While the military across the world had been studying the use of Artificial Intelligence or AI form some years now, the emergence of ChatGPT in the public domain apart from other AI tools such as Google’s Bard has fired the imagination of even the lay military men to exploitation of AI for a variety of operational and logistics tasks ranging from surveillance to inventory management. The War in Ukraine could well emerge as the first in which AI was used for a variety of purposes.
In fact Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir an AI software provider has claimed that Ukraine forces enjoyed a major advantage due to use of AI over the Russians, claims which need further verification.
Employment of AI in Ukraine War.
Some of the commonly known use of AI in the war in Ukraine primarily by armed forces of that country which are publicly known are summarised as given below. While Russian force have also used AI however open source information is limited hence these could not be included.
AI-enabled voice transcription and translation was employed to “process intercepted Russian communications and automatically highlight information concerning the Ukrainian forces.”
Claims are being made of capability enhancements in drones and loitering munitions using AI not only for flight but also for targeting and firing. These cannot be accurately assessed but the potential does exist.
Use of geospatial intelligence has been the most significant exploitation of AI in the Ukraine War which has been employed for geo-location, analysis of satellite images including social media photographs. Importantly Ukraine was provided extended support by companies such as
Palantir Technologies, Planet Labs, BlackSky Technology and Maxar Technologies indicating that the present expertise lies largely in the commercial sector. Transcription of geospatial information into actionable intelligence including troop movement and battle damage assessment has bene seen to be effective.
Facial recognition software is another area where considerable advances have been made and AI has been effective.
Artificial Intelligence is also very effective in the field of electronic warfare and encryption.
The Future
Despite the exploitation identified in Ukraine it is apparent that this is just a tip of the iceberg so to say. Today exotic terms such as, “algorithmic warfare,” in which autonomous systems and weapons can select targets independently and launch attacks.
To achieve this impact however, AI will have to undergo vast technical improvements, for accuracy of machine learning models and systems and integrate from multiple sources. This underlines some expected challenges.
Challenge of AI
Underlining the potential of AI is caution that effective application will require extensive data bases specific to the purpose or the system for which they are to be employed.
For instance ChatGPT is derived from large number of sources that have been provided to the software to include the internet, books, articles, media, videos and so on which is used to train the system through machine or, “unsupervised learning.”
The use of algorithms facilitates the software to detect patterns from this data and then generate responses.
When so prompted the appropriate response is given, which may on the face of it appear to be accurate but needs verification.
Therein lies the challenge for military use of AI which was evident in the war in Ukraine as well.
Unlike the data base employed by ChatGPT which can be generalised in nature, each military system injected with AI will require a relevant archive from which to identify the pattern and give the responses.
Building such a data base for thousands of weapons and support systems apart from logistics for the AI to give a near error free response to the military decision maker is a time consuming process.
And without such a reference base the AI cannot be used for military purposes given the criticality of accuracy desired in an operational situation which entails life and death scenarios.
Another important aspect is the credibility of creators of the data base. Mostly these are presently civilian programmers who are assisted by military personnel with knowledge expertise.
High level of personnel as well as cyber security is involved in developing legacy data bases for AI use.
And finally interference by the enemy will have to be expected and discounted while calculation of efficiencies. At present China – India’s principal and potential adversary is expected to surpass the leader United States in this domain in the coming decade.
It is time that Indian armed forces make rapid advances in preparation for adaption to AI for military use – operational as well as non operational.
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