ASPI’s artificial intelligence and national security masterclass held on 2 July gave some practical insights from experts and senior Australian officials about where AI might be used in national security.

The areas might surprise you, particularly if you were predicting swarms of killer robots fighting a war in the early 2020s. What might also surprise you is the number of uses, and the speed at which they’re likely to occur.

Artificial intelligence is less and more than the public debate says. Put simply, it refers to computer systems performing tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as decision-making, translation, pattern recognition and speech recognition. Early applications of AI are likely to involve things like optimising supply chains, helping digest data in jobs like visa processing, doing cyber defence against AI-enabled attackers—and helping strategic leaders and operational commanders make sense of confused but data-rich operational environments.

Closer to those killer robots are applications that might provide the edge to advanced missiles in the last stages of an attack, as well as countermeasures to systems like hypersonic weapons.

So, why are these particular areas likely first adopters of AI? One simple answer is because Australian agencies are already using AI to some extent—with a human decision-maker in the loop at one or more stages. A bigger reason is that the ‘business processes’ in national security agencies are similar to processes in companies that are already big users of AI.

Two other drivers for adopting AI are the availability of large datasets for analysis and a need to make quick decisions. If one of those drivers applies to an activity, it can make AI a sensible solution. If both apply, it’s a likely AI sweet spot, where the gains or capability advantages could be large. The big tech companies already use AI across their businesses; Google is an obvious example. Big resource companies are also early adopters—with driverless mining trucks and trains.

Logistics and supply-chain optimisation may sound mundane, but they’re valuable areas to apply AI. That’s because modern systems are prolific generators of data that can increase efficiency and reliability. Simple examples are condition monitoring of systems on board navy ships, and predictive ordering of spares, weapons, fuel and food. AI tools can be trained on the data that the Department of Defence and its major contractors produce, with human decision-makers validating AI judgements and improving the algorithms.

Cybersecurity is another no-brainer for AI—because cyber is the land of large data and there’s already a problem with relying on people to process it. Moves towards widespread connection to the internet of devices and machinery other than computers and smartphones—as is happening with new 5G networks—make it essential for cybersecurity systems to be able to scale up to handle massive datasets and do so at machine speed. AI will empower human cyber-defenders (and cyber-attackers) to manage the enormous expansion of the attack surface brought about by 5G and the internet of things.

But let’s get closer to the battlefront. Why won’t AI give us killer robots now? Well, the good news is that, outside the hothouse innovation-driver of war, even adversaries who might have few reservations about gaining the operational advantage have similar practical concerns to those who—like our military and broader national security community—pay close attention to their obligations under domestic and international humanitarian law.

The key concerns are about trust. Fully autonomous systems using machine learning can be fast but dumb, or, more politely, smart but flawed. During the Cold War, the computer said launch, but it was overridden by humans who suspected something wasn’t right—and we’re here because of those human judgements. Recent examples of self-driving cars crashing and killing people are further demonstrations of the fragility of and flaws in current fully autonomous systems.

National-security and military decision-makers are unlikely to send off the first AI-driven autonomous lethal robot, mainly because they fear loss of control and the potential blowback from doing something risky—with that ‘thing’ maybe killing their own forces or civilians who are in the way.

So, human-in-the-loop or human-on-the-loop approaches are likely to be core to AI in national security: both mean that critical decisions are made by people, not machines. Secretary of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo calls this the ‘golden rule’ for AI in national security.

History tells us that deciding and acting faster on better information than your adversary are key to success. AI can help commanders make sense of confused and rich data feeds from networked sensors on ships, in aircraft, on land vehicles, and now on individual soldiers and unmanned systems.

AI can also help advanced missiles hit their targets. A number of anti-ship, anti-aircraft and air-to-ground missiles already have active seekers and pre-programmed countermeasures that work against defensive systems. AI-enabled missiles, though, will be able to make decisions on data gathered in flight about the actual countermeasures and defences on the target ship, aircraft, ground formation or base. The rapid data processing of AI could increase the hit rate and damage. Use against specific military targets avoids the autonomous killer robot problem.

Just as in cybersecurity, AI on the battlefield will be part of the classic tango of measure and countermeasure, with the balance constantly shifting between aggressor and defender.

This sketch about AI in national security shows one clear thing: it’s real and it’s already happening faster than most realise. Many applications won’t elicit hyped-up commentary about the next war, but they are nonetheless powerful and likely to be widespread.

That brings us to Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, and some of the people at the ASPI event. Given the speed of development of AI, urgent work is required to establish the ethical and legal frameworks that AI developers must use for applications involving decisions about humans. That work is for policymakers, legal advisers and ethicists, in consultation with the technologists.

I’d argue that our chief scientist should get on with leading AI development, with ethicists doing the ethics. Both types of work must be done now if they’re to guide our future uses of machine-enabled or even machine-made decisions. Let’s not leave it to others to develop AI. And let’s not leave it to AI to decide how we use AI—that is a job for us humans.

In war, there’s a constant to and fro. At times defence dominates, at other times offence. Technologies arise and fall. Disruption rules. This is noticeably so in today’s arcane world of air superiority. While much investment has gone into the ADF’s air superiority capabilities—with more coming with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the operational environment isn’t standing still.

The skies are increasingly contested. Emerging threats are making our tanker and AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) aircraft more vulnerable, and advanced surface-to-air missiles, stealth-fighter technology, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles and even hobbyist drones are proliferating. The US Air Force (USAF) recently studied what all this means in practice and determined that its ‘projected force structure in 2030 is not capable of fighting and winning against [the expected] array of potential adversary capabilities’. If the USAF’s force structure is becoming stretched so, surely, is ours.

Some warn that the 2030 date may mislead, asserting that ‘Integrated Air Defence Systems covering areas in the Western Pacific … may now be able to deny access to all but the stealthiest of aircraft’. The ‘stealthiest of aircraft’ refers to the flying wing B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and forthcoming B-21 Raiders. It seems that F-35s with their vertical tails have some vulnerabilities to emerging multiband digital radars. A RAND study echoes these concerns about current and growing air-superiority shortcomings.

Even so, 2030 isn’t far away in defence terms. It’s only seven years after Australia’s F-35 fleet will have—hopefully—reached final (or full) operational status. That’s not long in the planned 25- to 30-year life of the aircraft.

Australia has committed to its major air superiority investments, which makes them a good starting point to discuss the strategic impacts of known and emerging changes in the air superiority operational environment. In my new paper published by ASPI titled Contested skies, I use current air superiority force structure plans to develop three practical strategic options to address these changes.

Two of these options require modifying the current plans. That may worry some, but strategic ‘ends’ can’t be determined independently of the capability ‘means’. The two are interdependent. When the means are fixed, it makes sense to discuss alternative ‘ways’ that might reasonably bring strategic ends into alignment.

The three options are:

• Continuing with our current plans. Maintaining our current operational plans and future equipment programs means lowering our national ambitions to simply the defence of the Australia. This ‘back to the future’ approach implies abandoning Southeast Asian nations to do the best they can as China rises and its sphere of influence expands. Strategically, this shifts the burden of conducting offensive air operations onto our American ally. While we could contribute by providing a safe base area in any conflict in which the skies were seriously contested, this level of involvement wouldn’t give us much influence on overall allied strategy or in any war-termination negotiations. Our current air superiority plans doom us to being a bit player.
• Going ‘air defence heavy’. This option changes our current capability development plans to stress air defence. A start would include acquiring significant numbers of advanced surface-to air missiles and sensors for integrated air and missile defence, changing our F-35 upgrade plans and focusing on making airbases more resilient. Strategically, the ‘air defence heavy’ approach would allow Australia to remain deeply engaged in Southeast Asia and make a meaningful—perhaps decisive—contribution in times of serious conflict. Because this approach is less reliant on US support, it would allow us to mount independent operations in an area critical to our future. This has some echoes with the Pacific War’s later stages, when the US relied on Australian forces to conduct operations in Borneo while it focused on the Philippines and beyond.
• Rebuilding our strike capability. This option entails adjusting our current plans to focus on reconfiguring our strike capability to be effective in contested airspace beyond 2030. We’d also need to make a limited investment in integrated air and missile defence. The USAF study mentioned earlier foresees the F-35 losing its strike role at the end of the next decade and then becoming an air defence fighter—taking the ‘strike’ out of ‘Joint Strike Fighter’. This applies to all of the elements that comprise the ADF’s strike capabilities, not just to the F-35. If we want to maintain a genuine strike capability into the future, we need to take positive steps to do so. But this won’t be easy or low cost—or maybe even doable.

In broad terms, the status quo ‘defence of Australia’ option implies burden-shifting onto the US, the ‘air defence heavy’ approach implies a reduced dependency on the US—perhaps lessening America’s burdens—while the rebuilding of our strike capability implies continuing to share the burden with the US in major ‘must-win’ wars past 2030.

Air superiority may seem narrowly technical, but it can have a significant impact on the range of strategies that can realistically be considered. It’s time for a big air-superiority rethink.

This piece is drawn from Agenda for change 2016: strategic choices for the next government.

The 2016 defence white paper didn’t end the contemporary defence debate; it began it.

Our strategic environment is full of uncertainties, and material defence capabilities are so situated in a revolutionary moment that no decades-long projection can survive more than two or three years as a source of comfort for policymakers. Our defence and broader diplomacy need to reflect the challenges and opportunities identified in the white paper. Some of it goes to medium-term projections on what appeared settled: funding and major equipment. Above all, the ideas indicate why it is desirable to have white papers at least every five years. The questions unanswered will always be more important than those which are.

We federated over a hundred years ago as a nation, in large measure because we perceived the need for a national defence. Defence has a very modest share of the budget pie. Even with the intention to lift GDP share, annual defence outlays remain around 7.5% of the federal budget. They are dwarfed by social spending. Yet whenever commentators reach for an example of something we could do without it is inevitably from the defence capital program.

So a sense of proportion is retained: in the 1980s when I was defence minister we routinely accounted for around 8.5–9.0% of the budget. The government averaged 2.3% of GDP in defence spending. Were we dealing with these numbers now, the defence budget would be $5 billion a year better off. Yet, as the Soviets used to say, ‘the correlation of forces’ has shifted decisively against us.

In 1987 our GDP exceeded that of the ASEAN states combined. Indonesia’s economy alone is passing us now. We seized a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War and nothing in the numbers suggests we want to seriously amend that. That’s a massive constraint. We can’t afford a blowout in a major program. The proceeds which flow from Defence reform will be critical. None of it will be sufficient. The spread of a consensus on the vital character of the defence function has to be the ballast at least of its sustainment but also a platform for a closer look at priority.

In allied relationships the paradox of the post–Cold War era is that we’re now closer to the United States than we were then. This simply reflects the transition of Southeast Asia from a post-Vietnam Cold War backwater to the southern tier of the focal point of the global economy. As the Americans engage Asia they appreciate a ‘muse’ with an agenda less troublesome than those of their other allies.

From our point of view, access to the best American technology is now critical for any chance of an Australian capability edge in its strategic zone. This is the post ‘revolution in military affairs’ or ‘second offset’ event acting out in our procurement program. It took effect in the early 1990s. We spend $13 million a working day in US defence industry. The Australian embassy in Washington DC manages over 400 foreign military sales programs. To cite one example of the fruit of this, one could point to the most effective air defence of our approaches we have ever had.

Both globally and regionally, our strategic situation has deteriorated. We confront a fraught situation in the Middle East where we support fragile local allies struggling with the fundamentalist extremist side of a confessional dispute in the Muslim community. We do so because our American ally is there, we have been engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we know, though this aspect of the struggle is local to the Middle East, it is global in impact. There’s a real possibility of its intensification in the region where the bulk of the world’s Muslims reside—Asia.

Though there’s no good reason for it, Russia determines a course dragging the US back to a European confrontation. China ignores the sage advice of Deng Xiaoping and persists in a challenge around its maritime borders. Global events, particularly the impact of climate change, tease forth a multiplicity of conflict scenarios. These are intellectually more challenging than a simple reflection on defending our approaches. They make prioritising force structure issues very hard and DWP 2016 unsatisfactorily resolved this by delineating all challenges as of equal priority.

In the next few years this will be less of a challenge to defence policymakers than the impact of a further technological revolution in defence equipment. The ‘third offset strategy’ is well underway. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and directed-energy weapons, together with applications of these changes in space and underwater systems in particular, disturb not only our priorities but the viability and relevance of some very expensive platforms.

One wonders, for example, over the long-term prospect of SEA 1000 when strides seem at last to be made on the use of autonomous systems in underwater detection. Directed-energy weapons render potent a lesser platform than the US normally operates at sea. Ballistic-missile defences are becoming more viable and from an American point of view more important. The new systems, if affordable, trump most capacities for regional asymmetric warfare. Down this road goes obsolescence of a lot we plan on and a premium on the American relationship.

Assuming the US sustains its global stance, our future conversation will be not so much about interoperability as about integration. The US will increasingly rely on using the capacities of others as it confronts the costs of replacing platforms, supporting personnel and introducing new weapons.

Australia’s defence planning will be massively more complex than has appeared to be the case with DWP 2016. And more expensive. We face a major strategic challenge for our national budget: can we sustain hybrid European levels of social provision and a hybrid American taxation system?

We can’t and we won’t face up to it. Unless we do, one wonders how we tease out of the budget what really ought to be our first-order priority—the resources to sustain the means of our survival.