PerspectiveArtificial Intelligence Is Changing Every Aspect of War
In an effort to stop the North Vietnamese from sending troops and supplies into South Vietnam, the United States dropped tens of thousands of sensors into the dense jungles of Vietnam, but these sensors did not prove effective in tracking the movement of the North Vietnamese. The idea of collecting data from sensors, processing them with algorithms fueled by ever-more processing power and acting on the output more quickly than the enemy lies at the heart of military thinking across the world’s biggest powers. And today that is being supercharged by new developments in artificial intelligence (AI).
As the navy plane swooped low over the jungle, it dropped a bundle of devices into the canopy below. Some were microphones, listening for guerrilla footsteps or truck ignitions. Others were seismic detectors, attuned to minute vibrations in the ground. Strangest of all were the olfactory sensors, sniffing out ammonia in human urine. Tens of thousands of these electronic organs beamed their data to drones and on to computers. In minutes, warplanes would be on their way to carpet-bomb the algorithmically ordained grid square. The Economist writes that Operation Igloo White was the future of war—in 1970.
America’s effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail running from Laos into Vietnam was not a success. It cost around $1bn a year (about $7.3bn in today’s dollars)—$100,000 ($730,000 today) for every truck destroyed—and did not stop infiltration. But the allure of semi-automated war never faded. The idea of collecting data from sensors, processing them with algorithms fueled by ever-more processing power and acting on the output more quickly than the enemy lies at the heart of military thinking across the world’s biggest powers. And today that is being supercharged by new developments in artificial intelligence (AI).
AI is “poised to change the character of the future battlefield”, declared America’s Department of Defense in its first ai strategy document, in February. A Joint Artificial Intelligence Centre (JAIC) was launched in the Pentagon in summer 2018, and a National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence met for the first time in March. The Pentagon’s budget for 2020 has lavished almost $1bn on AI and over four times as much on unmanned and autonomous capabilities that rely on it.
