All the moves by the USA, China and beyond for AI in war
The Pentagon's AI in warfare program, called Project Maven, has already found use in the Red Sea against the Houthis. But China also intends to use these technologies in the military sphere. All the details
If it was no secret that the US is also helping Kiev with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems, until now the great progress made in the field by America with the fundamental help of private technological partners was not known. Here's who they are and what's cooking in the technological pot of the Pentagon in the Bloomberg focus dedicated to the so-called "AI Warfare" which we summarize here in the essential points.
Exercises
Fort Liberty, North Carolina, summer 2020: Soldiers of the 18th Airborne Division are executing a very special operation in which an AI system has identified a target – a decommissioned tank – and transmitted the data to a Himars missile battery, which shoot and destroy the target.
The war with AI
And it is with this unprecedented exercise and not only for the US army that Bloomberg 's focus on AI and its military use opens. Which, the newspaper underlines, "is no longer theoretical", given that today the Pentagon's AI program called Project Maven has already found use in the Red Sea, where the rocket launchers of Yemen's Houthis are being targeted by Navy units stars and stripes which uses AI to identify targets.
But America, Bloomberg specifies, is not alone: Israel has also resorted to AI in these last weeks of the war in Gaza, just as Kiev is doing to repel Russian advance attempts.
The Beijing challenge
Despite the hesitation of the soldiers themselves to entrust the machines with decisions on which life and death depend, and the ethical doubts that follow, Washington is accelerating because its main adversary, called China, already has a national strategy with which it aims to become “the world's leading AI innovation center” by 2030.
Great excitement
Many officials are now convinced that AI will transform the way America wages war just as the advent of radio and machine guns did.
It is no coincidence that today the Pentagon has a senior officer – Col. Thomas J. Kilbride – who commands the so-called “Algorithmic Warfare” activities for which three billion dollars have been specifically requested to be placed in the 2024 budget.
A long journey
Despite the fact that AI has a long history behind it which saw forerunner systems enter the scene already during the Cold War and occupy a non-marginal place in Operation Desert Storm with which the USA expelled Saddam's Iraqis from Kuwait invaded in August 1990, it was in the civil field that the research and innovations that led to today's interface called ChatGPT emerged.
The turning point
But it was already in 2017 that, at the instigation of a former undersecretary of aviation, the Maven project took shape, officially called the "Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team" at the Pentagon, which was tested in the field with images recorded by NavySEAL drones in Somalia.
Little problems
But a problem immediately emerged for the Maven project from which the private partner, none other than Google , dissociated itself and left it, declaring that it did not want to have anything to do with "warfare technology".
Top secret
Since then the Pentagon has learned the lesson by keeping the Maven project and above all its technological partners in the private sector, who evidently have fewer scruples than those of the Mountain View company, in absolute secrecy.
But the confidentiality evaporates when Bloomberg intercepts and anonymously speaks to an internal source at Maven, who lists all the names: Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Sierra Nevada, ECS Federal, L3Harris Technologies, Maxar, and half a dozen other companies who shut their mouths when Bloomberg asks them for confirmation of their participation.
A dramatic test
Since the launch of the project, many steps forward have been made compared to the first lame attempts. And perhaps the most important test came in August 2021, the month of the great global humiliation of America forced to evacuate from Kabul in a hurry.
In that dramatic circumstance, the Maven Smart System played its part, helping the military to remotely follow everything that was happening thousands and thousands of kilometers away from a screen. “I could see General (Chris) Donaue walking all around,” a Maven officer recalls of the last American in uniform to leave Kabul.
The Ukrainian theater
This official and others interviewed by Bloomberg refused to reveal how the US is now using AI to support Ukraine.
But others, in exchange for anonymity, explain that the Maven Smart System is used to identify Russian targets with satellite images that are then passed on to the Ukrainians who then target those targets with GPS-guided missiles.
One of these sources admits that for the Pentagon this is a moment of learning and field testing of AI systems: the Maven Smart System alone was updated and improved more than fifty times in the first ten months of the conflict.
Evolutions
Now the Maven project can avail itself of the collaboration of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency which specializes in analyzing and mapping satellite images.
According to the director of the Agency, Vice Admiral Frank Whitwort, the images and identification of targets are now very accurate, as demonstrated by the precision with which 85 targets in Iraq and Syria were hit a few weeks ago.
“Maven has become exceptionally crucial for our functions” admits an officer, for whom in addition to a very high accuracy rate there are also advantages in terms of speed in identifying targets through algorithms.
Human factor
But ethical dilemmas remain for systems which, Bloomberg observes, could confuse an anomalous wave with the movement of a ship and which therefore require indispensable human mediation.
And that's precisely why the Pentagon issued a directive last year instructing commanders and operators to exercise "appropriate levels of human judgment" before pulling the trigger.
But it is not clear whether it is precisely this spirit that guides the over 800 projects that the US Defense has launched in the field of AI and which involve all weapons: army, navy, air force.
China factor
All mobilized with a single concern in the background called China. There are many officials who look with fear at Beijing's great progress in the ability to integrate AI into the military device.
And this is precisely why the White House in October introduced export controls on advanced chips and imposed sanctions on a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer.
War, a certain graduate recalled some time ago, is still the continuation of politics.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/progetto-maven-ia-guerra/ on Sat, 02 Mar 2024 06:05:26 +0000.