Before the Marine Corps can fully utilize the power of AI technology and the efficiencies it brings, the service must overcome one major hurdle: trust.

That’s the message from Commandant Gen. David Berger.

“We’re going to have to trust artificial intelligence,” he said during remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in February. “We’re not trusting today.”

Whether it’s “sensor-to-shooter or fuel to a frontline unit, we put humans in the loop at about 16 places because we don’t trust it yet,” he said.

The best way to boost confidence in the technology is to have Marines train machines, he said. “Then we’ll trust it.”
Brig. Gen. Eric Austin, director of the Marine Corps’ Capabilities Development Directorate, said building that faith in artificial intelligence will unlock its potential.

Service leaders believe the technology will be a key enabler for troops.

“How do we improve the Marine’s ability to understand the environment, make a decision based on what they see and then act, and ensure that those actions are communicated across the force — and do it faster than an adversary?” Berger said. “Some of the technology for doing that already exists.”

Artificial intelligence could assist the service with sifting through large quantities of data to provide commanders with targeted information, he said.

Intelligence information “can be stored, sorted and downloaded from a cloud for our forward deployed forces,” he said.

Austin said intelligence analysis is one of the service’s most mature applications of AI. The Marine Corps is developing tools to process vast amounts of data, provide rapid situational awareness to relieve cognitive burdens and enable Marines to focus on making critical decisions, he said.

The service is also employing artificial intelligence for force protection, he noted. It is currently using the technology for a counter-drone effort to protect forward bases.

The capability is “really neat because it’s a sensor-agnostic approach that provides the inputs through an artificial intelligence framework and leverages algorithms to discriminate threats and offer means to mitigate them, to reduce the burden on operators and … increase the velocity and accuracy of human decisions,” Austin said.

The service is also investing in systems that allow Marines to access data at the tactical edge while operating in denied and degraded environments with limited bandwidth by prioritizing dissemination of the most critical data, he added.

Other key areas of AI development include business processes, support for maintenance missions and improving logistics, he said. It could also be used to inform force development.

The Marine Corps wants to move beyond just the analytics aspect of AI and pursue systems that can truly make recommendations rapidly, he noted.

Austin said the service is on the verge of unprecedented change driven not only by the emergence of new capabilities, but modifications to tactics, techniques and procedures.

“We’ve got to not only realize new capabilities, but we’ve got to know how to use them,” he said. “Part of that comes from just getting these capabilities and these tools in the hands of the Marines and watching them go.”

While the service has AI experts and data scientists on its team, developing the technology is not as simple as just knocking on their door and asking for a system, Austin said.

Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies such as unmanned systems are ubiquitous across the military’s portfolio of activities and warfighting functional areas, “which adds to the complexity of our approach,” he said.

Key to the way ahead will be to continue to operationalize AI in meaningful and increasingly sophisticated ways, he said. Marines will need to value, understand, field and employ these types of platforms to gain an advantage. The service will need to invest in the science and technology underlying AI systems and test them during experimentation events, Austin said.

The Marine Corps will also need to be open to making mistakes and learning from them as it embarks on an AI-enabled future, he added.

“We’re going to goof it up sometimes. You’re going to fail,” he said.

Ultimately, the technology will be useful across multiple lanes, whether it’s business systems, applications like Joint All-Domain Command and Control — which is being pegged as an internet-of-military-things — or advanced weapon platforms, Austin said.

“We’re just going to learn a lot and find new ways to use it,” he said.

Meanwhile, AI can help with force readiness, Berger said in a recent Washington Post op-ed that he co-authored with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. with the headline, “To Compete with China and Russia, the U.S. Military Must Redefine ‘Readiness.’”

In the op-ed, the generals argue that readiness “has become synonymous with availability,” and note that this short-term and narrow view is poorly suited for great power competition.

“We propose a new framework for defining readiness, one that better balances today’s needs with those of tomorrow, incorporating elements of current availability, modernization and risk,” they wrote. “As a starting point, we recommend adding to readiness metrics new layers of analysis utilizing artificial intelligence to leverage the military’s data-rich environment. Such a framework would enable military service chiefs to better prioritize investments in research, development and future force design initiatives, rather than spending the majority of their resources on making decades-old capabilities ready for employment.”

This framework would deliver forces that combatant commanders need today but also invest in capabilities needed for the future, they said.

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Artificial intelligence” (AI) has become one of the buzzwords of the decade, as a potentially important part of the answer to humanity’s biggest challenges in everything from addressing climate change to fighting cancer and even halting the ageing process. It is widely seen as the most important technological development since the mass use of electricity, one that will usher in the next phase of human evolution. At the same time, some warnings that AI could lead to widespread unemployment, rising inequality, the development of surveillance dystopias, or even the end of humanity are worryingly convincing. States would, therefore, be well advised to actively guide AI’s development and adoption into their societies.

For Europe, 2019 was the year of AI strategy development, as a growing number of EU member states put together expert groups, organised public debates, and published strategies designed to grapple with the possible implications of AI. European countries have developed training programmes, allocated investment, and made plans for cooperation in the area. 2020 is likely to be an important one for AI in Europe, as member states and the European Union will need to show that they can fulfil their promises by translating ideas into effective policies.

Despite these positive developments, Europeans generally pay too little attention to one aspect of the issue: the use of AI in the military realm. Strikingly, the military implications of AI are absent from many European AI strategies, as governments and officials appear uncomfortable discussing the subject (with the exception of the debate on limiting “killer robots”). Similarly, the academic and expert discourse on AI in the military also tends to overlook Europe, predominantly focusing on developments in the US, China, and, to some extent, Russia. This is likely because most researchers consider Europe to be an unimportant player in the area. A focus on the United States is nothing new in military studies, given that the country is the world’s leading military and technological power. And China has increasingly drawn experts’ attention due to its rapidly growing importance in world affairs and its declared aim of increasing its investment in AI. Europe, however, remains forgotten.

Overall, there are many possible uses of AI in the military and security realm – most of which receive little public attention due to the dominance of the debate on killer robots. A comparative study of the three biggest European states reveals that France and Germany appear to be at opposite ends of the AI spectrum in Europe. France sees AI in general as an area of geopolitical competition and military AI in particular as an important element of French strategy. In contrast, Germany has been much more reluctant to engage with the topic of AI in warfare, and appears uninterested in the geopolitics of the technology. Military AI seems to be an acceptable topic of discussion for Germany only in arms control. For now, the UK is somewhere between these two positions. It is not as outspoken about military AI as France, but it is clearly interested in the military opportunities that AI provides. Independently of their governments’ positions, all three countries’ defence industries are developing AI-enabled capabilities.

As it is relatively early days in the development and use of operational AI-enabled military systems, it is possible that European countries’ positions will align over time. If they do not, however, this could pose real problems for European defence cooperation. Given that the EU is investing a great deal of effort in this area through instruments such as Permanent Structured Cooperation and the European Defence Fund, intra-European disagreements on one of the most crucial new technologies is a cause for concern. This is particularly true for pan-European projects such as FCAS, a fighter jet project involving France, Germany, and Spain that is set to include various AI-enabled capabilities. If France pushes for greater AI development – potentially even leading to LAWS while Germany does not, this cooperation could soon run into problems.

In this context, the EU could play an important role in helping member states harmonise their approaches to military AI. The EU already acts as a coordinating power for European national AI strategies, with “ethical AI” as its guiding principle. A similar approach could work for military AI. The European Commission should draft a coordinating strategy for military AI, outlining its ideas for areas of development in which common European engagement would be particularly useful (such as sharing systems to train algorithms), while setting red lines (in areas such as the development and use of LAWS). The EU should ask member states to respond to this guidance by outlining their ideas on, and approaches to, AI. In this way, European states could take advantage of one another’s expertise in AI development while working together to improve Europe’s military capabilities.

‘Not Smart Enough: The Poverty of European Military Thinking on Artificial Intelligence’ – Policy Brief by Ulrike Esther Franke – European Council on Foreign Relations / ECFR.

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