UAVs guided by artificial intelligence have become “the biggest battlefield revolution in generations,” the US Secretary of War has said.
The Pentagon will set up a new Autonomous Warfare Command to design, produce and field robotic systems across the military, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said in his ‘State of the Force’ address.
The announcement comes as experts sound the alarm about the threat posed by military AI, saying that over-reliance on it could lead to the erosion of human critical thinking, increase the risk of accidental escalation due to the unpredictability of the decision-making by the algorithms and make warfare even more dangerous for civilians.
During his speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on Wednesday, Hegseth said that the AutoWarCom would be granted “service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force in the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”
“Drone warfare supercharged by SI-enabled targeting is the biggest battlefield revolution in generations,” he stressed.
A day earlier, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order replacing the term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) with “Super Intelligence” (“SI”) in the US government’s vocabulary.
The lessons of the Ukraine conflict, in which both sides actively rely on drones, have been one of the main motivations for launching the new command, according to the secretary of war.
In a memo published the same day, Hegseth noted that the Pentagon’s long-time strategy “of buying fewer, increasingly sophisticated weapons” has lost its effectiveness.
“Warfare… has changed dramatically and suddenly. Advanced computing now enables precise, low-cost weapons to be produced at massive scale. These systems increasingly threaten our costly legacy platforms and disrupt our force projection. Urgent change is required,” he wrote.
The Autonomous Warfare Command, which will be led by a four-star general, should become operational by October 1, 2027, the secretary of war said.
Bloomberg reported last month that heavy reliance on AI, staff cuts and rushed targeting procedures contributed to a US missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school in Minab on February 28, in which at least 157 people, including 123 children, were killed.
Officials involved in the Pentagon investigation told the agency that some US Central Command (CENTCOM) personnel expected Palantir’s Maven Smart System to flag stale or inconsistent intelligence when selecting potential targets, but it failed to do so. The US hasn’t publicly acknowledged responsibility for the Minab strike.
Last week, CNN reported that AI almost caused a serious incident between US and China in spring. The American forces were about to intercept a Chinese vessel, which, according to an intelligence report, was carrying components for a nuclear weapon to Iran. The mission was called off at the last moment when it became clear that a chatbot used by the analyst misidentified the cargo, according to the broadcaster.
During a defense conference in Beijing in mid-September, Thailand’s Defense Minister Adul Boonthumjaroen warned that the world was at “a critical turning point” due to the emergence of the military AI. “The most pressing is not who will be the most powerful, but rather, how can we build an international order,” he said.
Weekend Warrior
SLIMEBALL hegseth, just one glance at that vile sack of excrement is all that’s needed …. A “secretary of war”… You know a country is a sick nasty nation ruled by nasty sick warpig scumbags when you see that sh*t
As 165+ little girls in Iran can attest to, warfare by the US is always dangerous and cruel.
J3ws love the movies, don’t they.
Shows how serious they are ……. about having you dead
The old ways don’t work. These dumb yanks now need new ways to do genocide and annihilate countries https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/component/content/article/trump-either-iran-makes-a-deal-or-it-wont-exist-any-longer?catid=17&Itemid=101
fastest peacetime shift aye.
Funny sort of peacetime when you have been attacking/occupying/colour revolutioning countries the majority of my life.
Autonomous drones won’t think twice about killing non-conformists either (convieniently labelled as terrorists or some other legitimate target name).
Apparently tech companies like Palantir process information fed to them by various sources, cameras, satellites, phone data, etc and through Ai provide real time target lists to Israeli, and American forces, not without error, maybe the reason those poor little girls in Iran died.
A dystopian future awaits us.