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HASTI PUBLIC SCHOOL & JR.COLLELGE,DONDAICHA

BLOG NO. 79

Israel has shown the way how to use AI during the war and have even referred to it as the “The First Artificial Intelligence War”  against Hamas during its operation Guardian of the Walls.

Watching the videos of swarms of drones as autonomous aerial weapons reportedly used by Azerbaijan during last year’s war with neighboring Armenia, in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, and the recent Israelis – Hamas conflict using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to pinpoint destroy the targets deep inside Gaza or the ‘Iron Dome’ successfully beating back the Rockets fire assaults, makes us believe the warfare has come a long way. Supercomputing was extensively used and they heavily relied upon machine learning and data collection. Instead of using the land army or even the air force, AI was the key component and force multiplier for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

These two recent examples exemplify the redundancy and obsolescence of many weapons of war and even impinge upon the traditional strategy and tactics world plans to fight the next war

Oft spoken phrase “we generally make plans to fight the last war’ needs to be taken a serious note of and rather look ahead at what the future world war would look like.

 If we were to visualize what the components may be – certainly the AI  will be one of the important ingredients and the others will include Cyber weapons, Drones, Loitering Munitions, Ballistic missiles and Space based satellites in addition to the existing weapon platforms in the next world war.

it is believed that the key trends in wars ahead would be the extensive use of AI, Drones, cyber weapons and use of killer apps, space based control of surveillance and creation of a defensive umbrella with offensive capabilities, Iron Dome like capabilities and the use of Lethal Autonomous Robots to kill*. Let us see some of these key trends and extrapolate their images into future wars.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A.I. will play a major role in the conflicts ahead. ,gathering of mass datasets has already begun and data is considered to be the new gold. Countries like China are already believed to be gathering data for quite some time for future military use. It is believed that there is a company in the US which is only investing in the collection of data. Big data requires interpretation and predictive analyses. The results are then verified for its accuracy and then used in the AI algorithm.

Drones

The latest war between Azerbaijan and Armenia witnessed the furious dance of loitering munitions and swarms of drones filling up the sky and causing havoc without sending out the Infantry, Tanks or Mechanized columns on ground in a large number; an unthinkable war scene a couple of years back.

Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) or simply called Combat Drones carried bombs and missiles under varying levels of autonomy i.e. under real-time soldier controlled or programmed to deliver the ordnance autonomously, thus assuming a standoff role and depersonalizing the decision to attack

Cyber Weapons

Stuxnet, widely believed to be jointly developed by the intelligence agencies of USA and Israel, was used against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility, and as such introduced cyber weapons to the war machinery. Similar weapons are not too far off and might be ready to go ahead. Also, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a challenge to the effective and uninterrupted communication and surveillance mechanism, so vital to win a war.

Conclusion

The world is moving fast and there are other worrying trends such as the use of Crypto currency, which is allowing terrorists to transfer funds or pay for acquisition of weapons without a trace of who paid whom without using the well-established financial institutions like the Banks. Space based satellites and navigation setup is both useful as well as vulnerable and will play an important role in the future war. Today the technology is no more evolutionary from one version to another but it is leaping ahead, as Peter Warren Singer, a Cyber expert mentioned recently.

Disruptive technologies are changing the world rapidly. Good news is that ethical questions are being debated in San Francisco, the AI capital of the world, as to how far the technology should be allowed to be autonomous and whether the software designers and engineers need to have a code of conduct.* But the day is not very far off when we see a new type of war clouds engulf us*. A beginning is made, only the future will reveal how many of these trends will further change the shape of the next world war.