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The age of human-piloted fighter aircraft is over, space is the ultimate high ground and the modern front-line warfare is a machine battlefield, according to a recent address by global businessman Elon Musk.
The wealthiest individual in the world and American special government employee, with ownership of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter (X), recently spoke to attendees of the “West Point” United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York.
Entitled The human and the machine: Leadership on the emerging battlefield, the talk involved his experience and opinions of autonomous systems in military operations, existential risks of artificial intelligence as well as the intersection of advanced technology and modern warfare.
The interview was conducted with USMA dean Brigadier General Shane Reeves.
“The biggest effect, I think, by far, is artificial intelligence and drones (for transforming warfare in the future) ... The current war in Ukraine, is very much a drone war already,” Musk said.
“It’s sort of a contest between Russia and China to see who can deploy the most number of drones. If there’s a major power war, it’s very much going to be a drone war.
“I do worry about the existential risk of AI, which is that if you employ AI and drones, do you go down this path where eventually you get to Terminator? Try to avoid that.
“Minimise the Terminator risk. But I mean, essentially, when you’re making military drones, you are making Terminators. And I think you’re somewhat forced into giving the drone localised AI, because if AI is far away, it can’t control as well as localised AI.
“(Localised AI) it’s an autonomous scaling machine. Completely autonomous ... You give it the OK in a particular arena, and it goes. With certain parameters, hopefully.
“Drones are going to be overwhelmingly what matters in any conflict between powers that have significant technology.
“Artificial intelligence is going to be so good, including localised AI. I mean, at the current rates, you’ll have some of that sort of rock-level AI probably that can be run on a drone. And so you could literally say this is the equipment that the drone needs to destroy. Go into that area. It’ll recognise what equipment needs to be destroyed and take it out.”
Musk elaborated that because of the lethality of modern drones, there will be disadvantages and even physical detriments to having personnel on the frontlines of the battlefield.
“My personal belief is that it’ll actually be too dangerous to have humans at the front. It’s drones at the front,” he said.
“If you’ve seen some of the computer-controlled sniper rifles ... They just don’t miss. So you’re fighting a machine that’s going to aim with micro level accuracy and never gets tired.”
“At the front of the battle line, it’s just going to be just drones, and any humans caught in the crossfire are going to get killed ... If you make the choice to be there, then you’re at a significant disadvantage.
“You got a million drones coming at you. Do you want to be there trying to take out drones with an assault rifle? It’s not going to be a good situation.”
Furthering the idea that military operations will be undertaken faster and with more precision by unmanned systems than actual personnel, Musk stated that the age of human-piloted fighter aircraft is also coming to an end.
“I’m not sure there’s a lot of room opportunity for fighter pilots. Because I think if you’ve got a drone swarm coming at you, the pilot’s a liability in the fighter plane, to be honest,” he said.
“If you compare a drone versus a fighter plane, how easy is it to make a drone? It’s an order of magnitude, maybe a hundred … At least 10, maybe a hundred times easier to make the drone, and you can afford to sacrifice the drones.
“Whereas pilots, you don’t want to sacrifice the pilots. So my guess is that actually the age of human-piloted fighter aircraft is coming to an end.”
The international businessman, who already innovates in the space sector, also championed use of space-based weaponry and communications as the “ultimate high ground”.
“Space is ultimate high ground ... And space is becoming increasingly militarised. Space-based communications is critical,” Musk said.
“Starlink is the backbone of the Ukrainian military communication system, because it can’t be blocked by the Russians, essentially. So on the frontlines, all the fibre connections are cut. The cell towers are blown up and the geostationary satellite links are jammed. The only thing that isn’t jammed is Starlink.
“If you can’t communicate, you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t receive orders, you can’t report information. And, whether it’s a human or a drone, they need communication. Any ground-based communications like fibre optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed ... All you’ve got are basically analogue radios and then for any kind of data communications is space-based.
“GPS has been effective for a long time, GPS jamming at this point is pretty easy, because the GPS signal is a weak signal. So it’s easy to do GPS jamming. So having sort of a next-generation system that can provide positioning is going to be very important. Space can also probably offer, you know, the ultimate weapons where you just have tungsten cannonballs from orbit.
“Rods from god ... This is certainly something that can be done, which is you have just kinetic weapons from space or space-based lasers.”
Musk later speculated that the US industrial base will likely again perform a major wartime shift in the event of another world war.
“If there’s a significant conflict, the US industrial base will switch quickly to voluntary active military production just as it did in World War II. Is it quick enough? I don’t know. But that’s what will probably happen,” he said.
“I think we probably need to invest in drones. The United States is strong in terms of technology of the items, but the production rate is low ... I think there’s a production rate issue.
“If there’s a drone conflict, the outcome of that drone conflict will be how many drones each side has in that particular skirmish, times the kill ratio. So if you’ve got a set of drones that have a high kill ratio, but then the other side has far more drones. If you’ve got a two-to-one kill ratio, but the other side has four times as many drones, it’s a little bit loose.
“There’s a tendency to be gearing up to fight the last war. The last war the US fought was kind of the Cold War. So, it usually takes some kind of shock factor to adjust. I would recommend adjusting now.
“And you are seeing some start-ups like Anduril and a few others that have a different mindset. But it’s going to be, can you make a lot of drones and what’s the core issue? That’s what it comes down to.”
During the interview, Musk also detailed his own personal mantra in regard to improving products and services.
“I do have this sort of simple first principles algorithm that I think could be quite helpful. And I sort of say it as a mantra to myself because I’ve made this mistake so many times,” he said.
“The first element is for any given thing, make the requirements less dumb ... Whatever problem you’re solving, make the requirements less dumb and whoever gave you those requirements, even if they are the smartest person in the world, they’re still dumb.
“This is where, say military procurement, it goes wrong right at the outset with excess requirements. So you’ll get sort of this giant document of requirements, that actually should be one page. (And) if you don’t do that as a first step, then you can get the right answer but to the wrong question. If the question’s wrong, it doesn’t matter.
“Then step two is delete the part or process step. Delete and if you’re not adding back 10 per cent of what you deleted, you haven’t deleted enough.
“Then only the third step is to optimise the thing... One of the mistakes that I see smart people making all the time, especially fine engineers, is optimising a thing that should not exist. Like, you could try to make the world’s best cloth biplane. I’m like ‘Well, actually, no. We should have jet airplanes instead’. So you should not optimise things that should not exist.
“And then step four is go faster ... Only automate it once you’ve done those other four things.
“Now the reason I have this mantra is because I personally, many times, automated something, sped it up, optimised it, and then deleted it ... I’m tired of going backwards here.”
