Yesterday’s MIT Technology Review article on autonomous drone swarms repeated a common analogy:
"Anyone who argues swarms of drones won't appear on a future battlefield is one day going to sound like the people who once argued that the submarine or tank or airplane was mere science fiction."
These analogies are mildly frustrating because they sell autonomy short, as new subs and tanks and planes advance the qualitative edge in a much less profound way, more one to two than zero to one.
Before even getting to drones, what underpins American combat effectiveness is the training and tactical autonomy afforded to each unit in the fight. It’s how American NCOs on the ground can outperform their top-down, micromanaged Russian counterparts. Swarm drones, then, are an extension of this longstanding US doctrine and even a reflection of us as a society ( vs. the authoritarian them.)
The future will be about bringing this mode of warfighting to the systems themselves. Systems won't just be unmanned — they will be autonomous, characterized by AI at the edge instead of the long and insecure loop to a remote operator.
This is what will win, or crucially, deter, the next war — dominance of the OODA loop by putting smart assets in decision-making capacities as close to the front as possible without risking lives as was traditionally necessary (and logistics too, obviously).
Back at Shield AI, we used to say "command, not control" for this very reason. AI will empower systems to figure out for themselves the nitty-gritty of how to achieve their broader goals, freeing up humans to make critical strategic and ethical decisions instead of worrying about joystick inputs.