When it comes to the technology allowing robots to kill people without the need for a human to guide them, as George Allen, the late coach of the Washington football team, now the Commanders, said, “The future is now.”
If there were ever any doubts, the lessons from the war in Ukraine have erased them. The real-world battlefield has become an incubator for the cheap, deadly efficient drone technology that’s being compared to the crossbow, gunpowder, and airplanes for the transformative effect it’s having on how wars are fought now and will be in the future.
In Ukraine, small, off-the-shelf commercial quadcopters have been “MacGyvered” into AI-assisted killing machines that can pursue fleeing soldiers, destroy main battle tanks, knock helicopters out of the sky, and set oil refineries ablaze — all flown by a distant operator using a video game controller.
Seaborne drones have sunk half of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, revealing a vulnerability that suggests the naval warfare will never be the same.
Drone warfare has been around for decades, but artificial intelligence, computer algorithms that allow machines to think and act like humans, is the real game-changer.
In World War II, for instance, Nazi Germany used V-1 flying "buzz bombs" to terrorize London. The winged bombs, powered by a jet engine, flew until they ran out of fuel, and then fell randomly onto no particular target.
It wasn’t until 2001 that the U.S. military figured out it could outfit a Predator unmanned aircraft with a hellfire missile and thus convert a surveillance drone into a precision weapon of war.
The marriage of artificial intelligence with smaller, cheaper drones is now threatening to render today’s expensive, high-tech weapons and large standing armies anachronistic reminders of a bygone era.
“Future wars will no longer be about who can mass the most people or field the best jets, ships, and tanks,” retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in the Aug. 5 issue of Foreign Affairs. “Instead, they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems and powerful algorithms. The next major conflict will likely see the wholesale integration of AI into every aspect of military planning and execution.”
“The use of unmanned weapons is essential for another reason: they are cheap. Drones are a much more affordable class of weapons than are traditional military jets,” Milley and Schmidt argue. “An MQ-9 Reaper drone, for example, costs roughly a fourth as much as an F-35 fighter jet. And the MQ-9 is one of the most expensive such weapons; a simple first-person-view drone can cost just $500. A team of ten of them can immobilize a $10 million Russian tank in Ukraine.”
A cursory search of the internet produces dozens of videos of drones in action in Ukraine, dropping explosives down an open tank hatch, flying into a hangar to destroy a fighter jet, and chasing a soldier on the ground like an angry hornet until he meets his demise.
It’s when the target is moving, or when GPS signals are being jammed, that AI can take over and complete the kill.
“We're seeing terminal guidance be applied on both the Russian and the Ukrainian side, where the drone can lock onto a target and it can glide into that target on its own,” Ryan Gury, cofounder and CEO of the drone technology company PDW, told the Washington Examiner.
“What we see in Ukraine and Russia is a cat-and-mouse game that will very quickly mature,” Gury said. “There's wideband heavy spectrum jamming across all front lines, and that means that we have to develop technologies that'll counter these challenges and allow American warfighters to dominate in a near-peer battlefield.”
In a report from Ukraine last month, Paul Mozur, a global technology correspondent for the New York Times, saw firsthand how artificial intelligence is reshaping warfare.
As Mozur recounted in The Daily podcast , he met with some Ukrainians in their 20s and one in their teens who started a company that makes autonomous drones, and they put on a demo for him.
“They’re not doing something that miraculous. What they’re doing is they’re taking basic code that is around, combined it with some new data from the war, and made it into something entirely different, which is a weapon,” said Mozur, explaining that the autonomous systems overcome the best defense against tiny drones, namely radio jamming.
“It doesn’t matter what the pilot sees," he continued. "Once they hit that lock, with the help of this AI software, it will keep going. And so, you all of a sudden are completely helpless to stop it unless you shoot it out of the sky.”
Mozur described another weapon, a ground-mounted machine gun, which a Ukrainian commander told him is operated from a video game console, uses AI to identify targets as they come over the horizon, automatically aims, and all the soldier has to do is press the button and shoot.
“He said it was great,” Mozur related. “We could sit back in the trench, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and shoot Russians.”
And therein lies the scary dilemma: How hard would it be to just let the algorithm decide when to shoot?
“There's also the potential for artificial intelligence to be paired with lethal munitions or robots, and then you've got a real significant ethical and moral issue on your hands with the potential for that to be used in a bad way,” Milley said at a Future of Defense Forum last month sponsored by Axios.
“The U.S. should ensure that its own military AI is subject to strict controls,” Milley and Schmidt wrote. “It should make sure AI systems can distinguish between military and civilian targets. It must keep them under human command.”
The Pentagon has a small program called Replicator , which has the ambitious goal of fielding tens of thousands of small, single-use drones by this time next year.
But the effort is not nearly enough to keep up with Russia, which has gained valuable experience in Ukraine, and China, which controls an estimated 70% of the global commercial drone market and whose authoritarian structure “has proved especially adroit at pushing through changes and adopting new concepts.”
“As a result, the U.S. military risks fighting a war in which its first-rate training and superior conventional weaponry will be rendered less than effective,” Milley and Schmidt warned. “U.S. troops, for example, have not been fully prepared to operate on a battlefield where their every move can be spotted and where they can be rapidly targeted by the drones hovering overhead.”
To catch up, the United States is going to have to go outside the traditional big defense contractors and rely on innovation and creativity from hundreds of small companies such as Gury’s PDW.
“The next generation of small, cheap drones are unlikely to be designed by traditional defense firms, which are incentivized to produce fancy but expensive equipment,” Milley and Schmidt wrote. "They are more likely to be created as they were in Ukraine: through a government initiative that supports dozens of small startups."
Gury is anxious to be a part of the revolution in drone warfare.
His company makes two models of small drones: a one-way “kamikaze” version that costs about $1,000 and a bigger model, still small enough to be folded into a backpack, which functions as a mothership that can be used for surveillance, resupply of troops, or loaded up with small kamikaze drones.
“It's almost like an aircraft carrier in the sky," Gury said. "It can hold other small consumable FPV [First Person View] drones, extend their range, and extend the time that they have in the air.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“It's our job to make sure that the operator has all tools on the table," he added. "So we make radios that can't be jammed, we make systems that can overcome GPS, and we use AI in a way that is intelligent, where parts of the mission can be conducted without operators.
“The war in Ukraine has made it clear that small robotics will change the battlefield. And again, it's up to us that we stay ahead.”
Local News
