us to go grab those two soldiers in the water.”
He then described Ukraine where, he said, “We see first-person-view drones operating in heavily contested [electromagnetic] environments. Some now using AI-enabled computer vision to continue to drive towards targets even when there's no GPS [Global Positioning System] or the [computer] links are cut. That gives small units affordable precision and shows how quickly software and autonomy are changing what is possible at the tactical edge.”
Caine described the stark result: “In certain locations on the front line of troops right now, the life expectancy of a new Russian recruit arriving on the front lines is as little as 20-to-30 minutes. Think about that. This is what happens when low-cost precision is fielded fast, adapted quickly, and scaled across the battlefield.”
“From the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine,” Caine said, “show how quickly technology is changing the character of war…We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing. We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time."
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