ONLY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN PROTECT BRITAIN
As the military threat grows from Iran, China and Russia and the MOD tightens its purse strings, a top general warns...
BRITAIN’S Armed Forces are still fighting “yesterday’s wars” and need the most profound change in 150 years to deal with modern threats, a top general has said.
Sir Richard Barrons, ex-joint Forces commander, warned that robotics, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence must take centre stage in policy.
He warned that while the Ministry of Defence knows what is required, political will is lacking.
Speaking ahead of a review which will determine how the Armed Forces invests its shrinking budgets, he said: “The Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, thinks that improving acquisition – our shopping organisation – will fix defence. But it won’t if we continue to buy the wrong kit.
“This revolution will only succeed if it is led politically in a discussion that includes the Armed Forces, academia and industry in a way that civil society supports.
“We are fiddling around in the margins of a broken defence programme. It’s a political failure.”
He pointed to expensive platforms such as Britain’s aircraft carriers and the F-35 fighter programme which, he warned, could never defeat China and Russia’s advanced missile systems.
Gen Barrons said: “The current Armed Forces model consists of military ‘hard-power’ which cannot deal with emerging Chinese and Russian capability.”
Just as air power killed the battleship, he said long-range missile developments by Russia and China have made it impossible to invade their sea and airspace.
He added: “They have invested in anti-air and anti-ship missiles that keep the West away, and in missiles that deliver harm to other countries.”
He claimed the Government is guilty of still having a late-20th century mindset, which has meant Britain is failing to keep up. Gen Barrons, who last week addressed the global Cogx leadership summit on the ethics of lethal autonomous weapons, said we now live in a different world, “filled with potentially existential peril”. He added: “We don’t know how this will turn out, or even whether the Western concept of the rules-based international order will still exist.we are going to be in a place where one nation’s economic necessity is another nation’s catastrophe.” He said that AI is the “core enabler to the modernisation and transformation of our defence and security. It’s going to happen and has to happen.”
The MOD is aware of the need for transformation. General Sir Nick Carter, head of Britain’s Armed Forces, admitted in December that “modernisation will require us to embrace information-centric technologies”.
He said: “It will be the application of combinations of technology like processing power, connectivity, machine learning and artificial intelligence, automation, autonomy and quantum computing that will achieve the disruptive effect we need.”
The MOD is already using AI and robotics to develop minehunters and submarines, and the RAF is leading on unmanned planes to defend fighter jets.
Remote controlled mini-drones and vehicles which can help soldiers reconnoitre a battlefield are also in play, as well as self-driving vehicles to supply troops.
However most of these are auxiliary or defensive, because of the ethical minefield facing democracies that abide by international law in developing first-strike autonomous weapons.
While the MOD will next month begin to deliberate these moral boundaries, at present the Army’s “manned unmanned” concept – aimed at enhancing troops and armour with AI – still insists every shot fired must have a human on the trigger.
This, says Gen Barrons, fails to acknowledge that China and Russia and Iran are unhindered by such rules. I’m not advocating autonomous weapons of mass destruction – we’ll never have Terminator wars.
“We’re talking about a combination of platforms, some unmanned but controlled remotely by people and others which are autonomous.
“What the Army could do, if allowed, is replace a platoon of Challenger 2 tanks with a single manned tank and three autonomous ones.this isn’t possible now.
“AI and robotics will revolutionise and reshape military force in what will be a difficult debate. However we might feel about this, be assured that Russia and China don’t have the same qualms.”
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