Hi All,
Two quick announcements before I get into this piece. First, Michael Weiss, author and investigative journalist, will join me for a Substack Live (at 1600 UK Time and 1100 EST) this Thursday, June 18. Michael also has his own Substack, which is worth checking out. So, please do join if you’re interested.
Also, there will be a Midweek Update this week, but its timing is dependent on there actually being a signed agreement between Trump and Iran which includes the text of an MOU. Until then, useful analysis is difficult. If I need to wait until Thursday or Friday for that, so be it. So in this case the midweek update might be closer to the weekend—who knows?
Now to the matter at hand.
We Are On A Twin-Track Road To An AI Battlefield
I was very much struck by two very recent claims about how AI systems are on the cusp of changing warfare, both of which came from senior people in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. One claim was made by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov. He stated that Ukraine now has an anti-air system that is fully automated after launch and can make all of the decisions from that point until it (hopefully) destroys its target (in this case, a Russian Shahed/Geran attack UAV). He even released a video in this tweet which purported to show the system in action.
The other claim was made by Danylo Tsvok, the head of the Ukrainian MOD’s AI center. He predicted AI systems would soon be unified into a single network overseeing the battlefield, leading to a “war of operating systems” with Russia in the next three to five years—something referred to as a “new paradigm” of war.
“The system that possesses more data and better understands that data, proposes solutions — that system will gain the advantage over the other,”
In these two announcements we can see how AI systems are evolving on what might be called a two-track process, one that I think is best called the macro and the other micro.
If you have better names—I am all ears. This is new ground.
If the micro and macro can be merged, think of combining what Fedorov and Tsvok are saying, the result would be a fully automated battlefield. This would dramatically alter the whole idea of warfare.
Now, this is a fascinating subject that I have written about a great deal in the past and I will write about regularly in the future. Almost two and a half years ago I sent out these three posts, some of the first on the subject, about how AI was on the cusp of transforming the way the Russo-Ukraine War, and all wars, were being fought.
When newer readers might wonder why I was adamant that Ukraine needed to reduce the number of humans on the battlefield, one of the reasons was because it seemed to me probable that automated systems combined with the expected major increases in UAV numbers, were on the cusp of massively increasing attritional losses. Here is a section from the last part of the concluding piece in that series.
