Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have raised alarm bells that the United States military remains unprepared as other nations have rapidly adopted artificial intelligence technology.
Ukraine is using AI-enabled drones to strike Russian targets, spurring an AI development arms race with Russia. China is researching how to use AI in missile guidance and target detection and identification. Even in Sudan, insurgents are using AI to help them fight.
The U.S. military has been incorporating AI technology into its operations since 2017, and it allocated $3.2 billion in its 2025 budget request for AI research and advanced command and control systems. However, in an article published in Foreign Affairs, Milley and Schmidt highlight shortcomings in the Pentagon’s weapons and equipment procurement process, which they describe as ”risk-averse and slow to adapt to the rapidly developing threats of the future.”
The United States military may have “the highest quality [AI] systems and spends the most on them,” but China is quickly catching up, according to Milley and Schmidt.
China has developed an AI commander used in large-scale virtual war games and is developing AI-powered surveillance and electronic warfare systems, which could give it an extra edge in the Indo-Pacific.
Just last week, the U.S. Army announced a 500-day plan to test AI technologies in the field and protect the U.S. from foreign agents and countries using AI.
On Friday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Brown called on the U.S. and its allies at the 2024 South American Defense Conference to collaborate on the development of AI.
According to Ari Sacher, rocket scientist and senior policy adviser at the U.S. Israel Education Association, the best course of action in countering China’s emphasis on military AI is to collaborate with as many of its allies as possible.
“The idea is to share data, share algorithms, and most important is sharing the format of the data,” Sacher told the Washington Examiner. “And it turns out that the Chinese and the United States work in different formats, and eventually the world is going to work in one format, and there’s going to be a tipping point. And if China wins this data war, then America will lose AI dominance.”
For Jonathan Molik, director of intelligence and security at the New York Army National Guard, ethical considerations are a top priority when incorporating AI into military operations, but so is the fear that other nations completely disregard them. Molik spoke to the Washington Examiner in a personal capacity.
“That’s going to end up being the problem in the U.S. and our other Western allies, is if other countries that don’t look at those decisions with the same moral and ethical lens, let’s say the People’s Republic of China as an example, and they then end up having an edge,” Molik, host of the podcast, Headlines and History, said. “What is the United States and our allies going to do in order to match that capacity without crossing that ethical and moral boundary?”
In artificial intelligence, data is king. The more data that can be fed into the AI model, the more it improves its ability to make predictions, improve decision-making, and also learn.
“As these models get better and better, it’s just going to allow, again, humans to see what’s the priority of information, as opposed to just the deluge of randomized data all over the course,” Molik said.
In the field of intelligence, AI algorithms and learning machines have been able to sift through hundreds of images and videos and parse out what is most relevant for the analyst to review.
“You can cut down literally dollars,” Molik said. “And even if it were to only cut down, let’s say 15 minutes or 10 minutes when you’re in a dynamic environment, 10 minutes, five minutes even can be the determinant factor in whether you’re able to engage in that target before that target sees you.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Pentagon has already agreed to joint research with the Japanese Ministry of Defense on artificial intelligence and data analytics and AI cooperation with Singapore.
“That’s what America needs to do,” Sacher said. “To gather data, to work together on development of systems, of algorithms, and to get as many people as possible working on them using the format of American data.”