THE FUTURE OF ALGORITHMIC WARFARE: FRAGMENTED DEVELOPMENT
BENJAMIN JENSEN, CHRISTOPHER WHYTE, AND SCOTT CUOMOJULY 20, 2023
Editor’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from the authors’ forthcoming book, Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence.
The current promise that artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities will revolutionize warfare stands in contrast to the historical record of high hopes and stalled progress of algorithmic warfare in the profession of arms. Despite the novelty of new chat bots and battlefield proliferation of AI/ML in Ukraine, the extent to which large, legacy military organizations — read the U.S. armed services — will prove adept at cultivating change is still uncertain.
To that end, we wrote a book — Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence — about how military organizations adapt new information technologies, which includes modern battle networks and AI/ML. We did so because as scholars and military professionals we have witnessed stalled progress up close. In the book, we offer four alternative futures about the prospects for AI/ML in the U.S. military. Each is written as a slice-of-time scenario following the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff on their morning commute. The logic of each scenario maps the findings from historical case studies in the book exploring how and why the military profession has struggled to integrate new information technologies to build battle networks over the last one hundred years.
In this first scenario we show that bold innovators can find their path blocked by bad bureaucracy. Even when ideas about change are in the air — like today with the excitement around AI/ML including generative approaches and large-language models — progress can still be stalled by antiquated organizations and old routines. No amount of technology can substitute for an unwillingness to experiment and adapt legacy force design to take advantage of new information technology, including AI/ML. New gadgets die in the iron cage of outdated bureaucracy.
https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/the-future-of-algorithmic-warfare-fragmented-development/
