AI and Pentagon
DC 2.05pm
As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling US$816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.
Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER.
“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year.
The fever dreams of the Pentagon are filled with visions of autonomous drones executing military maneuvers in the heat of battle with little need for human involvement. With recent advances in AI, that future is closer than ever. There's just one big problem: getting a swarm of drones from different manufacturers to talk to one another during warfare.
Pentagon scientists are working to address this by creating a mesh network of drones — one in which the devices themselves are the network and there is no need for outside connectivity. But that only solves part of the problem. The drones still need a common language to communicate. That's where Droidish comes in.
“It lets R2D2 talk to C3P0," Keven Gambold, Droidish’s mastermind and the CEO of government contractor Unmanned Experts, explained to Forbes, recalling the iconic robot duo from Star Wars.
Alongside the University of North Texas, Gambold has been experimenting with how to help drones talk to each other since 2020, backed with over $7 million in Air Force contracts. In one pilot sponsored by the Air Force that summer, three drones played a game of chicken: one hovered in the air, while two others were programmed to follow a flight path that took them dangerously close to it.
If the flying drones were to follow these instructions, they’d go within the prohibited range of the static drone. Without any human input, the flying machines had to decide how best to navigate the situation, coordinating so that one would let the other pass by first.
“It sounds relatively simple,” said Gambold, a former British Royal Air Force pilot. “But it took the most unfeasible amount of code to get it to actually work.”
While Droidish is designed purely for “machine-to-machine discussions,” humans are needed to expand the language’s vocabulary as tasks get more sophisticated. When the drones don’t have the right language to deal with a particular situation, Gambold’s team develops new “words” so the machines can collaborate again.
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin III, said air defence will continue to be Ukraine’s “greatest need” in the war against Russia.
In closing remarks after a meeting the Ukraine defence contact group, secretary Austin said:
First, the Kremlin abandoned the Black Sea green initiative. Then Russia’s took its assault on global food security to a new low, targeting grain supplies with airstrikes that has unleashed dangerous ripple effects in other countries and continents uninvolved in [Vladimir] Putin’s campaign of Imperial aggression.
So, air defence will continue to be Ukraine’s greatest need to protect the skies, its civilians, and its cities as well as innocent people far away from the battlefield.
Austin noted, however, that ground based air defence has also been one of Ukraine’s successes throughout the war. He called on leaders to donate air defence munitions as the country goes into the winter.
So at today’s meeting, I urged allies and partners to dig deep and donate whatever air defence munitions they can, as Ukraine heads into another winter of war.
Austin and Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, reiterated the US’s ongoing support for Ukraine.
Apparently the US Department of Defense or Pentagon released (in Pentagon website, June 9th, 2023, click here) this statement on its official website acknowledging that it has funded 46 biological facilities in Ukraine over the past 20 years --- thanks for coordination between Pentagon, NATO, and Ukraine regime after Soviet Union destroyed. Vladimir Putin was right all along, although how evil Putin. The lack of candor over Ukraine denied critical information on the conduct of US ally at a time when the public is debating the increasing costs of the war.
If Ukraine is engaging in sabotage against NATO allies (and the environment), we have a right to know. If committed by Ukraine, the drone attack on the Kremlin was remarkably stupid. It threatened an escalation of the conflict with little obvious military advantage. Many of American supported the sanctions against Russia and still support the Ukrainians in their fight to protect their homeland every inches. However, that does not mean that U.S should be played for chumps.
Eventually, Gambold hopes the language will expand enough where any vehicle-to-vehicle system could use it to communicate. That could mean self-driving cars coordinating in Droidish to decide on routes and avoid obstacles, or futuristic flying vehicles using it to safely navigate drone-filled skies.
The development of Droidish will culminate in a test in Colorado this October, in which aircraft will be launched on a mission and use the language to vote on what tactics to employ in a given scenario. One mission will see the drones try to suppress enemy air defense by detecting a radar system and then devising “the tactics to attack it,” said Gambold.
When researchers or government contractors crack the code, these advanced drone systems will launch together, work out amongst themselves how best to achieve their goals and land in tandem — with human pilots intervening only should something go awry. Spurred on by Ukraine’s extensive use of drones to defend against Russian invasion, and by fears of China’s advancing technological prowess, America’s best-funded agency is spending big across research labs, academia and AI tech companies to ensure the U.S. is at the bleeding edge of next-generation drone warfare.
Cynics, though, say that removing most human participation from war maneuvers like these is an ethical quandary. There are “many questions raised by these systems from those claiming to be committed to the laws of armed conflict,” said military drone expert Lucy Suchman, professor of the anthropology of science and technology at the University of Lancaster in the U.K. What happens, she asked, if autonomous systems target people they aren’t legally allowed to kill, like civilians?
The Air Force has been careful to position AI as a tool, not a weapon. Dr. Lee Seversky, a senior scientist for information superiority at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, told Forbes that his department’s focus is on developing AI technologies to augment pilots. Over recent years, the Air Force has tested an AI copilot to assist with deploying sensors and navigation. It’s spent hundreds of millions, meanwhile, on various data analysis programs, using AI to offer up options to human pilots. “It allows us to pair what the machine is good at—to crunch numbers quickly, physics and models—with what the human is good at,” he said. “The Air Force's perspective is really human-centered AI.”
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”
House Republicans reportedly aim to pass their defense budget later this week. They had planned to vote on an $826 billion proposal last week before the far-right Freedom Caucus blocked the proposal, demanding cuts to non-defense spending.
“The fact that the Pentagon developed an AI program to navigate its own policies should be a stark wake-up call for lawmakers who throw more money at the department than it even asks for nearly every year,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “It’s unsurprising, though: The DOD couldn’t adequately account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets in the most recent audit, and those are physical!”
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Military brass use GAMECHANGER to help them navigate what the Defense Department itself points to as an absurd amount of “tedious” policies. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents governing how the Pentagon operates, according to its GitHub entry.
“Did you know that if you read all the Department of Defense’s policies, it would be the equivalent of reading through ‘War and Peace’ more than 100 times?” a press release about GAMECHANGER from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s spy wing, says. “For most people, policy is a tedious and [elusive] concept, making the idea of understanding and synthesizing tens of thousands of policy requirements a daunting task. But in the midst of the chaos that is the policy world, one DIA officer and a team at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security saw an opportunity.”
The press release went on to decry the Pentagon’s “mountain of policies and requirements.”
It’s for the military to publicly air its contempt for its own sprawling bureaucracy, members of Congress have been similarly harsh. In its portrayal of U.S. military policy — which it also had a hand in creating — the Senate Armed Services Committee called rules governing the department “byzantine” and “labyrinthine.”
“The committee notes that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center developed an artificial intelligence-enabled tool, GAMECHANGER, to make sense of the byzantine and labyrinthine ecosystem of Department guidance,” the committee said in a report for National Defense Authorization Act — the law that appropriates cash for the Pentagon budget — for fiscal year 2023. (Amid the critique of the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, the NDAA would later become law, authorizing $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget.)
Though announced in February of last year, GAMECHANGER has received scant media attention. The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force created in 2018, developed the program. Upon its completion, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center transferred ownership of it to the office of the Defense Department comptroller, which handles budgetary and fiscal matters for the Pentagon.
Shortly after its release, GAMECHANGER was already used by over 6,000 Defense Department users conducting over 100,000 queries, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Described as a natural language processing application — a broad term in computer science generally referring the use of machine learning to allow computers to interpret human speech and writing — GAMECHANGER is just one of a vast suite of AI programs bankrolled by the Pentagon in recent months.
The Pentagon is currently funding 686 such AI projects, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit that frequently conducts research into the government. The figure does not include the Department of Defense’s classified efforts.
Before it was formally released, GAMECHANGER was granted an award by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency for civil servants.
“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest,” said Hartung, the Quincy Institute defense budget expert. “It’s more a problem of how they make policy and not a problem of how to surf through it.”
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-prada- Adi Mulia Pradana is a Helper. Former adviser (President Indonesia) Jokowi for mapping 2-times election. I used to get paid to catch all these blunders—now I do it for free. Trying to work out what's going on, what happens next. Arch enemies of the tobacco industry, (still) survive after getting doxed. Now figure out, or, prevent catastrophic situations in the Indonesian administration from outside the government. After his mom was nearly killed by a syndicate, now I do it (catch all these blunders, especially blunders by an asshole syndicates) for free. Writer actually facing 12 years attack-simultaneously (physically terror, cyberattack terror) by his (ex) friend in IR UGM / HI UGM (all of them actually indebted to me, at least get a very cheap book). 2 times, my mom nearly got assassinated by my friend with “komplotan” / weird syndicate. Once assassin, forever is assassin, that I was facing in years. I push myself to be (keep) dovish, pacifist, and you can read my pacifist tone in every note I write. A framing that myself propagated for years.
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