Stephan De Spiegeleire

Tim Sweijs

Matthijs Maas

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on everybody’s minds these days. Most of the world’s leading companies are making massive investments in it. Governments are scrambling to catch up. Every single one of us who uses Google Search or any of the new digital assistants on our smartphones has witnessed first-hand how quickly these developments now go. Many analysts foresee truly disruptive changes in education, employment, health, knowledge generation, mobility, etc. But what will AI mean for defense and security? In a new study HCSS offers a unique perspective on this question. Most studies to date quickly jump from AI to autonomous (mostly weapon) systems. They anticipate future armed forces that mostly resemble today’s armed forces, engaging in fairly similar types of activities with a still primarily industrial-kinetic capability bundle that would increasingly be AI-augmented. The authors of this study argue that AI may have a far more transformational impact on defense and security whereby new incarnations of ‘armed force’ start doing different things in novel ways. The report sketches a much broader option space within which defense and security organizations (DSOs) may wish to invest in successive generations of AI technologies. It suggests that some of the most promising investment opportunities to start generating the sustainable security effects that our polities, societies and economies expect may lie in in the realms of prevention and resilience. Also in those areas any large-scale application of AI will have to result from a preliminary open-minded (on all sides) public debate on its legal, ethical and privacy implications. The authors submit, however, that such a debate would be more fruitful than the current heated discussions about ‘killer drones’ or robots. Finally, the study suggests that the advent of artificial super-intelligence (i.e. AI that is superior across the board to human intelligence), which many experts now put firmly within the longer-term planning horizons of our DSOs, presents us with unprecedented risks but also opportunities that we have to start to explore. The report contains an overview of the role that ‘intelligence’ - the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world - has played in defense and security throughout human history; a primer on AI (what it is, where it comes from and where it stands today - in both civilian and military contexts); a discussion of the broad option space for DSOs it opens up; 12 illustrative use cases across that option space; and a set of recommendations for - especially - small- and medium sized defense and security organizations.

Strategic Implications For Small- and Medium-Sized Force Providers

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Defense

Klaus Segbers

Post-Soviet Puzzles: Against the background of the former Soviet Union

Joshua Polchar

Something’s afoot with power. The nation state is being challenged structurally and institutionally. Its model of hierarchical power, monopoly on violence, and binding law, is being squeezed from below and from above - by grassroots organizations on the one end and supranational organizations on the other. Development aid is becoming caught up with strategic interests in the political, military and economic areas. Centralized power with major international oil companies is a thing of the past. The internet has the capacity to bring people together, or to divide them. All of these developments are changing our world drastically, and altering our view on the world. In ‘The Fission of Power’, we make sense of these different changes, and demonstrate what they have in common. Power is becoming more widely distributed, more accessible, and more evanescent—but without losing amplitude. As a result, actors of all kinds must be more ‘flexible under flux’: they must take on a more agile and networked approach to implementing their decisions, prepare for change, and engage in more iterative and experimentalist forms of decision-making. The first step is to recognize the changing nature of power in a fragmented world.

Flex and Flux in an Age of Fragmentation

The Fission of Power

Nicholas Farnham

The presence of peace is more than the absence of conflict. Analyses and evaluations of the state of the international security environment often focus solely on the most concerning developments and tend to fall back on various conflict-centric metrics when providing assessments of a given security landscape. This chapter, entitled “The Other Side of the Security Coin” investigates a number of positive socioeconomic trends occurring on a global level and how they can contribute to sustainable peace in the future. Improving citizens’ access to socioeconomic opportunities and livelihood-enhancing goods and services is a key factor in increasing the stake that citizens hold in the state of peace in their communities. Fitting within global trends such as the rise of the platform economy and social media, the role of technological and developmental processes improving individual empowerment will become more important for security and defense organizations in the near future. As to how we can leverage the dramatic changes ongoing throughout the world to better suit our security objectives remains yet to be seen. This study provides a brief overview of these trends and identifies the options for security and defense organizations to remain on top of them. This study is part of the 2016-2017 HCSS StratMon.

Stephan De Spiegeleire

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