Generating an Edge

FORUM Staff

The autonomous vehicles navigated the unforgiving terrain of the 2,000-square-kilometer Cultana Training Area in South Australia, conducting simulated long-range precision fires and other missions. Defense scientists, meanwhile, sought to disrupt the uncrewed jeeps and trucks with electronic warfare and electro-optical laser attacks on their position, navigation and timing systems.

The Trusted Operation of Robotic Vehicles in a Contested Environment (TORVICE) trials in late 2023 incorporated experts and technology from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to evaluate the resilience of artificial intelligence (AI) in such assets — one of a slate of AI-capability initiatives under the allies’ AUKUS security partnership. “TORVICE tested the ability of autonomous vehicles to complete their missions and preserve network connectivity in a contested environment,” an Australian Defence Department spokesperson told FORUM. “The trial takes us a step closer to adopting these technologies in the land domain.”

Emerging capabilities such as AI and machine learning are transforming strategic cooperation, competition and conflict throughout the Indo-Pacific and beyond, military commanders and defense analysts say. From protecting global shipping against missile strikes to augmenting war gaming and scenario modeling to employing large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT to dig through mountains of raw intelligence, AI systems accelerate decision-making and allow forces to project power while reducing the risk to troops and noncombatants.

“New technologies such as AI and unmanned systems have changed the way that militaries provide security and try to deter war … and could ultimately decide who prevails in a time of war,” U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said in his keynote address at the “AI in the Era of Strategic Competition” conference. “At CENTCOM, we’ve been able to use AI in the maritime domain for pattern detection in order to identify threats at a faster rate. We want to get ahead of nefarious acts and AI … has proven itself to be very effective.”

To counter attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, CENTCOM taps into a “confluence of sensors, people, training — and AI” to optimize decision-making, Cooper said. Time is critical: Anti-ship ballistic missiles travel at five times the speed of sound — about 6,000 kilometers per hour — leaving military operators in the Middle East with barely 10 seconds to identify a target and determine whether to shoot it down.

“Everything that we do has a human in the loop,” Cooper told the audience of military leaders, government officials, industry representatives and scholars at the March 2024 conference, presented by the Global and National Security Institute (GNSI) at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “At the end of the day, decisions are made by humans. It’s the decision-making process that is more vibrantly enabled through AI. … We’re able to move at speeds that were previously unimaginable.”

SMART WARFIGHTING

Allies and Partners, increasingly in collaboration, are integrating AI across warfighting domains for functions such as analysis, surveillance and reconnaissance, cyber and missile defense, logistics, and training. During the Singapore Armed Forces’ (SAF) Forging Sabre 2023 exercise, engineers with the nation’s Defence Science and Technology Agency validated the use of AI, data analytics and robotics to adjust tactics and objectives based on real-time feedback. More than 1,000 Airmen, Soldiers and other personnel participated in the exercise, which is hosted at a U.S. Air Force Base in Idaho to provide the SAF with access to airspace about 20 times larger than that of 720-square-kilometer Singapore.

The “seamless integration of advanced technology” enables the SAF to “see further, sense faster and strike smarter,” the Singapore Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) stated. The SAF’s Command and Control Information System (CCIS), for example, leverages AI and weapon-to-target matching algorithms to “generate warfighting solutions and allow commanders to make informed and prompt decisions to eliminate threats quickly and accurately … reducing the risk of collateral damage and increasing the efficiency of strike missions,” MINDEF stated. Recent CCIS enhancements include a weather module to factor meteorological conditions into recommended actions; a 3D airspace module to identify potential flight path conflicts among assets; a 3D weapon safety zone module to increase situational awareness of strike weapon paths; and algorithms that detect and classify objects from drone video feed.

Additionally, the SAF’s Digital and Intelligence Service uses detection analytics to pinpoint cyber threats, while the SAF Medical Corps developed an analytics tool to identify the causes of musculoskeletal injuries among troops. “Technology continues to be a key enabler and force multiplier for the SAF to fight ‘smarter’ as a networked and technologically advanced fighting force,” MINDEF stated.

The Indian Army, meanwhile, used dozens of domestically developed and AI-enabled drones to conduct simulated offensive missions and support tasks in 2021. A year later, India’s Defence Ministry unveiled 75 priority AI projects focused on capabilities including fake news detectors, voice-activated command systems, driver fatigue monitoring, satellite image analysis, and predictive maintenance for weapons systems and equipment. Such technology will revolutionize the nation’s forces, and introducing autonomy in weapons systems, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and data management “can be a huge asset in stopping terrorism, installing counterterrorism measures, protecting Soldiers,” the ministry stated. “In fact, AI in defence can change combat and conflict at the deepest levels.” 

AI’s benefits extend beyond the battlespace, particularly in an arena as expansive as the Indo-Pacific. Under its Stormbreaker initiative, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) is developing a digital tool with “advanced data optimization capabilities, machine learning and artificial intelligence to support planning, war gaming [and] mission analysis,” U.S. Navy Adm. John Aquilino, then Commander of USINDOPACOM, testified before the U.S. Congress in March 2024.

“Most of what militaries do is not actually right at the tip of the spear fighting,” Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., told the news organization PBS in mid-2023. “It’s logistics, personnel, maintenance — it’s moving people and things from one place to another on a day-to-day basis. … And, so, AI has advantages in all of those other noncombat functions that are critical to how militaries operate. And if militaries can make their maintenance and logistics and personnel and finance functions just 10% better, that’s going to have huge impacts for militaries on, ultimately, their capability at the military’s edge on the battlefield.” 

Those advantages are evident in negotiating the ocean of information that defines 21st century warfare. “Too much data can be the same as no data if you cannot sift through it in a meaningful time frame,” Schuyler Moore, CENTCOM’s chief technology officer, said at the GNSI conference. “AI is exceptional at sifting through massive amounts of data and surfacing the pieces that might be of particular interest, and then a human can decide what to do with it.”

ETHICAL, RESPONSIBLE

While Indo-Pacific partners accelerate their development and adoption of advanced capabilities, they also warn that authoritarian regimes in North Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia are exploiting AI to undermine international norms and destabilize populations globally. “We watched the PRC use AI to augment cyberattacks, support economic espionage and assist in the development of what they call system destruction warfare” to disable networks and satellites, Gen. Bryan Fenton, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said at the GNSI conference.

Russia’s military uses AI-enabled tools such as LLMs “to conduct reconnaissance of satellite capabilities to support their operations in the cyber and space domains,” Fenton said. “And we’ve also seen North Korea and Iran use AI to assist in their cyberattacks and cryptocurrency theft. None of these applications cares about an ethical approach or anything rooted in democratic values.”

By contrast, such principles guide AI adoption among Indo-Pacific Allies and Partners. The Australian Defence Department spokesperson said the agency “is committed to using AI-enabled technologies responsibly, with careful consideration of risks and potential impacts, in line with Australia’s legal obligations under international and domestic law, including international humanitarian law.”

Australia and Singapore are among more than 50 nations to endorse the U.S.-led Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy. Launched in 2023, the initiative established guidelines for AI capabilities to ensure rigorous testing and evaluation, compliance with states’ obligations under international humanitarian law, and accountability, including “during military operations within a responsible human chain of command and control.”

North Korea, the PRC and Russia have not endorsed the global framework. 

“There is much work to be done in the realm of AI governance and norms,” Brig. Gen. Frederick Choo, the Singapore Defence Ministry’s deputy secretary for policy, told defense and foreign affairs officials from 14 nations at the inaugural Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain regional consultation in Singapore in February 2024. “To effectively harness the opportunities for improved productivity and quality of life presented by AI, we must be keenly aware of the downside risks. Strong governance necessitates an all-hands approach between nations and within nations.”

The U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy, released in late 2023, builds upon a legacy of public-private innovation that began more than 60 years ago when the agency “seeded the first AI research hubs at universities across the country,” U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a prerecorded speech at the GNSI conference. “We’ve been moving rapidly and responsibly, iterating and investing, to deliver a more modernized, data-driven and AI-empowered military now to make our decision advantage even better than it already is,” she said. “AI-enabled systems can greatly improve the speed, quality and accuracy of commanders’ decisions, which can be decisive in deterring a fight and in winning a fight.”

The data powering DOD’s AI applications “comes from decades of real-world, modern military operations and years in active war zones [and] leverages abundant, resilient sensors and data-transmission networks across domains, from seabeds to outer space,” Hicks said. “And it’s made even stronger through data-sharing mechanisms with Allies and Partners, including democracies who are standing up to authoritarian neighbors as we speak. Together, we’re continually improving and expanding these mechanisms, like in the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S., Japan and South Korea now share early warning, missile-launch data trilaterally and in real time.”

‘ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE’ 

Six months before the TORVICE trials, military advisors, engineers and scientists from the AUKUS nations gathered at the British Army’s Salisbury Plain Training Area in southern England, about 16,000 kilometers from South Australia’s Cultana Training Area. Operators used a swarm of AI-enabled uncrewed aerial vehicles, including Blue Bear Ghost and CT220 drones, to detect and track targets in real time. Testing featured the world’s first “live retraining of models in flight,” the U.K. Defence Ministry stated. “This capability of mission-tailored adaptive AI is going to be able to deliver a capability greater than what any country can do alone,” Hugh Jeffrey, Australia’s deputy secretary for strategy, policy and industry, said in a news release. “That really is the rationale for AUKUS.”

Such experimentation demonstrates “an interoperable AI pipeline, enabling AUKUS partners to co-create AI models and deploy them on each other’s uncrewed air vehicles,” the Australian Defence Department spokesperson told FORUM.

The Centre for Advanced Defence Research in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the University of Adelaide is among the agencies leading those collaborative efforts. Established in 2021 in conjunction with Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group, the center’s priorities include creating training programs in autonomous systems and robotics for defense personnel; enhancing machine-learning capabilities; and developing interfaces between humans and autonomous systems.

Australia’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review, which called for force posture restructuring and other transitions encompassing all domains of the nation’s defense, also “highlighted the potential transformative impact of autonomous and robotics systems,” the Defence Department spokesperson said. “AI is a key technology in endowing robotic systems with autonomy, and Defence is moving rapidly to both understand and develop such systems to gain asymmetric advantage.”