Cooperation between the U.S. and its allies and partners, particularly those in the Indo-Pacific, will be critical for Washington's new Replicator initiative to succeed, experts say, as the Pentagon seeks to negate China's military advantage in numbers by fielding thousands of smart, affordable drones. But questions remain about how much technology Washington will be willing to share without the risk of compromising the high degree of cybersecurity the new artificial intelligence-enabled systems will depend on. "We will be working with industry, Congress and allies and partners in everything that we do," U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, who is heading up the initiative, said Sept. 6, as experts highlighted an array of possible collaboration opportunities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving to be as much a security tool as an economic one in the Indo-Pacific, with the US and China attempting to expand their influence in the region. Because of AI's increasing role in military applications, the Indo-Pacific, rather than Silicon Valley, is now fast emerging as the principal AI market in the world. A new report from "Research and Markets" predicts that the radar simulator market alone in the Indo-Pacific will boom from $326.2 million in 2022 to $470.5 million by 2028 for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3%. "Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) developed by various enterprises have modern capabilities and have extended their reach and operating boundaries," the report states, adding, "There has been a surge in the development of laser-guided missiles with higher accuracy to hit the locked target. To combat this threat in the future, there would be a rise in the development of radars and radar simulators to train operators to combat the rising modern warfare systems."

Last week, on September 15 and 16, the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) held a meeting with officials from 13 countries, including but not only U.S. allies, around the ethical military uses of artificial intelligence, the first of its kind. Breaking Defense quotes Mark Beall, the JAIC's head of strategy and policy, who called the meeting "historic," as saying, "This group of … countries, to my knowledge, has never been brought together under one banner before." Earlier this year, the Pentagon adopted a set of ethics guidelines around AI use. At a time when China and Russia's pursuit of military AI has raised considerable alarm in Western capitals, Beall noted that the meeting was not about creating a coalition against specific countries. Rather, "we're really focused on, right now, rallying around [shared] core values like digital liberty and human rights… international humanitarian law," Beall said.

Ever since the US fell behind China in the AI arms race the country has been criticized for not being innovative enough and not focusing on the things that matter. As we outline in this previous post, there are a multitude of reasons why China pulled ahead of the rest of the world. Despite the fact that this is clearly a multi faceted issue the US has neglected to focus on the development of new technologies which includes AI. The DoD has seemingly decided to try and address this. Other than the president's recent executive order which lacked any kind of concrete plan or details describing an AI development strategy the US has not released anything that touches this topic. Shortly after the vague executive order the Department of Defense (DoD) released a 17 page document outlining their AI strategy that supposedly began in 2018.

On February 12, 2019 the Department of Defense released a summary and supplementary fact sheet of its artificial intelligence strategy ("AI Strategy"). The AI Strategy has been a couple of years in the making as the Trump administration has scrutinized the relative investments and advancements in artificial intelligence by the United States, its allies and partners, and potential strategic competitors such as China and Russia. The animating concern was articulated in the Trump administration's National Defense Strategy ("NDS"): strategic competitors such as China and Russia has made investments in technological modernization, including artificial intelligence, and conventional military capability that is eroding U.S. military advantage and changing how we think about conventional deterrence. As the NDS states, "[t]he reemergence of long-term strategic competition, rapid dispersion of technologies" such as "advanced computing, "big data" analytics, artificial intelligence" and others will be necessary to "ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future." The AI Strategy offers that "[t]he United States, together with its allies and partners, must adopt AI to maintain its strategic position, prevail on future battlefields, and safeguard [a free and open international] order. We will also seek to develop and use AI technologies in ways that advance security, peace, and stability in the long run. We will lead in the responsible use and development of AI by articulating our vision and guiding principles for using AI in a lawful and ethical manner."