AI has entered the war room, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, according to experts.
In a conversation with Fortune, Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University on war and conflict, said AI has vastly accelerated the “kill chain,” compressing the time from initial target identification to final destruction. He said the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, which resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might not have happened absent AI.
“It would have been impossible, or almost impossible, to do in that way,” Jones told Fortune. “The speed it was carried out, and the magnitude and the volume of the strikes, I think, are AI-enabled.”
Jones said the U.S. Air Force has used the “speed of thought” as a benchmark for the pace of decision-making for years. He said the time elapsed from collecting intelligence, such as aerial reconnaissance, to executing a bombing mission could take up to six months during WWII and the Vietnam War. AI has significantly compressed that timeline.
The key role of AI tools in the war room is to quickly analyze vast amounts of data. “We’re talking terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data,” Jones said, “everything from aerial imagery, human intelligence, internet intelligence, mobile phone tracking, anything and everything.”
However, Jones flagged a number of concerns around AI-enabled warfare. “The problem when you add AI to that is you multiply, by orders of magnitude I would argue, the degrees of error,” Jones said.
To be sure, Jones said, human error exists with or without AI technology, citing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as a conflict built upon flawed intelligence gathering. But he said AI could exacerbate such mistakes thanks to the magnitude of data the technology analyzes.
There’s also a string of ethical questions AI warfare raises, mainly around the question of accountability, something Husain said the Geneva Conventions and the laws of armed conflict already require states to comply with. With AI blurring the lines between machine and human-level decision-making, he said the international community must ensure human responsibility is assigned to all actions on the battlefield.
“The laws of armed conflict require us to blame the person,” Husain said. “The person has to be accountable no matter what level of automation is used in the battlefield.”
