US artificial intelligence experiment to predict enemy's next move

The Pentagon is testing ways to forecast the future using artificial intelligence and cloud computing resources which could uncover an enemy’s next move days before it actually happens. Predicting the future is normally “a mug’s game” but advances in computer technology and the increasing focus on using robotic brains to replace humans to assist decision-making have opened up science-fiction possibilities for warfighting. The US defence department has created a new acronym for the computerised crystal ball gazing, calling it GIDE or global information dominance experiments. The aim is to achieve “decision-making superiority”, said General Glen VanHerck, commander of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) both of which protect the US homeland from every form of enemy attack. “What we’ve seen is the ability to get way further what I call left, left of being reactive to actually being proactive, and I’m talking not minutes and hours, I’m talking days,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. America’s peer competitors - Russia and China – “hold the homeland at risk in every vector and every domain”, he said. In the latest of three experiments carried out by the Pentagon and all 11 combatant commands, one of the focuses was on envisaging a threatened takeover of the Panama Canal “by a peer competitor”, disrupting a crucial line of communication for US military logistics, the general said. During the experiment, artificial intelligence systems exploited a mass of data beyond any human ability to absorb to predict how the enemy might react by examining patterns and changes. Once alerted to anything significant, commanders fed the information to geospatial intelligence satellites (GEOINT) which can examine human activity on Earth, in order for them to “take a closer look at what might be going on in a specific location,” VanHerck said. “The ability to see days in advance creates decision space,” he said. In the past, secret information provided by the intelligence services could take a long time for an analyst to pore over. “Now the machine can take a look and tell you exactly how many cars are in a parking lot or how many airplanes are parked on a ramp or if a submarine is getting ready to leave or if a missile’s going to launch. Where that may have taken days before, or hours, today it can take seconds or less than minutes,” he said. The project outlined by the general which has now been researched for about a year, echoes the Hollywood film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. In the 2002 film, future technology makes it possible for the police to catch criminals before they have committed a crime. VanHerck said: "Decision space for me as an operational commander [is] to potentially posture forces to create deterrence operations [for] the secretary [of defence] or even the president." It represented "a fundamental change in the way we use information and data" to accelerate decision-making at the tactical and strategic level at a time when both Russia and China were challenging the US on a daily basis, he said. The project was not about new ways of gathering data. “This information exists from today’s satellites, today’s radar, today’s undersea capabilities, today’s cyber, today’s intelligence capabilities,” he said. “What we’re doing is making that data available and shared into a cloud where machine learning and artificial intelligence look at it and they process it really quickly and provide it to decision makers,” he said. “This gives us days of advanced warning and ability to react. Where in the past, we may not have put eyes on with an analyst of a GEOINT satellite image, now we are doing that within minutes or near real-time,” VanHerck said.