Ukraine: A Living Lab for AI Warfare.

• Author: Pontes, Robin
• Position: COMMENTARY

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, much debate has centered on whether the conflict represents conventional warfare or some revolutionary type of contest.

An article in the New Yorker in March 2022 described the conflict as the "the first TikTok War." Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov has called it a "technology war." Alex Karp, CEO of data analytics company Palantir, has suggested that the technology being used is changing the competitive advantage of a small country versus a larger adversary. The Washington Post in December ran a front-page article about how Ukraine and Russia are fighting the "first full-scale drone war."

There is also increasing talk about how this conflict accelerates the arrival of fully autonomous drones and other weapon systems to the battlefield. The role of artificial intelligence in warfare looms directly overhead in such commentaries.

A drone war, however, is not immediately an AI war. To what extent is the Ukraine conflict also characterized by AI?

Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, has called AI weapon systems the "third revolution in warfare," after gunpowder and nuclear weapons. Is that revolution unfolding before our eyes? Does Ukraine signal a change in the character of warfare?

Not yet. While still short of changing the character of war, we believe Ukraine is a laboratory in which the next form of warfare is being created. It is not a laboratory on the margins, but a center-stage, relentless and unprecedented effort to fine-tune, adapt and improve AI-enabled or AI-enhanced systems for immediate deployment. That effort is paving the way for AI warfare in the future.

It is a future that is expected. Over the past few years, visions of AI-enabled warfare have abounded and received different conceptual labels. Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen and SparkCognition founder Amir Husain have called it "hyperwar," a form of AI-controlled warfare with little to no human decision making involved. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and others have termed this "algorithmic warfare," in which autonomous systems and weapons independently start selecting their course of action based on the situation in which they find themselves.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has come up with the name "mosaic warfare," which is a more tactical term that combines conventional platforms with uncrewed systems to achieve battlefield advantages.

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