Monday, December 4, 2017

Future Wars Will Depend On Software As Much As On Ammunition

Photo from U.S. Army

Washington Post: Future wars may depend as much on algorithms as on ammunition, report says

The Pentagon is increasingly focused on the notion that the might of U.S. forces will be measured as much by the advancement of their algorithms as by the ammunition in their arsenals. And so as it seeks to develop the technologies of the next war amid a technological arms race with China, the Defense Department has steadily increased spending in three key areas: artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing, according to a recent report.

Investment in those areas increased to $7.4 billion last year, up from $5.6 billion five years ago, according to Govini, a data science and analytics firm, and it appears likely to grow as the armed services look to transform how they train, plan and fight.

“Rapid advances in artificial intelligence — and the vastly improved autonomous systems and operations they will enable — are pointing toward new and more novel warfighting applications involving human-machine collaboration and combat teaming,” Robert Work, the former deputy secretary of defense, wrote in an introduction to the report. “These new applications will be the primary drivers of an emerging military-technical revolution.”

Read more ....

WNU Editor: As my programmer friends like to tell me when we talk and speculate about these type of military platforms .... it all comes down to software

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today wars are won and lost on a computer screen. No ruling class of the future will ever fight a war without full and uncompromising tactical analysis of how the whole war would play out. In many ways we have evolved beyond wars with death, rather our wars are in boardrooms fighting for the crumbs of our ancestors.

Sean said...

It all comes down to the 1s and 0s. I'm a programmer and it's amazing to read how far the military has driven technology. The first computer(Eniac) was built during WW2 with the purpose of calculating artillery coordinates. I would argue more so software than ammunition (especially in the near future if not now)