AI Goes To War: Will The Pentagons TechnoFantasies Pave The Way For War With China?
Drone swarm. Image: JSC and AI Art Generator.
On August 28, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks used a three-day conference of the defense industry's largest trade group, the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA), to announce the Replicator Initiative. This includes, among other things, the production of “unmanned aerial vehicles” capable of hitting thousands of targets in China in a short time. We call it the beginning of a huge technology war.
His speech to arms manufacturers was another sign that the military-industrial complex, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower, more than sixty years ago, is still alive and well and headed in a new direction. Call it the MIC for the digital age.
Hicks describes the goals of the Replication Initiative as follows:
“To stay ahead of [China], we will develop advanced technologies... with autonomous systems that are fully deployable, cheaper, put fewer people at risk, and can be modified, upgraded or expanded in a much shorter time frame... We're in Our way to fight.' The People's Liberation Army has its own forces, but our forces will be difficult to plan, harder to strike, and even more difficult to defeat.
Think of it as AI warfare and, oh, “insulting,” a term that doesn't really sound like or mean much to ordinary taxpayers, pure Pentagon talk about readiness and quickly replacing what it loses. Systems in combat. Let us next examine whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are capable of developing a technological warfare system that is as cheap, effective, and easily replicable as Hicks suggested in his speech. But first I would like to focus on the goal of this effort: confrontation with China.
Destination: China
But if we measure China's willingness to engage in military conflict against its increasing reliance on its increasingly powerful tools of political and economic influence, it is clear that the Pentagon proposes to reassess the military-industrial challenges posed by Beijing. As Hicks said in his speech to arms manufacturers, this new strategy will be based on an important principle. The technological arms race of the future will depend largely on the dream of building cheaper and more powerful weapons systems based on rapid development of weapons. Almost instantaneous communication, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems in record time.
Hicks' proposed vision for the NDIA, as I noted, is not limited to responding diplomatically or politically to the challenge posed by Beijing as an emerging great power. Not to mention, it is arguably the most effective way to prevent future conflict with China.
Such a non-military approach would be based on a return to the long-stated "one China" policy. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States will give up any form of formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate country, while Beijing commits to limiting its efforts to seize the island peacefully.
There are many other issues on which cooperation between the two countries could shift US-China policy from one of confrontation to one of cooperation, as pointed out in a new article by my Queen's Institute colleague Jake Werner: 2) Combating climate change. 3) Review of global trade and economic systems; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive global order. Achieving these goals may seem extremely difficult in today's world, but the alternative – hostile rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war – must be seen as extremely dangerous. He considered it unacceptable.
On the other hand, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the risks of China's rise are experts on the risk of inflation. They find it easy and pathological to exaggerate Beijing's military capabilities and global intentions to justify future funding of the military-industrial complex.
As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, although China's strategy has advanced militarily in recent decades, it is “primarily defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. Indeed, Beijing today lags far behind Washington in military spending and core capabilities, including a much smaller (though still powerful) nuclear arsenal, a less capable navy, and fewer large combat aircraft. But none of this would be obvious if one simply listened to the forecasters in the halls of the Capitol and the Pentagon.
But, Grazier said, this should surprise no one because “the threat of inflation has been the preferred tool of defense spending advocates for decades.” This was, for example, the case at the end of the last Cold War. In the twentieth century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “Think about it.” I don't have any more villains. I salute Castro [Cuban Fidel] and Kim Il Sung [the late North Korean dictator]. »
Naturally, this posed a major threat to the Pentagon's finances, and Congress at the time was pushing for deep cuts in the armed forces and providing less money for new weapons in the early post-Cold War era. But the Pentagon quickly highlighted a series of new threats to US forces to justify increased military spending. With no major powers in sight, they began to focus on the threat posed by regional powers such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. They also greatly overestimated their military strength in order to raise the funds to win not one, but two major regional conflicts. The process of using perceived new threats to justify a major military buildup was clearly demonstrated in Michael Klare's 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.
After the 9/11 attacks, the “rogue state” logic was for a time replaced by the disastrous “global war on terrorism,” which was clearly the wrong response to these terrorist attacks. This would lead to billions of dollars being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a global counterterrorism presence to support US operations in 1985 - yes, 85. - Countries, as Brown's impressively documented Project Costs of War University.
All this blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many indirect deaths), as well as thousands of American deaths and devastating physical and psychological injuries to US military personnel, led to unstable structures. Or an oppressive regime whose actions, in the case of Iraq, contributed to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). In fact, these interventions turned out to be not just a “walk in the park” or the development of democracy, as American warmongers predicted after the events of September 11. Give them all the credit though. They have proven to be very effective money-making machines for the inhabitants of the military-industrial complex.
Building the “Chinese threat”
Meanwhile, the Chinese threat posture continues to grow under the Trump administration. In fact, the Pentagon's 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future for the first time since the 20th century.
The report of the congressionally mandated Committee on National Defense Strategy was one of the most influential documents of this period. The pentagon's strategy has been validated and affirmed with additional information that the defense minister does not receive from the argent defense force to remove military defenses from large rival buildings, in particular. China.
The committee recommended increasing the Pentagon's budget for the coming years by 3 to 5 percent above the rate of inflation, a move that would bring the Pentagon's budget to a trillion dollars or more within a few years. The report was later widely cited by advocates of Pentagon spending in Congress, including former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who often presented the report to witnesses at hearings and asked them to swear allegiance to its findings. This is a questionable conclusion. .
Hardliners in Congress had accepted a real growth rate of between 3% and 5%, and until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, government spending had remained faithful to that model. What hasn't been discussed much is research conducted by the government's oversight program, which shows that the committee that wrote the report and pushed for the spending increase was heavily influenced by people connected to the firearms industry. For example, one of its chairs is a board member of the defense giant Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members have served as consultants to the defense industry or worked at research institutions widely funded by these companies. Thus, we are never talking about an objective assessment of the “defense needs” of the United States.
Beware of the Pentagon's "techno-enthusiasm."
Lest anyone miss the essence of her speech at the National Defense Conference, Kathleen Hicks emphasized that her proposed review of weapons development needed for future technological warfare was aimed squarely at Beijing. “We must ensure that the leaders of the People’s Republic of China wake up every day, consider the risks of aggression and conclude: ‘Today is not the day.’ Not just today, but all the days until 2027. Now and in 2035, now and in 2049 and beyond.” ...Innovation is our way.
The idea that advanced military technology can be a silver bullet for complex security challenges flies in the face of actual data presented by the Pentagon and the defense industry over the past five decades. Over the years, new systems considered "revolutionary", such as the F-35 fighter jet, the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) and the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, have experienced cost overruns, schedule delays, performance issues, and maintenance issues . . Which severely limits their combat capabilities at best. In fact, the Navy was already considering prematurely retiring some of these littoral combat ships, while the entire FCS program was immediately canceled.
In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of its activity and industry in the era of artificial intelligence, which is difficult to achieve.
But you can count on one thing. This new approach is likely to be a goldmine for weapons suppliers, even if the resulting weapons do not work as advertised. This effort will not come without political challenges, especially raising the billions of dollars needed to achieve the goals of the Replicator Initiative while fending off pressure from makers of big-ticket goods like wearables — airplanes, bombers and fighter jets.
Members of Congress will vigorously defend current generation systems to ensure that weapons spending goes to major contractors as well as key congressional districts. One possible solution to the conflict between funding Hicks proposes for new systems and the expensive programs that currently fuel the defense industry's giants is to increase the Pentagon's already massive budget, with the goal of taking it into the trillions of dollars. Spending levels since World War II.
The Pentagon has long built its strategy on technological marvels like the Vietnam-era “electronic battlefield”; The “revolution in military affairs” was first heralded in the early 1990s, and precision-guided munitions have been heralded since at least the 1991 Gulf War, but have never been publicized. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign during the Persian Gulf War stated that “DoD and contractor claims regarding the ability of laser-guided munitions to hit a single target and a single bomb are unfounded.” On average, 11 tons of guided munitions and 44 tons of unguided munitions were fired at each target destroyed. »
When such advanced weapons systems can be deployed at enormous cost and over time, they are often of limited value, even against relatively lightly armed adversaries (as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan this century). Another problem is China, a formidable competitor with a modern industrial base and more advanced weapons. Efforts to achieve military superiority over Beijing and win a war against a nuclear-armed state should (but should not) be considered foolish, because they are more likely to provoke war than to prevent it, and are likely to be disastrous for all concerned. Anxiety.
Perhaps most alarmingly, efforts to produce AI-based weapons on a large scale will only increase the likelihood that future wars will be equally destructive without human intervention. As Michael Klar notes in his report for the Arms Control Association, the use of such systems also increases the likelihood of technical failures, as well as poor AI-based targeting decisions, which can lead to accidental killings and decisions made without human intervention. The potential for disaster in the operation of such an autonomous system would only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.
The Pentagon's technological enthusiasm can still be controlled by slowing the development of the systems Hicks mentioned in his speech, while establishing international rules for the development and deployment of such systems in the future. But now is the time to start fighting this misguided “technological revolution,” before war automatically increases the risk of global catastrophe. Choosing new weapons over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a sure recipe for disaster for decades to come. There must be a better way.
This column was contributed by TomDisaptch.
