AI Fundamentals and the Military Environment

Awareness is an essential prerequisite for using autonomous weapon systems (AWS) lawfully and in an informed way, and comes in three main forms: knowledge of the system (Technical Awareness), of the environment (Contextual Awareness) and how the latter impacts the former (Interaction Awareness). This chapter introduces the concept of Awareness as it pertains to AWS use. First, it looks at the underlying technology of AWS: artificial intelligence (AI). Modern AI differs from old AI systems in major ways due to its reliance on data and machine learning. These techniques offer many benefits indispensable for military systems, but also come with disadvantages that must be understood. The chapter then looks at how military AI agents such as AWS make decisions on the battlefield, by dissecting the acquisition-analysis-decision-action model. Both these discussions show that an AWS’s behaviour and performance depends as much on its technical properties as those of the environment in which it is used. Consequently, the military environment is explored, in particular its common properties (complex, cluttered, dynamic and adversarial) and why continuous monitoring of the environment through military intelligence-gathering is crucial. Finally, to address concerns regarding the complexity and dynamicity of military environments and modern AI’s vulnerability to such variance, this chapter argues for the establishment of an Intended Operational Environment (IOE). This refers to a fixed and concrete description of the context in which an AWS may be used, which must be maintained from the moment of design, to testing and validation, through operational-level use.