On the battlefield in Ukraine, the future of war quickly becomes the present. Thousands of drones fill the sky. These drones and their operators use artificial intelligence systems to avoid obstacles and identify potential targets, writes Foreign Affairs.
AI models also help Ukraine predict where to strike. Thanks to these systems, the Ukrainian army destroys tanks and shoots down aircraft with devastating efficiency. At the same time, Russian units are under constant surveillance and their communication lines, like Ukrainian ones, can be destroyed by the enemy.
„The two countries are trying to develop even more advanced technologies that can withstand continuous attacks and overcome enemy defenses,”, the material says.
In 2020, an autonomous Turkish drone used by Libyan government-backed troops struck retreating fighters – perhaps the first drone attack carried out without human intervention. In the same year, the Azerbaijani army used Turkish and Israeli drones to capture Nagorno-Karabakh. And in Gaza, Israel has thousands of drones connected to AI algorithms, helping Israeli troops navigate urban environments.
According to the authors, there is nothing surprising in such a pace of development of events, because war has always stimulated innovation. At the same time, today's changes are “extremely fast and will have a much greater impact”. Future wars will no longer be about who can muster the most people or deliver the best planes, ships and tanks, instead they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapon systems and powerful algorithms.
This is a future for which the United States remains unprepared, with its troops not fully prepared to fight in an environment of enemy “surprises”, and aircraft, ships and tanks ill-equipped to defend against attack from drones. The Pentagon has few initiatives to correct these shortcomings, and its current efforts are moving too slowly. If the United States is to remain a leading world power, it will have to change quickly.
The US needs to buy new types of equipment, better train soldiers to fly drones and use artificial intelligence. The nature of war is changing rapidly and fundamentally. The United States must also change and adapt.