If “war is politics by other means”, then Cyberwafare/AI is warfare by invisible means. Without embarking into a long and unnecessary history lesson, I believe some context, (that wasn’t covered in the readings), is required.
Technological advancements throughout human history can be tracked, and categorized, into digestible tidbits of information. From pre-historic times, the Bronze Age (when bladed swords were introduced), to the Iron Era (arrows made their appearance here; think projectiles [today’s bullets], up through the Classical and Middle ages, warfare, aside from espionage, was a match of strategic wits and battlefield maneuvering. Today, this is only partly true.
Today’s battlefield goes far beyond munitions because technology, and how wars are fought, has fundamentally changed. Example: during WWII, aircraft were radial-engine piston powered machines, which were not direct injected and required carburetors to push fuel through the engine. This is no longer true. Today’s aircraft, much like our land-based vehicles, are flying computers—they’re the most advanced most advanced computers imaginable, with the most sophisticated engines tucked away therein, with weapons mounted throughout. The point being that a computer, regardless of its level of sophistication, is hackable whereas a piston based engine is not. When once several battalions were dispatched to counter a threat, today’s enemy battalions can be fought by a unit size group of soldiers operating unmanned vehicles.
Additionally, as referenced in basically every article, AI is “scaring” senior officials with regard to its implications. This is dramatic nonsense; AI, for military purposes, is nothing new. Our Apache helicopters have been utilizing a rudimentary, and subsequently modernized, version of AI to manipulate its sensors to point toward which every direction the pilot’s helmet is facing for decades. AI was developed for military purposes, and only now we are seeing the hyper-aware modern version for civilian usage and that is scaring people—understandably. The reality is that our defense agencies have been using AI, to a high degree of success, (think GWOT), for the past 20 years. AI has been used to track the faces of tribal people, who often do not carry any form of written ID, by US forces in Afghanistan for decades.
What we are seeing today is a completely new method of warfare; the sort that could not have been dreamt up by even the most creative of video game designers of the 1980’s. For the first time in human history, we recently saw the full air-to-air dogfight between two unmanned aerial fighter vehicles (drones). Additionally, for the first time ever, we saw the first ever human surrender of a solider surrendering to a drone that was dropping munitions.
The battlefield landscape has fundamentally changed. Where once Napoleon revolutionized the battlefield with his small unit tactics and self-sustained infantry, today’s battlefield is often being run by soldiers sitting in air-conditioned offices, with coffee machines and televisions running in the background. The only people that are afraid of this are the rigid; those who are unable to flow, adapt, and change, according to the needs of today’s battlefield. Those that are adaptable and innovative, as history has proven, don’t have much to fear with regard to AI and cyberwarfare—as it is just the next logical step in the art of war.