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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

Algorithmic Warfare: Russia Expanding Fleet of AI-Enabled Weapons

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Categories: ASCF News Cyber Security

Comments: 0

Source: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/7/20/russia-expanding-fleet-of-ai-enabled-weapons

Photo: iStock illustration

Russia — which has made no secret of its artificial intelligence ambitions — is building a cadre of AI-enabled, autonomous weapon systems that could one day threaten the United States.

“The Russian military seeks to be a leader in weaponizing AI technology,” Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told National Defense.

The JAIC — which has been working to facilitate AI adoption across the Defense Department since 2018 — recently commissioned a report by CNA, a research organization based in Arlington, Virginia, to examine Russia’s developments.

The report — titled “Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in Russia” — identified more than 150 AI-enabled military systems in various stages of development, Groen said in an email in June. Key areas of interest include autonomous air, underwater, surface and ground platforms.

The nation wants to use AI for electronic warfare, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strategic decision-making processes as leaders pursue information dominance on the battlefield, Groen said.

While Russia is not a leader in commercial and academic AI research — as the United States and China are — it would be a grave mistake for the Pentagon to take its eyes off the threat, he said.

“Russia was not a major leader in the development of the internet or computer networking, but Russia has become a leader in weaponizing those technologies for advanced cyberattacks and cybercrime capabilities,” he noted.

The Russian military has taken significant steps to reform and improve the organization of its research and development enterprise, he noted. This was done in part because Moscow believed its previous structures were stifling innovation in technology areas such as AI.

The scale of these reforms — such as creating a new advanced R&D organization modeled on the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — demonstrates the nation’s seriousness about fielding an AI-enabled fighting force, he said.

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten noted that Russia has invested enormous resources into the development of artificial intelligence, big data and software technologies.

The country is moving quickly across many areas, including nuclear weapons, space and cyber, he said during remarks at the Defense Department’s AI Symposium in June. Embedded in each of those elements is new software, processing and artificial intelligence systems.

“Russia is a significant threat, especially in the near term,” he said. “It is a challenge to not just keep up with them but stay ahead of them.”

Like the United States, Russia is working to digitize its military. Its Ministry of Defense recently announced it intends to create a specialized department to develop AI, according to the CNA report. It is even working on developing a military information sharing structure that resembles the Pentagon’s joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, effort.

JADC2 has become a buzzword in the Defense Department and is intended to better link the armed forces’ sensors and shooters on the battlefield. Russia’s version is known as the automated control system, or ACS, the report said.

“ACS is not new, but the concept is the basis for how the Russian military is conceptualizing and using AI and autonomy to make Russian forces more efficient and more lethal,” the study said.

The Russian military has conducted real and simulated events implementing an ACS environment, according to the report. For example, during a 2019 Caspian Fleet drill, Russian air, land and sea forces were combined into a single information space.

“Data on detected targets were loaded into the system in real time and depending on the target type, the command chose the best attack methods,” the report said. “All information was received in real time and analyzed using an automated command-and-control system with AI elements.”

However, despite Moscow’s deep interest in AI, the nation faces challenges in developing the most cutting edge platforms, said two authors of the report, Jeffrey Edmonds and Samuel Bendett, who are both Russia experts at CNA and the Center for a New American Security.

Within Russia’s AI ecosystem, the leading companies are state sponsored, Edmonds said. The Russian private sector lacks an environment that’s conducive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship in AI, autonomy and innovation, he added.

In the United States, some of the most important technologies started as U.S.-government projects, such as the internet and mobile communication systems, Bendett said. But after those systems were developed, the government moved out of the way to allow companies to further mature them.

“Russia doesn’t really have a high-tech private sector in the same sense” as the United States, he said. “Some of those private initiatives are only now starting to” be developed.

The country does not have an equivalent tech hub to Silicon Valley, Bendett said. There was the intention that the Skolkovo Innovation Hub — which was launched in 2010 — would emulate that model, but that vision has not come to fruition.

“It did for some companies and individuals, but probably on the whole it didn’t,” he noted.

Skolkovo includes five “research clusters” focusing on information technologies, including artificial intelligence, energy, nuclear, biomedicine and space, according to the report.

However, Bendett noted that the lion’s share of the nation’s AI-related activity comes out of three universities including Moscow State University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Moscow Higher School of Economics.

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