Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the most beneficial technological development of the twenty-first century.Media hype and raised expectations for results, however, have clouded understanding of the true nature of AI—including its limitations and potential. AI at War provides a balanced and practical understanding of applying AI to national security and warfighting professionals as well as a wide array of other readers. Although the themes and findings of the chapters are relevant across the U.S. Department of Defense, to include all Services, the Joint Staff and defense agencies as well as allied and partner ministries of defense, this book is a case study of warfighting functions in the Naval Services—the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. Sam J. Tangredi and George Galdorisi bring together over thirty experts, ranging from former DOD officials and retired flag officers to scientists and active duty junior officers. These contributors present views on a vast spectrum of subjects pertaining to the implementation of AI in modern warfare, including strategy, policy, doctrine, weapons, and ethical concerns.

Winner of the 2019 William E. Colby Award "The book I had been waiting for. I can't recommend it highly enough." —Bill Gates The era of autonomous weapons has arrived. Today around the globe, at least thirty nations have weapons that can search for and destroy enemy targets all on their own. Paul Scharre, a leading expert in next-generation warfare, describes these and other high tech weapons systems—from Israel’s Harpy drone to the American submarine-hunting robot ship Sea Hunter—and examines the legal and ethical issues surrounding their use. “A smart primer to what’s to come in warfare” (Bruce Schneier), Army of None engages military history, global policy, and cutting-edge science to explore the implications of giving weapons the freedom to make life and death decisions. A former soldier himself, Scharre argues that we must embrace technology where it can make war more precise and humane, but when the choice is life or death, there is no replacement for the human heart.

AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose. The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny.

The language of business is the language of dreams, but the language of war is the language of nightmare made real. Yet business dreams of driverless cars on intelligent roads, and of other real-time critical systems under the control of algorithmic entities, have much of war about them. Such systems, including military institutions at the tactical, operational and strategic scales, act on rapidly-shifting roadway topologies whose ‘traffic rules’ can rapidly change. War is never without both casualty and collateral damage, and realtime critical systems of any nature will inevitably partake of fog-of-war and frictional challenges almost exactly similar to those that have made warfare intractable for modern states. Into the world of Carl von Clausewitz, John Boyd, Mao Tse-Tung, Vo Nguyen Giap and Genghis Khan, come the brash, bright-eyed techies of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber who forthrightly step in where a phalanx of angels has not feared to tread, but treaded badly indeed. In this book we use cutting-edge tools from information and control theories to examine canonical and idiosyncratic failure modes of real-time cognitive systems facing fog-of-war and frictional constraints. In sum, nobody ever navigates, or can navigate, the landscapes of Carl von Clausewitz unscathed.

The Long-Awaited Sequel to The Long Run and The Last Dancer. In 2072, the United Nations Space Force began building the Unity . . . at Halfway. The Unity was seven kilometers long. It was not merely the largest spacecraft that had ever been built, more than ten times as long as the uncrewed mining ferries that had, in calmer times, sent ore from the Belt to Halfway; it was nearly the largest artifact humans had ever built. There are cylindrical Cities in the Belt that are larger, blown up out of asteroids that were melted down with giant mirrors, and then inflated, while still molten metal, to the desired shape . . . but in 2080 there are only a few, and even those few are not much larger than the Unity. She had been designed for one purpose, and though the Unification had never said so publicly, that purpose was the clearest thing in the System: Sixty years after the end of the Unification War, the Unification of Earth intended to become the Unification of Sol.

Artificial Intelligence is going to war. Intelligent weapon systems are here today, and many more are on the way tomorrow. Already, they're reshaping conflict--from the chaos of battle, with pilotless drones, robot tanks and unmanned submersibles, to the headquarters far from the action, where generals and politicians use technology to weigh up what to do. AI changes how we fight, and even how likely it is that we will. In battle, warbots will be faster, more agile and more deadly than today's crewed weapons. New tactics and concepts will emerge, with spoofing and swarming to fool and overwhelm enemies. Strategies are changing too. When will an intelligent machine escalate, and how can it be deterred? Can robots predict the future? And what happens to the 'art of war' as machines themselves become creative? Autonomous warfare makes many people uneasy. An international campaign against 'killer robots' hopes to ban AI from conflict. But the genie is out--AI weapons are too useful for states to outlaw. Still, crafting sensible rules for warbots is possible. This fascinating book shows how it might be done.

War by Numbers assesses the nature of conventional warfare through the analysis of historical combat. Christopher A. Lawrence establishes what we know about conventional combat and why we know it. By demonstrating the impact a variety of factors have on combat he moves such analysis beyond the work of Carl von Clausewitz and into modern data and interpretation. Using vast data sets, Lawrence examines force ratios, the human factor in case studies from World War II and beyond, the combat value of superior situational awareness, and the effects of dispersion, among other elements. Lawrence challenges existing interpretations of conventional warfare and shows how such combat should be conducted in the future, simultaneously broadening our understanding of what it means to fight wars by the numbers.