PART viii
"Warfare"
"When all else fails, the future still remains." -
Christian Bovee
"Knowledge is power and permits the wise to conquer without
bloodshed and to accomplish deeds surpassing all others." Sun Tzu (Chou dynasty
philosopher and military strategist), "The Art of War" (fourth century B.C.).
Warfare and potential for warfare is taking a paradoxical turn in the
last half of the twentieth century. There is increasing reliance, at least by the more
developed nations, on "smart" weapons and a rapid evolution of such weapons.
Missiles can be launched from air, ground or sea hundreds and in some cases thousands of
miles from their intended targets. These weapons find their way to their destinations
using a variety of pattern-recognition and other computer technologies. Pilot's
Assistants, for example, are beginning to provide pilots with an electronic copilot that
helps fly, navigate, locate enemy targets, plot weapon trajectories, and other tasks.
Recent military engagements which utilized such technology have resulted in more accurate
destruction of enemy targets and substantially less unintended damage to neighboring
civilian populations and facilities (although there are still a few bugs in these
systems). Among military establishments that can afford routine use! of th ese
technologies, a profound reconsideration of military tactics is underway. The primary
thrust is to replace shotgun strategies with the careful pinpointing of targets.
Not all nations have access to these new technologies. While Iran and
Iraq do possess small numbers of such advanced weapons, they still primarily used weapons
and battlefield tactics of World War II vintage during their recent war. The Soviet Union
in Afghanistan also used relatively unsophisticated weapons and tactics. This reflects a
fundamental reality in the balance of power between East and West: the Warsaw Pact forces
are at least a decade behind the NATO forces in AI and computer technologies. Indeed, our
primary strategy in countering the numerically superior forces of the Soviet Union and its
allies is to rely on our superiority in the intelligence of our conventional (or
nonnuclear) weapons as the first line of defense and on our nuclear threat as the second
line.
In accordance with this second line, the United States and NATO have
been unwilling to make a declaration of no first use of nuclear weapons, stating that we
may use nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional attack on Europe. However, if we
can improve our intelligent but conventional weapons to a point where our confidence in
the first line strategy is sufficiently enhanced, then the western allies would be in a
position to issue a no-first-use pledge and forego the nuclear threat in Europe. Recent
political changes in Eastern Europe and the apparent collapse of communism in many
countries may hasten such a development. There are active development programs to create a
new generation of, for example, ground-to-ground and air-to-ground antitank missiles that
are capable of being launched from hundreds of miles away, follow irregular trajectories,
search intelligently for their targets, locate, and destroy them. Once perfected, these
missiles could be la! unched without precise knowledge of the location of the enemy
positions. They are being designed to use a variety of artificial vision,
pattern-recognition, and communication technologies to roam around and reliably locate
enemy vehicles. Friendly forces would be avoided by a combination of electronic
communication and pattern-recognition identification. To the extent that friendly targets
are avoided by electronic communication, the reliability and security of the encoding
protocols, another important area of advanced computer research, will obviously be
crucial. Anticipated progress in intelligent weaponry was a major factor behind the
recommendation of four former high-ranking American advisers, including Robert McNamara
and McGeorge Bundy, for an American no-first-use pledge in the spring 1982 issue of
Foreign Affairs.
One result of these changes is the prospect of diminished civilian
destruction from war, but few observers are heralding this development. The reason for
this is, of course, the enormous increases in the destructive capability of weapons that
have also occurred. As terrifying and destructive as the atomic weapons that ended World
War II were, the superpowers now possess more than a million times more destructive power.
Children growing up today belong to the first generation in history born into an era in
which the complete destruction of the human race is at least plausible. Experts may debate
whether or not "nuclear winter" (the catastrophic global change in climate that
some scientists have predicted would follow a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons)
really has the potential to end all human life. The end of the human race has never been
seriously debated as a possibility. Whether an all-out nuclear war would actually destroy
all human life or not, the overwhelming d! estruc tion that would certainly ensue has
created an unprecedented level of terror, under which all the world's people now live.
Ironically, the fear of nuclear conflict has kept the peace: there has not been a world
war for nearly half a century. It is a peace from which we take limited comfort.
The most evident technologies behind this radical change in the
potential destructiveness of warfare are, of course, atomic fission and fusion. The
potential for worldwide catastrophe would not be possible, however, without
weapon-delivery systems, which rely heavily on computer intelligence to reach their
destinations. The power of conventional munitions has also grown substantially, and
political and social inhibitions against their use are far less than those for nuclear
weapons. Thus, the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons from the European theater
paradoxically evokes fear that such a development would make Europe "safe" for a
conventional war that would still be far more destructive than World War II. This duality
in the development of military technology - the advent of weapons for fighting weapons
rather than civilian populations and the potential for greatly enhanced destruction - will
continue.
Let us consider military technology and strategy several decades into
the next century, at which time these trends should have fully matured. By that time
flying weapons (missiles, robot planes, and flying munitions) will be highly self-reliant.
They will be capable of being launched from virtually any place on earth or from space and
still finding their targets by using a combination of advanced vision and
pattern-recognition technologies. They will obviously need the ability to avoid or
counteract the defensive weapons intended for their destruction. Clearly, of primary
strategic importance will be the sophistication, indeed, the intelligence, of both the
offensive and defensive systems of such weapons. Geography is already losing its strategic
importance and should be a relatively minor factor several decades from now. Such slow
moving vehicles as tanks and ships, as well as battle stations, whether land, sea, air or
space based, will be vulnerable unless defended ! by arr ays of intelligent weapons.
Most weapons today destroy their targets with explosions or, less often,
bullets. Within the next few decades it is likely that laser and particle beam weapons
will be perfected. This will provide such fast-moving weapons as missiles a variety of
means for both offense and defense.
Planes, particularly those closest to combat, will not require pilots.
With sophisticated enough electronic technology, there is no reason why planes cannot be
directed from afar by either human or machine intelligence. Of course, reliable and secure
communications will be essential to prevent an enemy from taking control of
remote-controlled robot aircraft. Indeed, the three Cs - command, control, and
communication - are emerging as the cornerstone of future military strategy.
In general, the interactions of future weapons are likely to be so fast
that human reflexes will not be the primary criterion of tactical success. Weapons will
utilize a variety of their tactical offensive and defensive capabilities within seconds or
even milliseconds when meeting comparable enemy systems. In such encounters, the most
capable and reliable electronics and software will clearly prevail.
I remember as a child reading a tale about a very advanced civilization
that had outlawed war and replaced it with a more refined form of conflict. Rather than
resort to deadly weapons, two societies challenging each other for supremacy engaged in a
game of chess. Each society could select their best master player or use a committee. As I
recall, no one thought to use machine intelligence for this task. Whoever won the board
conflict won the war and, apparently, the spoils of war. How this was enforced was not
discussed, but one can imagine that warfare in the future may not be all that dissimilar
from this tale. If human reflexes and eventually human decision making, at least on a
tactical level, are replaced with machine intelligence, then two societies could let their
machines fight out the conflict and let them know who wins (or perhaps it would be obvious
who had prevailed). It would be convenient if the actual conflict took place in some
remote place, like outer space.! Here the enforcement of the winner's prerogatives is
obvious: the losing society will have lost its machine defenders, which will render it
defenseless. It will have no choice but to submit to the victor.
This scenario differs in one important respect from the story about
conflict resolution through chess. In the terms I used earlier, chess represents level 2
intelligence and is thus amenable to recursive software techniques combined with massive
amounts of computer power. Battling weapons, on the other hand, require level 3
intelligence (the ability to abstract) as well as advanced forms of pattern recognition.
They also require reliability. One controversial aspect of this new technology is the
extent to which we can rely on these extremely complex systems, considering the limited
opportunity we will have to test them under realistic wartime conditions. This issue is
particularly salient for the highly centralized communication networks needed for command
and control.
Can we take any comfort from this vision? It is entirely possible that
military engagements decades hence may involve relatively few casualties, particularly of
a civilian nature. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that warfare will be
constrained to weapons fighting weapons. The tactic of holding large civilian populations
hostage will continue to have its adherents among military strategists. What is clear,
however, is that a profound change in military strategy is starting to take place. The
cornerstones of military power from the beginning of recorded history through recent times
- geography, manpower, firepower, and battle-station defenses - are being replaced by the
sophistication of computerized intelligence and communications. Humans will direct
battlefield strategy, but even here computers will play a crucial role.Yet humans will
still be the underlying determinants of military success. Military strength will be a
function of the sophistication of the technolo! gy, bu t a society's leaders, scientists,
engineers, technicians, and other professionals will create and use the technology. At
least, that is likely to remain the case for the next half century.
The Age of Spiritual Machines