General’s Intelligence Vs Artificial Intelligence –
Can Military Strategy become an Algorithm?
11th May 1997 is a
significant day. Besides being exactly a year before India conducted its second
nuclear tests, it is the day that IBM’s Deep Blue computer made Gary Kasparov, the
human world champion, concede defeat in less than 20 moves in the 6th
Game of Chess that they played together. Kasparov reflect today, 20 years
later, in his book “Deep Thinking – where machine intelligence ends and human
creativity begins”, even if he would have won, it was just a matter of time
when computers would have started winning. The supporters of Artificial
Intelligence – called the hard AI – were delighted then – proclaiming a day,
not in too far in future ahead, when machines will be able to replicate the
human decision-making process. In contrast, soft AI proponents believe that
intelligence cannot be created artificially. It can at best be simulated at an
appropriate level of detail to create solutions for some of human
decision-making problems.
Winning a game of Chess, of
course, cannot be considered a comprehensive test of intelligence. Various
alternatives in Chess can be known in advance. The win depends to a
considerable extent upon look-ahead of number of moves of the opponents a
player can analyze from the present board position. Supercomputers will have
more look-ahead capability than the best human chess player like Kasparov. But
do they have vision, can they create, invent or innovate? More important and
perhaps interesting is the question can they, the machines with artificial
intelligence, systems with a mind, if one may, can they conduct war operations?
Can they assist in military tactics, operations and strategy? Can an Artificial Intelligence replace our
military commanders and Generals?
Military
Competence as a test case of Intelligence
Human intelligence, a
particularly demonstrable version of it, arguably, is amenable for potential
study in war scenarios, as it is likely to be highly pronounced under stress
and crisis. Wars and military situations can produce a set of intelligence
traits under extremely stressful conditions with greatest stakes, although war
itself can be considered a most foolish act of human intelligence. Each of the
two world wars in the last century showed and resulted in rapid advancements of
science and technology due to the enhanced pace of competition for creating combat
superiority. The wars may have ended but the technology competition continued
during cold war. Advanced technologies started to overpower the classical
warfare doctrines and strategies so much that a new term was coined in
erstwhile USSR - Military Technology Revolution (MTR). By mid 1990s the term
has mutated to Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The technological armed
forces of US, allies and other high-tech powers, however, were faced with
low-tech warfare of different type of actors – guerillas, insurgents,
terrorists, freedom fighters who usually get embedded in urban, rural, hill populations
or in dense jungles. The vapor army of these actors – non-state as well as
state actors used methods and techniques that the conventional militaries
despite their cutting-edge technologies are not able to fathom clearly, what to
say about responding with finesse.
In 1975, Norman Dixon published a
fascinating and provocative book titled “On the psychology of military incompetence”
that brought to the fore the inherent human traits that Military Generals in
the wars of the past displayed that can only be termed as incompetence. He
writes, “One thing is certain: the ways of conventional militarism are ill
suited to ‘low intensity operations’ “. Clausewitz says, “Although our intellect
always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”
Given the Clausewitz’s fog of war and military incompetence inherent in the
psychology of human Military Generals, a case for AI based military generals
can be made.
Can war
outcomes be predicted or can operations be modeled mathematically?
In a war situation like the 1991
Gulf-war, for example, various factors affecting the outcome and conduct of war
are uncertain, unquantifiable and usually unique to the war context. An attempt
to list down the key factors was made by military historian Col. T.N. Dupuy who
identified 73 factors. He developed the ‘Quantified Judgement Method of
Analysis’ (QJMA) based upon analysis of historical war data which was published
in his book “Numbers, Prediction and War”. On 13 December 1990, about a month
before the 1991 Desert Storm started on 16 January 1991, Col. Dupuy
successfully analyzed and presented the military options in the Gulf war to the
House Armed Committee. The five options discussed by Dupuy were named –
Colorado Springs, Bulldozer, Leavenworth, Razzle-dazzle and Seize. His models
calculated the potential US casualties in D+40 days to range from 680 to 10479
(dead and wounded) in various options. Iraqi casualties were estimated to be
118500. He published his options in a 1991 book titled – “If war comes, how to
defeat Saddam Hussein”.
It must
be noted that the five options discussed by Dupuy were perceived/conceived by
him through his experience as a retired service officer and not by computer.
Computer though helped in the analysis of these five options based on the QJMA
and associated theory developed by Dupuy. Incidentally, other such models have
also been made by various actors – for example, Rand Corporation developed a
model named Situational Force Scoring (SFS) that uses certain expert judgement
factors besides assigning a firepower scores to each weapon. Unlike Chess, war
is what can be termed an open system, where many imponderables exist. To
successfully model a war is not only difficult but perhaps may fall under the
realm of not amenable for modeling systems – due to the chaotic regions the
non-linear effects of war may lead the interactions into – what Clausewitz
termed the fog of war.
What
computers can then do?
Computers can help in evaluating
various options, particularly for problems which, though complicated, are
well-defined. Before and during the 1991 Gulf-war, the allied forces needed to
schedule several lakhs of troops and hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo.
Manually it was a challenging task since each mission required a three-day
round trip, visiting seven or more different airfields under the command of up
to four different air crews and consuming almost million pounds of fuel. This
challenge was met by a computer/operational research team of scientists who
helped to schedule more than 100 missions each day – a task humanly impossible
to plan without computers.
Consider another example of
selecting and attacking different targets. For each target depending on its
classification as land, air or naval target, fixed or mobile, defended or
undefended, a strike package of aircraft to achieve maximum damage had to be
created and chosen. This required identification, assessment and location of
targets using reconnaissance photographs. In case of mobile targets such as
Scud launchers, a track of movement from one location to another must be made
continuously. Also, an assessment whether the target needs another attack must
be made on a continuous basis. This planning for an attack required computer
support and could not have been achieved without the help of computers and
related technological support.
1991 Gulf war is already more
than a quarter century old. Today’s wars have evolved into a peculiar mix of
hybrids and multi-dimensional mutants that the RMA based strategic thinkers of
1990s didn’t predict. Generals in future wars will face more complicated
decision-making scenarios. The progress being made in the field of Artificial
Intelligence is no doubt substantial, but we are still far from behind a
scenario in which military commanders will be replaced by computers. No
computer program as of now has passed the critical “Turing test” which is the
threshold to assign “intelligence” to the computer. The Turing test proposed by
the famous British mathematician Allan Turing, considers a scenario in which a
human being is talking to a computer through a network or any other means
without being aware of its identity. If the human being after lots of questions
and answers starts believing that he is talking to another human being instead
of a computer, then the computer can be considered as intelligent. Currently,
computers are essentially data processing and information processing machines.
Their role is predominantly applicable to first three levels of the
intelligence pyramid which has data, information, knowledge, intelligence and
wisdom. The current state of use is limited to knowledge processing systems to
aid intelligent decisions. Wars continue to be led by Generals or military
commanders with computers used for information processing and as an aid for
decision-making by investigating outcome of various alternatives. The evolution
of strategies which require creativity and innovativeness continue to depend
upon the wisdom and experience of Generals. Computers are supposed to assist
the generals in determining optimal strategies, despite the psychology of
military incompetence that they are plagued with.
Technology, however, is evolving
and now making inroads into the realms hitherto unthought. As per Law of
increasing intelligence of technical systems (One can download the pdf on law
of increasing intelligence of technical systems at http://aitriz.org/articles/InsideTRIZ/323031322D31312D6E61766E6565742D627573686D616E.pdf
), dumb/unguided systems became guided systems, then smart systems, brilliant
systems and genius systems. Today, we are already in the era of smart
munitions. Brilliant munitions are emerging. Genius munitions will the next
stage.
A recent report
indicates the possible use cases of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI),
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)
in Defence and Security of a nation. Pentagon already has established an
algorithmic warfare cross functional team that will fight the ISIS through
application of machine learning and deep learning on the rapid infusion of
real-time satellite and drone data, images and video feeds. The immediate task
is for the machines to learn about 38 critical objects in the video/image
feeds. Once learned, machines would prefer and so would their controllers to
let them decide on what to do with or against the identified targets. A scary
“automated kill” intelligence to be built in the machines. Recent incident of
the AI creating its own language resulting in the closure of the system (for
the time being) at Facebook, clearly indicates the potential as well potential
pitfalls that we are getting into.
AI for Generals
Although we are away from
replacing the military commanders by AI, we reckon technology is fast evolving
when we must take a serious call on how much of the Generals intelligence we
should replace by artificial intelligence, when and for what tasks. Giving the
last point to Kasparov – the human Chess master who gave in to the Artificial
Intelligence two decades back – despite the military incompetence, human
stupidity and increasing machine intelligence, human creativity and imagination
will be needed by the machines in the way forward – not only for controlling
the machines but also enabling the machines. AI will continue to require the
human mind – with intelligence or otherwise as thinking – specifically
reflective or critical thinking is still not mechanizable. The way forward
indeed will be with AI supplanting and enhancing general’s intelligence and of
course suppressing their military incompetence.
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