Here's What You Need to Know: SOCOM has been a pioneer in the application of Artificial Intelligence. For example, the Naval Special Warfare Command (WARCOM) has been using Artificial Intelligence to find ways to make its SEAL and Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC) operators more combat effective, while the Marines Special Operations Command (MARSOC) has been implementing Artificial Intelligence to better select and assess its future cadre of Marine Raiders. Artificial Intelligence is everywhere today. From Amazon's Alexa to unmanned aerial vehicles to space crafts to health care; Artificial Intelligence enables faster and better decisions if employed properly. The U.S. military and intelligence community have been using this technology for decades now and it's becoming increasingly more prevalent.

Harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has become the new arms race among the great powers, a Hudson Institute panel on handling big data in military operations said Monday. Speaking at the online forum, Richard Schultz, director of the international security program in the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said, "that's the way [Russian President Vladimir] Putin looks at it. I don't think we have a choice" but to view it the same way. He added in answer to a question that "the data in information space is enormous," so finding tools to filter out what's not necessary is critical. U.S. Special Operations Command is already using AI to do what in the old days was called political or psychological warfare, in addition to targeting, he added.

Harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has become the new arms race among the great powers, a Hudson Institute panel on handling big data in military operations said Monday. Speaking at the online forum, Richard Schultz, director of the international security program in the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said, "that's the way [Russian President Vladimir] Putin looks at it. I don't think we have a choice" but to view it the same way. He added in answer to a question that "the data in information space is enormous," so finding tools to filter out what's not necessary is critical. U.S. Special Operations Command is already using AI to do what in the old days was called political or psychological warfare, in addition to targeting, he added.

In September, Azerbaijan and Armenia renewed fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory in the Caucasus mountains. By then, an information warfare campaign over the region had been underway for several months. The campaign was identified using artificial intelligence technology being developed for US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which oversees US special forces operations. The AI system, from Primer, a company focused on the intelligence industry, identified key themes in the information campaign by analyzing thousands of public news sources. In practice, Primer's system can analyze classified information too.

As the military tries to enable artificial intelligence on the battlefield, building databases and coding software are only part of the picture. AI goals like the Army's desires for autonomous vehicles or creating "hyper-enabled operators" will require computing systems to become more efficient, military technologists said during a recent panel. The challenge is in deploying "edge computing," where the high-power processors needed to run AI systems are dispersed in the field rather than located only in a central cloud system. Better hardware at the edge means less reliance on communications networks that can be denied, degraded or jammed by enemy forces. For example, sending raw data from the field to a central AI system just for an unmanned vehicle to determine if a road is turning right or left is not realistic, the experts said.

The face recognition system is designed to be used by drones. The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is developing a portable facial recognition system that can identify individuals from 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) away. The Advanced Tactical Facial Recognition at a Distance Technology project demonstrated a working prototype last year; its use could be extended to drones. Long-range face-recognition device manufacturer Secure Planet is developing the system, which must render captured images as pictures that are sufficiently clear for software to identify. Secure Planet bases its devices on digital single-lens reflex cameras with commercial face-recognition software running on a standard laptop.

The US military is developing a portable face-recognition device capable of identifying individuals from a kilometre away. The Advanced Tactical Facial Recognition at a Distance Technology project is being carried out for US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). It commenced in 2016, and a working prototype was demonstrated in December 2019, paving the way for a production version. SOCOM says the research is ongoing, but declined to comment further. Initially designed for hand-held use, the technology could also be used from drones.

In a not-too-distant future, recruiting for military special operations could focus less on aptitude scores and physical fitness and more on a computer algorithm that can predict success based on past candidates. Officials with U.S. Special Operations Command are experimenting with artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine whether it's possible to highlight the qualities that distinguish an ideal operator. This summer, officials began collecting and assessing a wide swath of data regarding candidates for Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, said David Spirk, SOCOM's chief data officer. "It's really going to be our first experiment. It's exciting," he said at a Special Operations Policy Forum hosted this month by the New America think tank.

Earlier this month, Google employees made a stir in Silicon Valley when a number of them chose to resign from their positions in protest after their company agreed to work with the Defense Department on a new artificial intelligence initiative. Overwhelmingly, the media presented this gesture as an ethical stand -- with tech professionals doing their part to stem the tide of Terminator robots roving a nearby battle space, making complex decisions about who lives and who dies with seemingly no human supervision. These departing Googlers, then, were heroes -- begging society to ask hard questions about what we're capable of doing and whether we should do it at all. Of course, the reality of the situation didn't quite sync up with the dramatic headlines and lofty narratives presented in petitions and Op-eds. The truth of the matter is, Project Maven is indeed a Google partnered artificial intelligence endeavor, but it never aimed to make decisions about pulling any triggers.

Battlefield drones are evolving quickly, and there's only so much militaries can do to keep up -- they're not used to competing with consumer tech that can improve in a matter of months. To that end, US Special Operations Command (aka SOCOM) is taking the unusual step of opening a drone hacker lab in Tampa, Florida. The organization's James Geurts hopes this tinkerer mindset will help special forces "get out in front" of future threats that could easily prove overwhelming, such as drone swarms. There are also more direct problems to solve, such as balancing weapon payloads and portability. You may need a drone bigger than something like the tiny, kamikaze-oriented AeroVironment Switchblade (above) to take down a target, but you can't always field more conventional runway-bound drones to do the job.