India has been giving great importance to the usage of artificial intelligence in the armed forces, especially the use of robotics and autonomous systems. Greater application of this technology could help the country’s defence forces by enabling soldiers with more capability in difficult conditions.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) created a multi-stakeholder task force for Strategic Implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Defence in February 2018 which gave its report in June. Based on the recommendations of the report, it led to the adoption of the creation of the institutional framework for AI policy implementation with guidelines for the country’s defence forces. In February 2019, the ministry established a high-level Defence AI Council (DAIC) under the chairmanship of Minister of Defence assigned with the task of providing strategic direction towards the adoption of AI in defence.

Recently, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh announced that 25 defence-specific AI products would be developed by 2024. Although it is a welcome move, the announcement did not provide specific initiatives in this regard. Of course, in the case of India the budget for AI-specific projects is drastically small compared to larger countries like the US and China. Here we look at what other nations are unto in the use of artificial intelligence capabilities in their defence projects.

If we look at specific outcomes of India’s AI implementations for the defence, the Centre of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) in the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has built autonomous technology-based products. It has focused on the net-centric communication systems for tactical command control. For surveillance and reconnaissance purposes, CAIR has developed automated machines like snake robots, hexa-bots, and sentries. It has a comprehensive library for AI-based algorithms and data mining toolboxes that can potentially be used for image/video recognition, NLP, swarming.

US Is Leading The Way In AI Budget Spending

The US has been using using AI-based technologies in their defence for a long time. In the United States National Defence Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2001, the Congress mandated that “it shall be a goal of the armed forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned.” In 2014, former Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel announced the “Third Offset Strategy” stating that rapid advances in artificial intelligence will define the next generation of warfare. Ever since then, there has been a substantial increment in the budget of AI-led projects under the defence budget.

According to one report, the US Defence Department will be setting aside $4 billion toward AI and ML-related R&D activities in fiscal 2020, which is a substantial jump from the 2019 fiscal spending. As part of the defence budget, the military is working on 222 AI R&D activities at a combined $1.6 billion. If you look at the entire US budget for 2020, it provides an enormous $134.1 billion for Federal R&D, including the conduct of R&D and investments in R&D facilities and equipment. The President’s 2020 Budget priorities investments for four key industries, including AI, quantum information sciences, advanced communication networks and advanced manufacturing.

The US has many military AI combat programs, such as the Sea Hunter autonomous warship, which is designed to operate for extended periods at sea without a single crew member, and to even guide itself in and out of port. Another example is Project Maven, which is a Pentagon project involving using machine learning and engineering talent to distinguish people and objects in drone videos. For Project Maven, Pentagon leveraged tech giant Google’s capabilities.

China Comes A Close Second In AI Militarisation

In 2017, the Communist Party of China set 2030 as the deadline for this ambitious AI goal, and, to get there, it laid out a set of targets to reach by 2020. These include making significant contributions to fundamental artificial intelligence research. The initiative unveiled in 2017, known as the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan has given birth to multiple policies and billions of dollars of investment in research and development from ministries, provincial governments and private companies.

China is well on its way to making a significant impact, according to an analysis of the most-cited AI papers indexed on the scholarly search engine Microsoft Academic. According to a February 2019 report by Gregory C. Allen of the Center for a New American Security, “China’s leadership – including President Xi Jinping – believes that being at the forefront in AI technology is critical to the future of global military and economic power competition.” Chinese military officials have said that their goal is to incorporate commercial AI technology to “narrow the gap between the Chinese military and global advanced powers.”

According to The National Interest, China is the biggest exporter of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), otherwise known as combat drones. China has become the primary exporter of UCAVs. Whereas China exported 10 UCAVs to 2 countries in 2009-13, in 2014-18 it exported 153 to 13 countries—5 of which are in the Middle East: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

China also has autonomous vehicles its military uses itself. One of these is the Marine Lizard, which is not a UCAV, but an autonomous amphibious landing vehicle. According to the state-owned technology company China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, the machine can “plot out its own route, swim to shore, avoid obstacles, and it can also be remotely controlled by an operator.” China also has a double advantage of working with private companies both from its own country like Baidu, Tencent, Huawei and Alibaba, as well as technologically advanced private companies from the Silicon Valley like Microsoft and Google who have been collaborating with Chinese organisations to develop AI-based technology. 

Russia & India Have A Similar Story — Budgetary & Infrastructure Constraints

A long-time antagonist of the US, Russia has been trailing when it comes to deploying artificial intelligence capabilities in the military. Similar to India, Russia has budgetary constraints and a lack of general infrastructure that supports AI research for defence purposes. But, Russia is on its way to close the gap. Of the 388 scientific schools of the Russian Ministry of Defence, 279 are concentrated in military schools. Most of them are actively engaged in research in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics, military cybernetics and other promising areas. In 2017, Kalashnikov, the Russian defence manufacturer, announced that it had developed a range of robots that use AI to identify targets and make independent decisions. The same year during a National Knowledge Day address to over a million students in 16,000 Russian schools, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind… Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”.

Russia has been testing several autonomous and semi-autonomous combat systems, such as Kalashnikov ’s “neural net” combat module, with a machine gun, a camera, and an AI that its makers claim can make its own targeting judgements without human intervention. On March 14-15, 2018, the conference “Artificial Intelligence: Problems and Solutions” was held on the territory of the Patriot Convention and Exhibition Center, one of the leading discussion and demonstration venues in the country and the world. It was organised at the initiative of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the assistance of the Ministry of Education and Science, as well as with the direct support of the Ministry of Defence. The Russian government announced that by 2020, the Ministry of Defence plans to deploy 2100 specialised jobs for research, experimental work, testing in artificial intelligence. In addition, laboratories, engineering units of more than 80 leading scientific and industrial enterprises will become operational in Russia.

South Korea Is Rising Fast With AI Research and Development Centre

In South Korea, the plan for the AI Research and Development Centre is to build a network of collaboration with local universities and research entities such as the KAIST [Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology] and the Agency for Defence Development. In September 2018, South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) launched a new strategy to develop its national military-industrial base, with an emphasis on boosting Industry 4.0 technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics and robotics.

In December 2018, the South Korean Army announced the launch of a research institute focusing on artificial intelligence, entitled the AI Research and Development Center. The objective is to capitalise on cutting-edge technologies for future combat operations and turn it into the military’s next-generation combat control tower. South Korea is developing new military units, including the Dronebot Jeontudan (“Warrior”) unit, with the aim of developing and deploying unmanned platforms that incorporate advanced autonomy and other cutting-edge capabilities. South Korea is also known to have used the armed SGR-A1 sentry robot, which has operated in the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea. The robot has both a supervised mode and an unsupervised mode. In the unsupervised mode the SGR-AI identifies and tracks intruders, firing at targets without any further intervention by human operators.

Overview

Autonomous military systems, combined with the power of AI, present entirely new and frightening possibilities about the way in which future wars will be fought. There are also many ethical debates about removing human oversight and an over-reliance on automated weapon systems. Notwithstanding this, nations are pressing ahead with such systems. India has been lagging when it comes to AI research and having implementations in the defence side. But, the recent funding of the NITI Aayog for AI research has brought much hope that India would not be left behind in the coming years. It is to be noted that R&D in these AI is largely being driven by the private commercial sector rather than the defence industry. Unfortunately, the Indian counterparts of Baidu, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are yet to rise to the occasion, despite the strengths of our IT industry. The government, therefore, needs to ensure that private companies and startups are given enough incentives to develop AI technologies that have applications in not just protecting the borders but also for the social good as well.

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