The New Character of the “Fog of War”—Seeing to Know and Seeing to Strike

Speakers: Lt Gen Jack Shanahan (Former Director of the US Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Center (JAIC); Member of the Board of Advisors, Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP)); and Dr. Dave Kilcullen (President & CEO, Cordillera Applications Group, Inc.)

Date: 10 August 2022

Speaker Session Summary

SMA hosted a speaker session with Lt Gen Jack Shanahan (Former Inaugural Director of the US Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC); Member of the Board of Advisors, Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP)), and Dr. Dave Kilcullen (President & CEO, Cordillera Applications Group) as part of its SMA Mind-tech Nexus Speaker Series.

The advancement of technology—including artificial intelligence (AI)—is unavoidable. New technology will inevitably change how military campaigns are conducted and how individual military units engage in combat. How warfighters decide to use technology will be the strongest influencer of how warfare evolves, Lt Gen Shanahan commented. He also argued that AI will force an important reassessment of reality across society and especially the military. The pace of technology creation and adoption is also increasing, enhancing the need for more frequent wargaming.

While technological advancement will strongly influence the way war is fought, the technology itself is not deterministic. Lt Gen Shanahan emphasized that incorporating AI systems and other technology into units will decide future winners and losers; however, it is how those units decide to use technology that will decide their actual impact on society and the battlefield. Lt Gen Shanahan stated that he is equally apprehensive about fully trusting AI as he is about the influence of human bias.

Dr. Kilcullen described several wargaming scenarios that were conducted in cooperation with allies and partners, including DARPA (US), SOCOM (US), dstl (UK), Qinetiq (UK), UKSF (UK), DRDC (CA), SOCOMD (AUS), and NATO. He explained that these wargames allowed for researchers to better understand how teams will incorporate new technologies into various combat scenarios. These teams blended physical domains, such as firepower, mobility, and protection, with virtual domains, such as electricity, connectivity, and data, during multiple scenarios. Dr. Kilcullen explained that these games revealed the potential for AI to learn how a commander thinks over time and to identify where combatants are by collecting data on a unit’s actions and location. He concluded by emphasizing that AI systems must remain mostly autonomous to avoid inadvertently taking soldiers out of the battlefield to maintain the broader AI system.  

Speaker Session Recording

Briefing Materials

Biographies:

Lieutenant General John (Jack) N.T. Shanahan, United States Air Force, Retired, retired in 2020 after a 36-year military career. In his final assignment he served as the inaugural Director of the US Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Center (JAIC). Jack served in a variety of operational and staff positions in various fields including flying, intelligence, policy, and command and control. He commanded at the squadron, group, wing, Agency, and Numbered Air Force levels. As the first Director of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (Project Maven), Jack established and led DoD’s pathfinder AI fielding program charged with bringing AI capabilities to intelligence collection and analysis. Jack is a 2022 graduate of the North Carolina State University Master of International Studies program. He served as a Special Government Employee supporting the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and is now serving on the Board of Advisors for the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security; serves on the Board of Advisors for the Common Mission Project; is an advisor to The Changing Character of War Centre (Oxford University); is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Autonomous Weapons Systems Assurance and Safety Subcommittee; is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Testing, Evaluating, and Assessing Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Systems under Operational Conditions for the Department of the Air Force; and is an adviser to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Hamilton Center on Industrial Strategy. He also serves as a consultant on the use of AI-enabled technologies for national security.

Dr. Dave Kilcullen is a bestselling author, a leading researcher in the field of unconventional and guerrilla warfare, and a former professional soldier and diplomat. He is President and CEO of Cordillera Applications Group, a research and development firm headquartered in Colorado, USA. Cordillera launched in August 2017 from Meta Aerospace Capital, where Dave was COO and Head of Applications Group. Before joining Meta, Dave founded and led Caerus Global Solutions, a strategic R&D firm in Washington DC, and First Mile Geo (now Native.io), a tech platform that enables researchers to rapidly pool and share analysis in austere field environments. Prior to founding Caerus and Native, Dave served 24 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In addition to his work with Cordillera, Dave advises world institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs and local communities across the globe, while working on complex humanitarian and security challenges in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. Foreign Policy named him as one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009. Dave is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including the PROSE Award winner and Washington Post bestseller The Accidental Guerrilla (2009); Counterinsurgency (2010); Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (2013), which won the PROSE award for Government and Politics; and Blood Year: Islamic State and the failures of the War on Terror (2016), which won the 2015 Walkley Award for long-form journalism. His specialties include aerospace, field research, counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, risk analysis, urban design, strategic advisory services, monitoring, and evaluation.

The SMA Mind-Tech Nexus Speaker Series description and list of the other sessions in this series can be downloaded here.