8 ms·

>“We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which this will be playing out, I think this articl

>“We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which this will be playing out, I think this article's focus is way off It's more plausible that algorithmic warfare is going to make us unsure as to what is even happening. We are going to be lost, drowned, in conflicting plausible information to the point we won't even know what is going in nor who to believe

Damorian 7y ago
Going to be? We're already there.
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.
vsareto 7y ago
What is the target of algorithm warfare supposed to be? This concept makes no sense to me. Submarine warfare? Makes sense. You kill subs and ships and control waters. What is the algorithm seeking to control? It doesn't even seem like a new kind of warfare, just a decision maker for existing types of warfare. So it basically has rules for land, air, sea, internet warfare and ties everything together? Is the US President basically going to enter "control Russia" at a command line and the AI plans and executes a cold/hot war? This seems laughable.
- h5erahqer4 7y ago
  Sure, to a certain extent, algorithms are not so different than "strategies" that generals employ in response to enemy movements. But the speed and execution of these strategies can be improved order of magnitudes as we replace more parts of the system with machines. One can imagine Sun Tzu's chapter "Weak Points and Strong" discussing various heuristics and strategies to determine a combatant formation's weakest point. With machine algorithms, you could launch a similar probing attack instantaneously, and have the results analyzed and the striking attack coordinated before your enemy even hears the first reports of encounter.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    >But the speed and execution of these strategies can be improved order of magnitudes as we replace more parts of the system with machines. You're going to be limited by military logistics. Things moving at certain speeds across the Earth. An algorithm can't change that until we get to AGI (maybe). I'm sure it can remove some human inefficiencies in organization, but there is a minimum time and you still need an overall goal like deciding to attack Russia. But besides that, the formations don't really matter. All country vs country warfare is based on long range, fast moving weaponry. Something like MOAB will incinerate the entire formation. To me it feels like military people trying to find a brand for this particular thing and to justify programs for it by inventing a need. Even then, for the US, these small gains just don't matter because of our overwhelming might.
- Whirl 7y ago
  Usually folks in the business are concerned about cyber attacks on important warfighting infrastructure (GPS satellites, for example). Cyber attacks against early warning radars, communications infrastructure, civilian power infrastructure and so on. You can imagine a battle fought solely in ‘cyberspace’ over control of critical satellites. Sometimes electronic warfare is also lumped into this in the form of jamming or spoofing radars.
bane 7y ago
I agree with you. Since WW2, the trend in military weaponry and intelligence is precision. - Instead of blowing up a submarine, why not disable the one critical crew member needed for it to launch? - Instead of leveling a city to stop arms production, why not just infect the control systems of the factories so only plows can be manufactured and not swords? - Cause a single screw to fall out of a piece of artillery so that it can no longer fire on target? - Better yet, cause a fire in the iron mine so that gun can't even be manufactured. To be effective, the affected parties wouldn't even know they were being targeted. They wouldn't even know they were at war. The lowest friction conduit your enemy civilization can proceed on is the one you want them to, and over time that's the one they'll inevitably settle into after becoming frustrated with their inability to make meaningful war on you. In a perfect scenario, you might not even know you're attacking them either. The series "The Golden Oecumene" explores this concept. In the story, the entire world's military might has reduced to a single sophisticated computer A.I. and a single man, who is usually cryogenically frozen and only brought out under extreme circumstances for specific operations that might include severing a single synaptic connection in a target using an x-ray laser stationed in orbit -- in order to change the target's mind.
- vkou 7y ago
  Since WW2, the trend has been the construction of bigger and bigger doomsday weapons. Why disable one critical crew member needed for a submarine's launch, when you can kill him, the entire crew, and everyone in a 10-mile radius with a single nuclear warhead? The only thing 'precision' weapons have been found to be any good for is bombing stone-age adversaries, without putting boots on the ground. I see no situation where nuclear superpowers can get into a high-stakes[1] shooting war which will not quickly devolve into a nuclear exchange. [1] Low-stakes, low-commitment engagements can continue to be performed by finding a stone-age adversary that you can bomb, as a proxy for your enemy. It's great for domestic morale, great for the military-industrial complex, and great for furthering our international ambitions.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    > Why disable one critical crew member needed for a submarine's launch, when you can kill him, the entire crew, and everyone in a 10-mile radius with a single nuclear warhead? Because you don't have enough of them... You can't win against a nuclear state with 100+ ICBMs unless you strike first, or do a beheading strike. USSR had really no defensive plan, as was found after the fall. They really bet all on "firing all your guns, before enemy can destroy them"
mlb_hn 7y ago
I think the disinformation you're thinking about matters [cf 0], but being able to project power to the right place at the right time requires a lot of logistical planning and material even if the information can be trusted. There are a lot of military areas where AI can inform traditional bureaucratic processes from planning to command and control [cf 1]. DOD maintains a lot of troops/bases/relationships around the world, and my guess is they want to be optimizing all of them as much as possible and be able to adapt policy to changes. Like any large organization, it's hard for the higher ups to have a good grasp on what's going on at lower echelons. They've had some pretty bad policy decisions handed to them from not being able to explain what was going on (e.g. the disbanding of the Baath party in Iraq). Being able to algorithmically integrate the information they've got and present it to policy makers has been an unsolved problem in its own right without the disinformation stuff. [0] Whaley,B. (1982). "Toward a General Theory of Deception" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402398208437106 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239820843710... [1] MCDP 1. (1997). "Warfighting" https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Wa...
m463 7y ago
Who's to say that we're not in the middle of it now? Lots of little surgical strikes appearing to be russian hackers, heart attacks, ethical lapses and folks caught in unlucky situations?

Damorian 7y ago

Going to be? We're already there.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.

vsareto 7y ago

What is the target of algorithm warfare supposed to be? This concept makes no sense to me. Submarine warfare? Makes sense. You kill subs and ships and control waters. What is the algorithm seeking to control? It doesn't even seem like a new kind of warfare, just a decision maker for existing types of warfare. So it basically has rules for land, air, sea, internet warfare and ties everything together? Is the US President basically going to enter "control Russia" at a command line and the AI plans and executes a cold/hot war? This seems laughable.

h5erahqer4 7y ago
Sure, to a certain extent, algorithms are not so different than "strategies" that generals employ in response to enemy movements. But the speed and execution of these strategies can be improved order of magnitudes as we replace more parts of the system with machines. One can imagine Sun Tzu's chapter "Weak Points and Strong" discussing various heuristics and strategies to determine a combatant formation's weakest point. With machine algorithms, you could launch a similar probing attack instantaneously, and have the results analyzed and the striking attack coordinated before your enemy even hears the first reports of encounter.
- vsareto 7y ago
  >But the speed and execution of these strategies can be improved order of magnitudes as we replace more parts of the system with machines. You're going to be limited by military logistics. Things moving at certain speeds across the Earth. An algorithm can't change that until we get to AGI (maybe). I'm sure it can remove some human inefficiencies in organization, but there is a minimum time and you still need an overall goal like deciding to attack Russia. But besides that, the formations don't really matter. All country vs country warfare is based on long range, fast moving weaponry. Something like MOAB will incinerate the entire formation. To me it feels like military people trying to find a brand for this particular thing and to justify programs for it by inventing a need. Even then, for the US, these small gains just don't matter because of our overwhelming might.
Whirl 7y ago
Usually folks in the business are concerned about cyber attacks on important warfighting infrastructure (GPS satellites, for example). Cyber attacks against early warning radars, communications infrastructure, civilian power infrastructure and so on. You can imagine a battle fought solely in ‘cyberspace’ over control of critical satellites. Sometimes electronic warfare is also lumped into this in the form of jamming or spoofing radars.

bane 7y ago

I agree with you. Since WW2, the trend in military weaponry and intelligence is precision. - Instead of blowing up a submarine, why not disable the one critical crew member needed for it to launch? - Instead of leveling a city to stop arms production, why not just infect the control systems of the factories so only plows can be manufactured and not swords? - Cause a single screw to fall out of a piece of artillery so that it can no longer fire on target? - Better yet, cause a fire in the iron mine so that gun can't even be manufactured. To be effective, the affected parties wouldn't even know they were being targeted. They wouldn't even know they were at war. The lowest friction conduit your enemy civilization can proceed on is the one you want them to, and over time that's the one they'll inevitably settle into after becoming frustrated with their inability to make meaningful war on you. In a perfect scenario, you might not even know you're attacking them either. The series "The Golden Oecumene" explores this concept. In the story, the entire world's military might has reduced to a single sophisticated computer A.I. and a single man, who is usually cryogenically frozen and only brought out under extreme circumstances for specific operations that might include severing a single synaptic connection in a target using an x-ray laser stationed in orbit -- in order to change the target's mind.

vkou 7y ago
Since WW2, the trend has been the construction of bigger and bigger doomsday weapons. Why disable one critical crew member needed for a submarine's launch, when you can kill him, the entire crew, and everyone in a 10-mile radius with a single nuclear warhead? The only thing 'precision' weapons have been found to be any good for is bombing stone-age adversaries, without putting boots on the ground. I see no situation where nuclear superpowers can get into a high-stakes[1] shooting war which will not quickly devolve into a nuclear exchange. [1] Low-stakes, low-commitment engagements can continue to be performed by finding a stone-age adversary that you can bomb, as a proxy for your enemy. It's great for domestic morale, great for the military-industrial complex, and great for furthering our international ambitions.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > Why disable one critical crew member needed for a submarine's launch, when you can kill him, the entire crew, and everyone in a 10-mile radius with a single nuclear warhead? Because you don't have enough of them... You can't win against a nuclear state with 100+ ICBMs unless you strike first, or do a beheading strike. USSR had really no defensive plan, as was found after the fall. They really bet all on "firing all your guns, before enemy can destroy them"

mlb_hn 7y ago

I think the disinformation you're thinking about matters [cf 0], but being able to project power to the right place at the right time requires a lot of logistical planning and material even if the information can be trusted. There are a lot of military areas where AI can inform traditional bureaucratic processes from planning to command and control [cf 1]. DOD maintains a lot of troops/bases/relationships around the world, and my guess is they want to be optimizing all of them as much as possible and be able to adapt policy to changes. Like any large organization, it's hard for the higher ups to have a good grasp on what's going on at lower echelons. They've had some pretty bad policy decisions handed to them from not being able to explain what was going on (e.g. the disbanding of the Baath party in Iraq). Being able to algorithmically integrate the information they've got and present it to policy makers has been an unsolved problem in its own right without the disinformation stuff. [0] Whaley,B. (1982). "Toward a General Theory of Deception" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402398208437106 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239820843710... [1] MCDP 1. (1997). "Warfighting" https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Wa...

m463 7y ago

Who's to say that we're not in the middle of it now? Lots of little surgical strikes appearing to be russian hackers, heart attacks, ethical lapses and folks caught in unlucky situations?