AI, Directed Energy: Inherently Synergistic.

• Author: Shepherd, Joe
• Position: Viewpoint

* As military technology becomes more advanced, the line between tactician and mathematician begins to blur. Coordination between global defense systems and troop movements--counterbalanced against adversarial efforts--can be broken down into mathematical formulas, equations and variables.

Until the 20th century, military organizations were constrained by the computational power of the human brain. The introduction of advanced intelligence systems has upended that calculus entirely.

While imperfect, computational assets expanded the way leading minds could gather, synthesize and act upon intelligence. This pattern laid the foundation for the modern military landscape and the proliferation of information warfare.

It is in this spirit, creating an ecosystem that consumes terabytes of data to give combatants any conceivable edge, that artificial intelligence is becoming an obvious necessity in military systems.

This is already taking place within the U.S. military. In fact, the Defense Department in June launched an AI accelerator initiative aimed at transitioning applications from the purely analytical to the tactical, improving the way warfighters approach decision-making in split-second scenarios.

This is a critical shift, as it expands AI's role away from pureplay analysis and toward operational scenarios that would otherwise overwhelm a warfighter.

As the Defense Department explores battlefield applications for artificial intelligence, opportunities to test its synergy with other cutting edge technologies are emerging.

One technology with enormous upside for this intersection is directed energy, which includes a range of capabilities like highenergy lasers and high-powered microwaves.

As a part of the nation's defense architecture, directed energy offers unique solutions to defeat complex threats, from hypersonic missiles to drone swarms. AI can be brought to bear as a partnering technology in a number of areas to augment a human operator's abilities in tasks such as target acquisition, collateral damage mitigation, predictive system maintenance and battle planning.

But what makes directed energy a natural companion for AI? It's a matter of complexity. Such weapon systems operate at the speed of light, with extremely complex variables affecting every engagement. Capitalizing on the highly precise nature of a high-energy lasers system, for example, requires factoring in variables such as moving target trajectories, environmental and...