WASHINGTON - Autonomous weapons are coming. Recent Pentagon breakthroughs in experimental aerial and naval craft are paving the way for low-cost attack drones and new tactics that feature AI in key roles. Navy and Air Force experiments also highlighted how the U.S. military might employ autonomous weapons differently than China or Russia, writes Patrick Tucker in Defense One.
The Navy, for example, brought swarms of air and sea drones to the annual Unitas exercise, where they collected and shared reconnaissance data that helped the multinational fleet detect, identify, and take out enemy craft more quickly.
“We had an unmanned surface vessel and unmanned air vessel informing each other and then we actually had an international partner’s missiles on board, and we're able to shoot six high speed patrol boats coming at us. And we were six for six,” said Rear Adm. James Aiken, 4th Fleet commander, sharing new details about the July exercise at the Navy Surface Warfare symposium in Virginia recently.
Navy
The 4th Fleet, along with the 5th Fleet halfway around the world, are the Navy’s leaders in emerging AI concepts. Then-CNO Adm. Michael Gilday pushed for experiments in operational waters, which he said might become critical for dealing with grey-zone operations, smuggling, and other threats.
Aiken said unmanned and AI systems could help detect and thwart hostile attempts to interfere with international shipping, in part by scouring video footage and other sensor data. He added that such systems might also make it easier to share information and work with partners, from shipping companies to other governments.
“We actually use a human-machine interface to make better watchstanders, to better inform the fleet and to move forward,” he said. “How can we...use them in different ways to inform distributed maritime [operations]? To get us a better sight picture of what's going on? And then share that with with some of our key stakeholders around the globe?”
The United States isn’t the only country making new uses of autonomy. While the one-way attack drones that Houthi forces are firing at ships in the Red Sea are crude, earlier this month they launched what U.S. officials called a “complex” attack of more than 20 drones at once. Iran reportedly has plans to build jet versions of its one-way attack drones, weapons that could show up anywhere from Ukraine to the Red Sea.
That highlights the urgent need for cheaper interception technologies but it also validates the Pentagon’s five-month-old Replicator plan to increase production of cheap drones for attack, much as both sides have done in the Ukraine war and Iran has done to arm the Houthis.
U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said that the Navy is contributing.
“These concepts have been brought to fruition in terms of all the advances that we've made in unmanned, whether it be on the surface, whether it be in the air, whether it be underneath the surface,” Del Toro said. “The concepts that we've put forward to Replicator have been very well embraced.”
Air Force
The Air Force last year also demonstrated new capabilities in autonomy and AI, Col. Tucker Hamilton, Operations Commander of the Air Force’s 96th Test Wing, said last week.
“We are testing things like the XQ-58 high-performance drone that is uncrewed and has AI-enabled functionality which is really cool. We actually, for the first time in the history of aviation, had an AI agent and AI algorithm fly a high-performance drone” last July at Eglin Air Base, Florida,” he said during a Defense News broadcast. “I had the fortune of flying on the wings of this thing. When the AI agent turned on for the first time, I was in an F-15 and it was awesome.”
Hamilton said previous “autonomous” drones have generally followed simple instructions, say, for returning to a predetermined location after losing contact with its operator. There’s little room for actual elaboration. The directions are simple, he said, like “will fly at this throttle setting at this airspeed. You will turn it 30 degrees… and it's all like very deterministic software.”
But new experiments, such as with XQ-58, have allowed a more sophisticated form of autonomy.
“This is where we give it an objective, but it decides what throttle setting, what bank angle, what altitude, what dive angle it's going to do to meet that objective, right? So that's the AI-enabled autonomy that we're talking about. When that turned on, it is great to see,” Hamilton said.
The results are sometimes surprising. The XQ-58, for instance, makes extremely rapid or “crisp” rolls compared to an aircraft with a human pilot.
“A computer-controlled aircraft…may do things differently than a human. And we need to recognize there's a huge benefit there,” he said.
To realize that benefit, he said, AI systems need a learning space where they can make decisions in a safe way.
