General’s Intelligence Vs Artificial Intelligence – Can Military Strategy become an Algorithm?

General’s Intelligence Vs Artificial Intelligence –

Can Military Strategy become an Algorithm?

11^th 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 6^th 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.

Can AI make Military Strategy and Planning?

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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Winning the Asymmetric Wars - Matrix of Instruments of War

{*** The article below has been published at Indian Defence Review now. Please see HERE


Winning the Asymmetric Wars – Matrix of Instruments of War 

Using Ivan Arreguin Toft’s hypothesis of strategic interaction proposed and studied on a sample of asymmetric conflicts since year 1800, in “How the weak win wars – a theory of asymmetric conflict”, I have proposed the three step rapid strategy switching process for winning the asymmetric wars.

The three steps include the discovery of adversary’s strategy. Whether it is belonging to one of the two clearly demarcated Toft classes, i.e., indirect or direct. The second step involves creating and executing the most appropriate counter strategy that should be in the same class as the adversary’s. Finally, as the opponent changes its strategy from direct to indirect strategy, or indirect to direct strategy, we need to adapt by shifting our strategy to the same class as is done by the adversary. As per Toft, Symmetric Strategic Interaction is the key for winning the asymmetric wars for the stronger player. Of course, for the weaker player it has to be asymmetric option. Toft’s book was published in the year 2005. Since then a new term has emerged called the hybrid war. The hybrid warfare combines regular war with irregular warfare and cyber warfare. This three-domain war (3-Domain war), as one can see, requires a peculiar blend of conventional, special ops, irregulars and cyber/information warriors that conventional armed forces are typically unable to provision because of the siloed way in which these forces have been designed and developed. A cunning and agile adversary, focused on achieving its political and military objectives can combine the three domains in an eclectic game, that the regular conventional forces, with their linear thinking and capabilities, are not designed to even comprehend, forget about playing it.

The asymmetric warfare and its evolved form – hybrid warfare - comprising regular, irregular and cyber/informational warfare – is markedly different as the type of conflict operations that get created in the hybrid war bear almost no resemblance to the warfare by and against regular armies that we designed the armies for, in the first place. Secondly the key instruments of such operations – instruments of war - are typically infantry or humans trained to operate variety of small arms in a brutal manner. The capabilities of armor, artillery, air force and even cruise missiles are suddenly rendered tangential as the weapons used are crude IEDs, AK47s, grenades, and suicide bombers. Sun-Tzu, the military philosopher from ancient China, told that the superior militarist spectrum of attack starts at the strongest if it is carried out when the enemy is still laying out its schemes. The next best stage is to attack enemy’s alliances, then comes the attack on adversary’s army, lowest is to attack the city and last resort is the seize of a city. In the terror inducing option, the attack is always on city to create a long-lasting picture in the mind of the population and the government of the country. As a tributary strategic flow the armed forces and economic assets are destroyed to induce terror. The non-state actors have been created, employed, evolved and engaged to carry out inciting insurgency, widening local fracture lines, creating ideological substrate to build monuments of terror movements that not only lasts long but have a much lower cost in terms of option of political deniability and utilization of disgruntled and frustrated youth in the adversary’s society – especially in developing economies.

By design, hybrid war, however, avoid military to military confrontation, as far as possible. Further, the weaker actor in the hybrid war, uses all its instruments of war at the time and place of its choice selectively and in complete synergy. Although the effects appear disparate initially. The agile switching and synergistic utilization of different instruments of war is the strategic architecture of Hybrid War actor. The traditional warrior or the strong actor with its conventional, large military and bigger economy, comprehends the attacks in silos and responds in a piecemeal manner. That is where the asymmetry gets created and impacts the stronger actor’s chances of win, negatively.

India is fighting Hybrid War by its adversaries.

Since 2008, China has not only become more assertive but it has created aggressive designs and actions in its quest for new type of superpower by 2050. The architecture that emerged is President’s Xi’s “Marshall Plan” as designed in One Belt One Road (OBOR) with its key leg in China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The OBOR is rapidly engulfing and entangling India. One can see the rapid implementation of OBOR as I described in a previous article here.  What is emerging slowly but surely is the increasing Chinese influence on Pakistan – militarily, economically, politically and even infrastructural. This peaceful and friendly engulfment of Pakistan through various instruments has many ramifications for India and the world at large. The friendly takeover of Pakistan by China is a potential scenario that India should analyze and either proactively counter or be prepared for costly reactive repairs after the events. 

In a recent article published at National Interest, the hesitancy of US army and politicians to have certain thresholds of military operations above which they will go to the force-on-force combat where they have considerable capability and advantage has been mentioned. The article says below that threshold Russia and China have played the asymmetric war options with considerable success. In fact, American Strategic predictability as articulated in its considerably open assessment reports has become an input for others to design their asymmetric wars. Interestingly, India has always been maintaining a much higher threshold to responding by force-on-force military options – first due to inherent ideality of its ideological political philosophy and later constraint by the escalation spirals to nuclear conflict as communicated by others. 

Irrespective of the fate or evolution of Sino-Pakistan nexus and emerging geopolitical axis, India has been subjected to a hybrid war by Pakistan based jihadi and terror groups for many years now. Pakistan, along with its “all-weather friend” China, has created and used instruments of war in the asymmetric/hybrid spectrum to a considerable success. India has not responded to various instruments of hybrid war for the simple reason that we neither have designed, developed and nor integrated these instruments in a spectral spread of potential options space in the asymmetrical/hybrid war. Instead India has been creating options, capabilities, structures and doctrines in the conventional warfare space, that too in a fledgling on-off way – be it the so-termed Cold Start Doctrine against Pakistan or Mountain Strike Corps against China. In contrast, our adversaries are not only crisp, clear and confident, in not only articulating their instruments/doctrines/strategies but developing them in full public eyes of the international community – for example, Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons as reflected in the 60Km NASR create a new option between the conventional and full-scale Nuclear war, in the shining glare of international community. 

As I have mentioned in the previous article that India has been facing an asymmetric war/Hybrid war – a new type of war, and we should address that by calling it a War, albeit a different kind of war. The problem is acute, as we do not have clarity on distinct nature of various instruments of hybrid war that form the full spectrum. Each instrument has a specific role that requires an orchestration of these instruments through a centralized algorithm through an agile conductor. That Pakistan and its deep state conducts with glee and enthusiasm as they are focused on conducting it with clear strategic vision and objectives.

Matrix of Instruments of Hybrid War

In the emergent matrix of instruments of Hybrid War, India has not only failed to recognize, articulate, communicate, and respond to the hybrid war unleashed by Pakistani deep state and its sponsors, but has been completely unmindful of all spectrum of hybrid war instruments that need to be responded to through creation of corresponding instruments of hybrid war or counter-instruments. This has resulted in an overload of responsibilities and need for deploying capabilities for which our conventional forces get assigned for which they never were designed. 

The matrix below is just an illustrative way to study the interactions and formulations of instruments of hybrid war and highlights the doctrinal or instrumental lacuna in our force/response structure. It can be extended and developed further with due diligence to create a response envelope that will cover the full spectrum of hybrid war/asymmetric war that we are fighting for so many years, but with limited instruments of conventional wars that we have designed our forces/instruments for. It indeed is a challenge but one that we should have designed much earlier.

Instruments of War Matrix – Hybrid War		ADVERSARIES
		Regular Army	Special Operations Forces (SOF)	Irregulars/Terrorists	Cyber Instruments (Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare – CHEW - Focus)
INDIA	Regular Army	(1) Conventional War	(2) Military Intelligence/ Policing/Defending VA/VPs against Attack by adversaries SOFs on Regular IA	(3) COIN and Counter Guerilla Warfare Strategy (CGWS)	(4) Defensive Cyber Warfare/ Cyber security
	SOFs	(5) Surprise attacks for specific purposes	(6) Potential Spiral Swarming Covert Operation (Need to create a doctrine)	(7) Surgical Strikes at the terrorist camps and originators infrastructure	(8) Information intensive operations in support of SOFs/Cyber security
	Irregulars/Terrorists	(9) Inciting Insurgency by supporting fault lines (India doesn’t have a specific doctrine)	(10) India doesn’t have strategy, organization, doctrine and technology so far. This should be created and owned by intelligence organization	(11) So far, no Indian doctrine exist – a potential non-conventional doctrine to be created	(12) Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare – (we do not have a full-fledged doctrine for Cyber-Psy-Ops, cyber warfare using irregulars)
	Cyber Instruments (Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare – CHEW - Focus)	(13) Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare	(14) Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare	(15) Crime/Hacking/Espionage/Warfare	(16) (a) Defensive Cyber CHEW (b) Offensive Cyber CHEW

 
A rather updated version of the matrix of instruments of war with authors gut feeling of Indian capability vis-a-vis its adversaries is in the figure below.

One can observe that the matrix shows 16 elements or interactions of 4 instruments of hybrid war from Indian side and 4 instruments of hybrid war from adversary side. To read the above matrix, if we trace the Indian regular army row (1^st row) and Adversary’s regular army column (1^st Column) we get the element (1) which is conventional war between two regular armies for which India is not only well trained and prepared but has comprehensive superiority over Pakistan and a sufficient parity against China. If we move to say element (3) which is adversary’s irregulars/jihadis/terrorists attacking our regular army, we have learnt the insurgency and counter insurgency ops paying heaving price of loss of our soldiers. It is the elements (9), (10), (11) and (12) i.e., India using its own irregulars to fight adversary’s army. Special operations forces, irregulars and cyber instruments that we simply do not have a doctrine, a strategy or even an instrument in place.

Rapid Strategy Switching – Orchestrating the Instruments of Hybrid War

The Rapid Strategy Switching, as proposed earlier, requires availability of full spectrum instruments of hybrid/asymmetric war. Even if some instruments are partially developed, their doctrine and employability should be conceptually developed. When the adversary (especially an asymmetric adversary attacks – indirect or direct – the stronger player need to switch the counter attack from impending asymmetry to a symmetrical attack. The orchestration of instruments of hybrid war to switch the strategy is of paramount importance. India need to fight this new kind of war with a holistic command and control system that orchestrate all instruments of hybrid war – regular forces, irregular forces, special operations forces and cyberwarriors into full-spectrum responding force that can switch its strategy rapidly.

Conclusions

India has been subjected to war and we need to fight it as such. However, this war is a new kind of war. It is different and we not only lack all instruments of this asymmetric/hybrid war that our adversaries have developed over the years, but we do not have clear theoretical basis/understanding of fighting this multi-domain war. In this article, we have proposed two key concepts – (a) a matrix of instruments of Hybrid war and (b) a mechanism of rapid strategy switching to win the asymmetric wars. We believe a comprehensive framework combining these two key concepts can give us directions to not only think but create a comprehensive full spectrum response to respond to this new kind of war, as a war. It is imperative that we must develop the full spectrum hybrid war understanding and create a robust response.