The United Service Institution of India was founded in 1870 by a soldier scholar, Colonel (later Major General) Sir Charles MacGregor. The story of its growth is the story of the growth of the Indian Armed Forces. It was founded for ‘furtherance of interest and knowledge in the art, science and literature of the Defence Services.’
Report
On 14 September 2023, the Centre for Strategic Studies and Simulation (CS3) at the United Service Institution (USI) of India organised the First scholar’s presentation by Brig Pawan Bhardwaj, YSM, Senior Research Fellow CS3. As a part of continuing research on ‘Employment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Tactical Level’, the officer presented a global scan and summarised military use of AI employment in the militaries of the USA, UK, France, Australia, Turkiye, Russia, China, Taiwan and Israel. Council members, research scholars of USI and serving officers also attended the event.
Maj Gen RPS Bhadauria, VSM (Retd), Director CS3 welcomed the participants and commended the proceeding. It was followed by research guide remarks by Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM (Retd) delivered the guide’s remarks. The scholar presentation was followed by remarks of external discussant, Gp Capt (Dr) Ajey Lele, Consultant MP-IDSA. Post comments and suggestions by other attendees, the event was concluded by Maj Gen RPS Bhadauria.
Presentation by Brig Pawan Bhardwaj
Key takeaways
The most important takeaway remains ‘a cross-functional team’ of users and developers to ideate, design and develop the AI tools. The research is ongoing and a few other takeaways at this stage are as under:
· Authentic and corrected Data supports AI growth, and the military (users) should put efforts into curating it.
· The military should undertake deliberate discussions and analysis to design an AI product and define the ‘Output’ well before commencing the AI development cycle.
· Fog and Edge Computing provide an alternative option for security-conscious organisations. This option (intrinsically with a smaller form factor) also servers well during inconsistent access to the cloud or internet and
· Generative AI like Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has huge potential to disrupt military activities in a manner not fully understood yet and requires special exploratory emphasis.
· Case study militaries are employing AI to study the adversary continuously, and Pattern of Life Analysis is a natural outcome of such AI analyses.
· Militaries are using AI to collect data, fuse it, weed out the noise and support the decision makers by allocating priorities.
· Autonomous systems have been prioritised by militaries for ‘critical times and spaces’, when humans would be too slow.
· Civilian-military cooperation is clearly visible in AI for cyber operations by all countries.
· Human Machine (Man Machine) Teaming (MMT) is employed to increase combat mass and reduce risks to humans.
· Militaries use AI to reduce national threats and support national goals – Russian emphasis on AI in EW, Land robots; Chinese emphasis on long-range and lethal autonomous aerial and subsurface vehicles and Aerial and marine MMT in Australia as guard against its geographical isolation.
· Participation in international debates on AI Governance, Risk Management, and Lethal Systems is necessary to stay abreast of partners’ and competitors’ hopes, aspirations and fears.
Group Discussion
Closing remarks by Gp Capt (Dr) Ajey Lele (Retd)
Report by: Brig Pawan Bhardwaj, YSM, Senior Research Fellow CS3, USI