The Age of the Automated Commander
On the technologically evolving battlefield, a prompt data fusion process is critical. Since the human commander can no longer handle all of the information pouring in simultaneously, the next phase is an automated one
Ami Rojkes Dombe
| 14/07/2017
Photo Credit: US Army
In the past decades, the world of warfare experienced some technological revolutions that changed it radically. Some of the most important revolutions were the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), Network-Centric Warfare (NCW), the emergence of the cyber warfare dimension (the fifth dimension of warfare) and the cloud computing and IoT revolution whose first indications have emerged in the last few years. This article addresses another revolution that is to be expected in the world of warfare – the command revolution.
The revolutions and changes that took place in the world of warfare during the last three decades may be attributed to the development of computer infrastructures, communications that enabled networked operations, miniaturized electronics and substantial processing power. These infrastructures made it possible for modern armed forces to collect massive amounts of data, then process and share those data. In the military jargon, this is, in fact, the ability of a military organization to reach a state of collective situational awareness as close to real time as possible.
This capability of modern military organizations enabled them to handle the process of battlefield evolution during those three decades – the transition from symmetrical wars between regular armed forces to asymmetrical confrontations between a regular military organization and a terrorist organization. This process compelled the world's armed forces to develop a situational awareness that would enable them to identify enemy targets whose life cycle is less than one minute long.
A review of the future battlefield indicates that the additional upgrading of the infrastructures has a glass ceiling – the decision-making process. The technological upgrading of the platforms, weapon systems and C2 systems that link together the technologies on the battlefield eventually depends on the decisions to be executed. The man in the loop, as talented and competent as he may be, is restricted by his ability to handle the flood of incoming information and the decision-making time intervals on the modern battlefield.
This leads to the conclusion that the next revolution in the world of warfare will involve the decision-making process, namely – a command revolution. Just as the infrastructures had undergone a technological process, so the command process is expected to undergo modernization through algorithms, automatic scripts, bots and automated assistants.
Automated Assistants for Commanders
The first elements heralding these capabilities are already being introduced into various elements of the chain of command. Modern C2 systems incorporate data fusion and automation elements. Parts of the Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) arsenal possess Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) capabilities. Loitering munitions can close the fire loop on their own, technically, and various types of cybersecurity systems can diagnose threats and block them without human intervention. At the same time, all of this does not yet amount to a conceptual change in the world of military command. Rather, it reflects the random development of the computer and communication infrastructures that serve and support the human command elements.
In order to position the capabilities of the infrastructure and the capabilities of the command elements along the same time axis, the human commander has to enlist the assistance of technological tools to make some of the decisions for him. Some of you are already familiar with bots, algorithms and scripts designed like "automated personal assistants" from the cellular phone world. Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa are only a few of the automated personal assistants developed by the software manufacturers in recent years. The objective of all of these assistants is to make some of the decisions for the human user.
Such decisions may include recommendations for navigation, an immediate reply to questions based on the use of search engines, activation of apps and on-line purchasing based on behavior pattern analysis and so forth. In the future, automated assistants may also perform even more complex operations on the battlefield.
During actual combat, at the tactical level, a commander has to make dozens or hundreds of decisions within short time intervals – seconds or minutes. Analyzing insights from real-time intelligence, whether it is delivered in the form of structured data or unstructured data, is a task an automated assistant can handle. If the commander has an automated assistant capable of making some of the decisions, the human commander will be able to focus on the more important decisions, whether he operates a platform, employs troopers, communicates between functionaries or performs any other tasks.
The advantage of an automated assistant may be put to good use at the strategic level as well. At this level, senior commanders examine various scenarios during the actual fighting (this process normally involves "What If" type scenarios). As this activity involves the collection of data followed by analysis and calculation of scenario probabilities – it makes a classic profile where machine learning or deep learning algorithms can produce results.
One should bear in mind the fact that conducting a war is a content world based on history (operational experience that includes previous confrontations and wars) and philosophy (concepts such as those by Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz and others). Combining history and philosophy with data collected on the battlefield (topography, current OrBat, force positions, current capabilities, maintenance status, etc.) can make the difference between victory and defeat. In a modern war, where all of the parties involved rely mainly on automated systems, the process involves a great deal of data out of which insights should be gleaned before the officers of the other side have done the same. In the future, the side that has the most advanced automated assistants, capable of doing that for their officers, will emerge victorious on the battlefield.
In addition to the contribution made by automated assistants to human commanders in the context of tactical and strategic command, on the future battlefield they will also be able to command swarms of unmanned platforms operating autonomously. In a combined combat profile involving human troopers and autonomous platforms, the rate at which decisions are made and the amount of information on the battlefield will be nearly impossible to analyze for a human commander. In such a profile, human commanders may make the final decisions with regard to strategy, but at the tactical level automated assistants will be those that actually operate the autonomous unmanned arsenal.
Pursuant to the claim that the human commander will no longer have the monopoly on command on the future battlefield, a new training process for military commanders should be devised that would prepare them for the next war, where algorithms, scripts, bots and automated assistants will relieve them of the task of making some of the command decisions.
Commanding combat operations in a combined man-computer environment calls for a number of capabilities that may be considered. Firstly – commanders must be familiar with the technology. Admittedly, an enormous effort is under way to provide military commanders with "stupid-simple" systems, but as far as the operational aspect and aspects such as information security and others are concerned, the desired result is not always achieved. Accordingly, a commander who's not comfortable and thoroughly familiar with the technology will not be able to make the most of the capabilities modern weapon systems can offer him.
Another capability stems from the understanding that a dialog must be conducted with the automated assistant. Admittedly, it is possible to run algorithms on the intelligence pouring in so that they would search for contexts or patterns and present them to the human commander in real time, but that commander still has to enter his questions into the automated system, such as what he is looking for, whom he is looking for, what the optimal hierarchy of priorities for the next operation is and so forth. Good communication between the human commander and the automated assistant can help in promptly identifying the enemy's points of failure in real time.
Another aspect around which the future commanders should be trained is sharing information during combat. For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume, theoretically, that a communication layer and an information security layer are available. In line with this assumption, the fighting will evolve from network-centric fighting to synchronized, collective fighting. Namely – platforms will communicate with one another using different models under the heading of IoT. Platforms will activate and operate themselves, as well as other platforms, with no human involvement (as is the case, for example, with the Trophy system). Platforms will also attempt to intervene in battlefield information (EW/Cyber) independently in order to gain an advantage or protect themselves.
Whereas this process involves full cooperation and time intervals that are close to real time, the human commander will also have to share information within the same intervals. The human commander, like any other platform on the battlefield, will also become a producer of information through wearable sensors or other resources that would enable him to share information with all of the entities in his vicinity.
This is a profound change. Military units (squad/team, platoon, company, battalion, etc.), now made up of human beings and smart machines will aspire, to the maximum extent possible, to produce a current (up to the minute) collective insight. This will not be just a battle picture, but collective situational awareness where every decision made by one entity would affect all the other entities in real time. The ability of the unit to jointly decide, as a collective, which move should be selected out of all possible scenarios – with everything done during the actual battle – will also be included in this equation.
The implication is that the human commander will have to think in a manner other than the hierarchical way of thinking in use today. Instead, he would have to redefine his role within a collective military unit that makes decisions jointly in real time. The human commander would have to coordinate with the other entities in the unit (some of which will be autonomous and automated) his role and the value he provides the unit with at any given moment. In some cases, the human commander may not provide any added value to the unit, so he would be excluded by automated systems from tactical moves. For example – if the move imposes an excessive risk on that commander.
Recalculating Command
The technological changes of today will undoubtedly intensify. High-speed, robust communication systems facilitating smart command and control systems are only the beginning. A joint battle picture, network-centric warfare and combined-arms operations, the integration of autonomous systems on the battlefield – these are only the first indicators heralding the artificial intelligence revolution on the battlefield, which should be expected to take place in the coming years.
Algorithms and automated assistants capable of reaching insights and contexts a human cannot reach on his own facing the flood of incoming information and the response speeds required on the battlefield will determine who the victor would be. These capabilities, which are mostly based on civilian systems (COTS = Commercial, Off-the-Shelf in the defense jargon), will be accessible to everyone – including terrorist organizations and developing countries. The implication is that it will be more difficult for military organizations – any military organization – to maintain the technological gap vis-à-vis the enemy.
Moreover, the implication is that in such an era, it will no longer be possible to base the qualitative gap on the human capital. The human capital will hardly have any significance in an era where every algorithm has access to databases containing data from military conflicts around the world, to military philosophy databases and to databases from the worlds of business, medicine and other worlds. A decision made by such an algorithm will be just as good as, and in most cases better than a decision made by a human commander who does not have access to such a massive quantity of information. If this technology is available to the enemy, then his decisions will be just as good as mine.
On the technologically evolving battlefield, a prompt data fusion process is critical. Since the human commander can no longer handle all of the information pouring in simultaneously, the next phase is an automated one
In the past decades, the world of warfare experienced some technological revolutions that changed it radically. Some of the most important revolutions were the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), Network-Centric Warfare (NCW), the emergence of the cyber warfare dimension (the fifth dimension of warfare) and the cloud computing and IoT revolution whose first indications have emerged in the last few years. This article addresses another revolution that is to be expected in the world of warfare – the command revolution.
The revolutions and changes that took place in the world of warfare during the last three decades may be attributed to the development of computer infrastructures, communications that enabled networked operations, miniaturized electronics and substantial processing power. These infrastructures made it possible for modern armed forces to collect massive amounts of data, then process and share those data. In the military jargon, this is, in fact, the ability of a military organization to reach a state of collective situational awareness as close to real time as possible.
This capability of modern military organizations enabled them to handle the process of battlefield evolution during those three decades – the transition from symmetrical wars between regular armed forces to asymmetrical confrontations between a regular military organization and a terrorist organization. This process compelled the world's armed forces to develop a situational awareness that would enable them to identify enemy targets whose life cycle is less than one minute long.
A review of the future battlefield indicates that the additional upgrading of the infrastructures has a glass ceiling – the decision-making process. The technological upgrading of the platforms, weapon systems and C2 systems that link together the technologies on the battlefield eventually depends on the decisions to be executed. The man in the loop, as talented and competent as he may be, is restricted by his ability to handle the flood of incoming information and the decision-making time intervals on the modern battlefield.
This leads to the conclusion that the next revolution in the world of warfare will involve the decision-making process, namely – a command revolution. Just as the infrastructures had undergone a technological process, so the command process is expected to undergo modernization through algorithms, automatic scripts, bots and automated assistants.
Automated Assistants for Commanders
The first elements heralding these capabilities are already being introduced into various elements of the chain of command. Modern C2 systems incorporate data fusion and automation elements. Parts of the Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) arsenal possess Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) capabilities. Loitering munitions can close the fire loop on their own, technically, and various types of cybersecurity systems can diagnose threats and block them without human intervention. At the same time, all of this does not yet amount to a conceptual change in the world of military command. Rather, it reflects the random development of the computer and communication infrastructures that serve and support the human command elements.
In order to position the capabilities of the infrastructure and the capabilities of the command elements along the same time axis, the human commander has to enlist the assistance of technological tools to make some of the decisions for him. Some of you are already familiar with bots, algorithms and scripts designed like "automated personal assistants" from the cellular phone world. Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa are only a few of the automated personal assistants developed by the software manufacturers in recent years. The objective of all of these assistants is to make some of the decisions for the human user.
Such decisions may include recommendations for navigation, an immediate reply to questions based on the use of search engines, activation of apps and on-line purchasing based on behavior pattern analysis and so forth. In the future, automated assistants may also perform even more complex operations on the battlefield.
During actual combat, at the tactical level, a commander has to make dozens or hundreds of decisions within short time intervals – seconds or minutes. Analyzing insights from real-time intelligence, whether it is delivered in the form of structured data or unstructured data, is a task an automated assistant can handle. If the commander has an automated assistant capable of making some of the decisions, the human commander will be able to focus on the more important decisions, whether he operates a platform, employs troopers, communicates between functionaries or performs any other tasks.
The advantage of an automated assistant may be put to good use at the strategic level as well. At this level, senior commanders examine various scenarios during the actual fighting (this process normally involves "What If" type scenarios). As this activity involves the collection of data followed by analysis and calculation of scenario probabilities – it makes a classic profile where machine learning or deep learning algorithms can produce results.
One should bear in mind the fact that conducting a war is a content world based on history (operational experience that includes previous confrontations and wars) and philosophy (concepts such as those by Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz and others). Combining history and philosophy with data collected on the battlefield (topography, current OrBat, force positions, current capabilities, maintenance status, etc.) can make the difference between victory and defeat. In a modern war, where all of the parties involved rely mainly on automated systems, the process involves a great deal of data out of which insights should be gleaned before the officers of the other side have done the same. In the future, the side that has the most advanced automated assistants, capable of doing that for their officers, will emerge victorious on the battlefield.
In addition to the contribution made by automated assistants to human commanders in the context of tactical and strategic command, on the future battlefield they will also be able to command swarms of unmanned platforms operating autonomously. In a combined combat profile involving human troopers and autonomous platforms, the rate at which decisions are made and the amount of information on the battlefield will be nearly impossible to analyze for a human commander. In such a profile, human commanders may make the final decisions with regard to strategy, but at the tactical level automated assistants will be those that actually operate the autonomous unmanned arsenal.
Pursuant to the claim that the human commander will no longer have the monopoly on command on the future battlefield, a new training process for military commanders should be devised that would prepare them for the next war, where algorithms, scripts, bots and automated assistants will relieve them of the task of making some of the command decisions.
Commanding combat operations in a combined man-computer environment calls for a number of capabilities that may be considered. Firstly – commanders must be familiar with the technology. Admittedly, an enormous effort is under way to provide military commanders with "stupid-simple" systems, but as far as the operational aspect and aspects such as information security and others are concerned, the desired result is not always achieved. Accordingly, a commander who's not comfortable and thoroughly familiar with the technology will not be able to make the most of the capabilities modern weapon systems can offer him.
Another capability stems from the understanding that a dialog must be conducted with the automated assistant. Admittedly, it is possible to run algorithms on the intelligence pouring in so that they would search for contexts or patterns and present them to the human commander in real time, but that commander still has to enter his questions into the automated system, such as what he is looking for, whom he is looking for, what the optimal hierarchy of priorities for the next operation is and so forth. Good communication between the human commander and the automated assistant can help in promptly identifying the enemy's points of failure in real time.
Another aspect around which the future commanders should be trained is sharing information during combat. For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume, theoretically, that a communication layer and an information security layer are available. In line with this assumption, the fighting will evolve from network-centric fighting to synchronized, collective fighting. Namely – platforms will communicate with one another using different models under the heading of IoT. Platforms will activate and operate themselves, as well as other platforms, with no human involvement (as is the case, for example, with the Trophy system). Platforms will also attempt to intervene in battlefield information (EW/Cyber) independently in order to gain an advantage or protect themselves.
Whereas this process involves full cooperation and time intervals that are close to real time, the human commander will also have to share information within the same intervals. The human commander, like any other platform on the battlefield, will also become a producer of information through wearable sensors or other resources that would enable him to share information with all of the entities in his vicinity.
This is a profound change. Military units (squad/team, platoon, company, battalion, etc.), now made up of human beings and smart machines will aspire, to the maximum extent possible, to produce a current (up to the minute) collective insight. This will not be just a battle picture, but collective situational awareness where every decision made by one entity would affect all the other entities in real time. The ability of the unit to jointly decide, as a collective, which move should be selected out of all possible scenarios – with everything done during the actual battle – will also be included in this equation.
The implication is that the human commander will have to think in a manner other than the hierarchical way of thinking in use today. Instead, he would have to redefine his role within a collective military unit that makes decisions jointly in real time. The human commander would have to coordinate with the other entities in the unit (some of which will be autonomous and automated) his role and the value he provides the unit with at any given moment. In some cases, the human commander may not provide any added value to the unit, so he would be excluded by automated systems from tactical moves. For example – if the move imposes an excessive risk on that commander.
Recalculating Command
The technological changes of today will undoubtedly intensify. High-speed, robust communication systems facilitating smart command and control systems are only the beginning. A joint battle picture, network-centric warfare and combined-arms operations, the integration of autonomous systems on the battlefield – these are only the first indicators heralding the artificial intelligence revolution on the battlefield, which should be expected to take place in the coming years.
Algorithms and automated assistants capable of reaching insights and contexts a human cannot reach on his own facing the flood of incoming information and the response speeds required on the battlefield will determine who the victor would be. These capabilities, which are mostly based on civilian systems (COTS = Commercial, Off-the-Shelf in the defense jargon), will be accessible to everyone – including terrorist organizations and developing countries. The implication is that it will be more difficult for military organizations – any military organization – to maintain the technological gap vis-à-vis the enemy.
Moreover, the implication is that in such an era, it will no longer be possible to base the qualitative gap on the human capital. The human capital will hardly have any significance in an era where every algorithm has access to databases containing data from military conflicts around the world, to military philosophy databases and to databases from the worlds of business, medicine and other worlds. A decision made by such an algorithm will be just as good as, and in most cases better than a decision made by a human commander who does not have access to such a massive quantity of information. If this technology is available to the enemy, then his decisions will be just as good as mine.
