WIREDGOV

A misunderstanding of AI – as used in US air strikes against Iran – obscures deeper questions about the pace modern militaries are trading deliberation for speed.

Amid a frenetic media cycle, one theme has stubbornly persisted: the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in defence. Claims of over 1,000 targets struck by the US military in the first 24 hours of the war in Iran exposed a military tempo and feat unachievable by humans alone. Questions, rumours and misunderstandings about defence AI took on a new life. In this piece we highlight the complexities behind these headlines.

Before the AI Boom: Decades of Military Algorithms

AI adoption is now intensifying across unclassified and classified defence systems, transforming the pace at which decisions in the military can be made. Defence and intelligence estates continue to grapple with ways to synthesise their vast amounts of disparate data and ultimately improve intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination cycles, in order to gain some form of advantage over adversaries.

Yet while the underlying principles are certainly not a new phenomenon in US and Israeli military architectures, the proliferation of these toolsets across the end-to-end defence estate deserves more attention. As AI tools become endemic across enterprise IT and operational mission systems, they become normalised and carry the risk of trading out human consideration for a need of speed.

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