The next era of war and deterrence will be defined by AI. The AI winner of this decade will be economically and militarily dominant for the next 50 years. The faster that we confront this reality, the faster we can act in ensuring America does not lose.
The gist of this post is:
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AI will disrupt warfare.
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China is currently outpacing the United States (for which there are numerous supporting facts).
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The United States, both the government and AI technologists, need to start acting.
The AI War is at the core of the future of our world. Will authoritarianism prevail over democracy? Do we want to find out?
The Ukraine war is already demonstrating that the tech stack for war has changed. Technologies including drones, AI-based targeting and imagery intelligence, and Javelin missiles have allowed for a shocking defense of Ukraine against Russia, despite their nearly $300B in defense spending over the past 5 years.
The future is clear—AI-powered targeting and autonomous drones will define warfare. AI applied to satellite imagery and other sensor data has already enabled targeting and tracking of Russian troops and generals. Our legacy military platforms, while still important, will be disrupted by cheaper autonomous drone fleets. Aircraft carriers are giant targets in the sea compared to autonomous, adaptive drone swarms.
We are in the midst of a renaissance of AI in the commercial sector. In the past few years, breakthroughs have enabled AI systems to generate imagery, text, code, and even reason. The pace of AI research is following its own Moore’s law—every 2 years, the number of AI papers published per month doubles. As venture capitalists ogle over the potential of Generative AI to change knowledge work, we are not addressing the obvious application of AI towards military power, and the very clear risks that America will be outpaced.
A recent AI system, CICERO, achieved human-level performance in Diplomacy, a strategy game requiring negotiation and manipulation of other human players. This result, along with dominance of AI in chess, go, and poker, paint a precursor to the future of war. An AI warfighter will handily dominate an adversary through strategic brilliance, faster decision-making, and greater situational awareness. What’s more, autonomous drone fleets (air, sea, and land) will tactically outcompete human operators in velocity and coordination. While this hasn’t happened yet, it is only a matter of time. Based on the pace of progress with AI technology today, I believe this is less than 10 years away.
All that will matter in a future conflict is our technology—AI will devise, execute, and update our combat strategy. Our technology is our strategy.
There is precedent for technological disruption of warfare. I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear weapons in 1942 ushered in a new era of the nature of war and deterrence, and is one of the largest contributors to the Pax Americana, the unprecedented relative peace in the world since the end of World War II.
The continuation of Pax Americana rests upon our ability to navigate and maintain the lead in the AI race, which in turn will ensure the military and economic leadership of America. The facts today on our relative standing against China are not good, and need to be confronted head-on. We will not win by standing still.
China deeply understands the potential for AI to disrupt warfare and ultimately overtake the USA, and is investing heavily to capitalize on the opportunity. Let’s walk through some facts.
Their belief is AI will rhyme with how China surpassed America in fintech, where the American mature existing financial services industry and regulations ultimately enabled China to race ahead with a more digital and AI-enabled fintech stack.
More specifically, they believe that the United States will fall into a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. We will over-invest in mature systems and platforms, and underinvest in new disruptive technologies such as AI that would make our mature systems vulnerable or obsolete. Meanwhile, China, less encumbered by an existing defense industrial base, will race far ahead on AI.
Their long-term vision for how AI will disrupt the battlefield is also clear, and they are investing to accomplish it. As one Chinese official has said1:
“In future battlegrounds there will be no people fighting. By 2025 lethal autonomous weapons [will] be commmonplace and ever-increasing military use of AI is inevitable. We are sure about the direction and that is the future…
Mechanized equipment is just like the hand of the human body. In future intelligent wars, AI systems will be just like the brain of the human body. AI may completely change the current command structure, which is dominated by humans to one that is dominated by an ‘AI cluster.’”
China’s military arm, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), spent between $1.6B and $2.7B on AI against an overall defense budget of $178B in 20202, whereas the US Department of Defense (DoD) spent only between $800M and $1.3B on AI against an overall DoD budget of $693B over the same period3.
China is spending between 1% and 1.5% of their military budget on AI while the United States is spending between 0.1% and 0.2%. Adjusted for the total military budget, China is spending 10x more than the United States.
The quotes are damning:
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“The United States gets its ass handed to it”
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“We are going to lose fast”
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“China ran rings around us… they knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it”
And this isn’t
