As recent events have shown, military decision-making is one of the world’s greatest challenges: diplomatic relations are at stake; Billions in tax-financed households are on the balance sheet; the safety and well-being of thousands of military and civilian personnel around the world are at stake; Most importantly, the freedom and liberty of the United States and its 330 million citizens must be protected, but with so much at stake, there is an inscrutable amount of data to be considered. In an increasingly complex and networked world or in network-centric decision management on battlefields, independent people prove to be insufficient to use data, analyze it and make timely and correct decisions.
With six branches and more than 1.3 million active soldiers on seven continents, how can all data points be taken into account, from the dictation of the commander-in-chief to the handwritten notes on the cover of an aircraft carrier? Decision-making, national security, speed and reliability as well as avoiding technological surprises or being taken by surprise by the country’s political rivals require massive real-time analysis and first- and second-order thinking that includes the complexity of behavior.
Consider all of the challenges and moving parts that the management of a large domestic military base is facing during the recent COVID19 pandemic. COVID19 concerns need to consider not only grassroots personnel, but the behavior of civilians in the surrounding counties, such as people from across the region, military and civil contractors alike, came and went daily. The information necessary to consider starts with infection and hospitalization rates, but also includes behavior monitoring (and influencing) as well as staying up to date with steps being taken by local, regional and state officials are taking action to monitor the virus and limit its spread. With so many moving parts, it’s very difficult to keep up with everything and make the right decision with any degree of certainty.
The answer to this paralysis of guesswork and analysis lies in the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning: if the military continues to waste too much time on human hours and analysis that could be done by machines, it can become dangerous and even lead to death. At the heart of complex systems like the US military, there is a critical turning point where the systems are so complex that humans can no longer track them. But AI solutions are able, taking into account all the factors and consequences of the second and third order, to deliver up-to-date data models that can offer tangible data-driven intelligence that goes far beyond the limits of the mind. Perhaps the greatest benefit is the reassurance that they will avoid negative publicity from the “podium moment” when they are asked to justify their decisions. Decision-makers cannot rely solely on their intuition and instead rely on data based on indices, expert models and specific simulations for them Day and the special circumstances of each facility.
When President Biden was recently called on the carpet to explain Afghanistan’s rapid decline in nine days, he should have had an AI that could at least explain the data, models, and weights that made the analyzes, conclusions, and decisions based on belief that the 300,000 Afghan army personnel could hold up the 60,000 Taliban fighters long enough to enable an orderly withdrawal. The journalists could then question the data sources, the models or the weightings, but not the president, who would rely on these systems for his judgment. But more importantly, such a system would surely have predicted that rapid decline in the Monte Carlo distribution of potential outcomes and taken countermeasures and precautions.
Without a deeper commitment to AI, the military runs the risk of missing out on information beyond classified, isolated, and otherwise restricted information without compromising security. One of the biggest challenges to high-stakes decision-making in the military is silos of classified information, making it difficult or impossible for each party of all the factors that determine the situation.
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning safely solves this challenge. Rather than dumping disparate data from various branches of the military and clearance level into one gigantic data lake, it is possible to leave all the data safely and securely where it is, and train a machine to know and inform human decision-makers that the data is there. AI is able not only to process all information in the corpus, but also to know which parts are authorized for each individual data and which are not. For classified information, it can tell various employees that the information is in place and forward those individuals to the qualified authority for approval.
Skills like these can easily be applied to large and complex military endeavors, including processes, decisions, and amounts of information. For example, when a new aircraft carrier is built, management needs information in handwritten reports. It is difficult for the naked eye to tell if the project is on time or on budget as it rely heavily on human judgment. If a human rating is only a fraction, it can have a massive impact on the entire project.
Recent challenges, taking into account the vagaries of human behavior exposed by COVID19 and the Afghan departure, require rapid analysis and creative input from machine learning systems, from digesting and quantifying myriad data points to ingesting and cataloging the knowledge of experts Not always becoming available to aid predictive modeling of circumstances with dozens of variables, this amplified intelligence is key to better results.
