As their rivalry intensifies, American and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like a swarm of bees to overwhelm an enemy.
The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands, of machines engage in a coordinated battle. A single controller can monitor dozens of drones. Some would explore, others attack. Some might move to new objectives in the middle of a mission, based on previous programming rather than a direct order.
The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race over swarms of drones reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be much harder to control than nuclear weapons. Because software powers the drones’ swarming capabilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue states and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.
The Pentagon is pushing for the urgent development of cheap, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI weapons are inevitable, so they too must have them.
The uncontrolled spread of swarm technology “could lead to increased instability and conflict around the world,” said Margarita Konaev, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
As the undisputed leaders on the ground, Washington and Beijing are best equipped to set an example by setting limits on the military use of drone swarms. But their fierce competition, Chinese military aggression in the South China Sea and ongoing tensions over Taiwan make the prospect of cooperation appear bleak.
The idea is not new. The United Nations has been trying to promote drone non-proliferation efforts for more than a decade, which could include limits such as banning targeting of civilians or banning the use of swarms for ethnic cleansing.
MILITARY CONTRACTS PROVIDE DIRECTIONS
Drones have been a priority for both powers for years, and both sides have kept their progress secret, so it’s unclear which country could have an edge.
A 2023 Georgetown study on AI-related military spending found that more than a third of known contracts issued by both U.S. and Chinese military services over eight months in 2020 were for intelligent unmanned systems.
The Pentagon in January solicited bids for small, unmanned maritime “interceptors.” The specifications reflect the military’s ambition: the drones must be able to traverse hundreds of miles of “contested water space,” operate in groups in waters without GPS, carry 1,000-pound payloads, attack enemy vessels at 40 miles per hour and sail expresses “complex autonomous behavior” to adapt to a target’s evasive tactics.
It is not clear how many drones one person would operate. A spokesperson for the Secretary of Defense declined to say, but a recently published Pentagon-backed study offers a clue: A single operator monitored a swarm of more than 100 low-cost air and land drones during an urban warfare exercise on a military base in late 2021. army training ground. at Fort Campbell, Tenn.
The CEO of a company that develops software that allows multiple drones to work together said in an interview that the technology is progressive.
“We are enabling a single operator to now direct six,” said Lorenz Meier of Auterion, which works on the technology for the US military and its allies. He said this number is expected to increase to dozens and within a year to hundreds.
Not to be outdone, the Chinese military claimed last year that dozens of aerial drones “healed” themselves after cutting their communications. According to an official documentary, they regrouped, switched to self-pilot and unaided completed a search-and-destroy mission, detonating explosive-laden drones on a target.
To justify the push for drone swarms, China hawks in Washington are offering this scenario: Beijing invades Taiwan and then hampers U.S. intervention efforts with waves of air and sea drones that destroy U.S. and allied planes, ships and troops deprive you of a foothold.
A year ago, CIA Director William Burns said that Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping had ordered his military to “be ready” for an invasion by 2027. But that doesn’t mean an invasion is likely, or that the US-China arms race over AI won’t worsen global instability.
KISSINGER urged action
Just before he died last year, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged Beijing and Washington to work together to discourage the spread of AI weapons. They have “a limited window of opportunity,” he said.
“AI constraints must occur before AI is built into the security fabric of any society,” Kissinger wrote with Harvard’s Graham Allison.
Xi and President Joe Biden struck a verbal agreement in November to establish working groups on AI safety, but those efforts have so far taken a back seat to the arms race for autonomous drones.
Competition is not good for building trust or reducing the risk of conflict, says William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
If the US “goes full speed ahead, it is very likely that China will accelerate whatever it does,” Hartung said.
There is a risk that China could offer swarm technology to US enemies or repressive countries, analysts say. Or it could be stolen. Other countries developing the technology, such as Russia, Israel, Iran and Turkey, could also spread the know-how.
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in January that U.S.-China talks would begin sometime this spring will address the safety of AI. Neither the Defense Secretary’s office nor the National Security Council would comment on whether military use of drone swarms is on the agenda.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
A WAIT OF FIVE YEARS
Military analysts, drone makers and AI researchers don’t expect fully capable, combat-ready swarms to be deployed within the next five years, although major breakthroughs could happen sooner.
“The Chinese currently have an advantage in hardware. I think we have an advantage in the software field,” says CEO Adam Bry of the American drone maker Skydio, which supplies the military, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the State Department, among others.
Chinese military analyst Song Zhongping said the US has “stronger basic scientific and technological capabilities” but added that the US advantage is not “impossible to surpass.” He said Washington also tends to overestimate the effect of its computer chip export restrictions on China’s drone swarm progress.
Paul Scharre, an AI expert at the think tank Center for a New American Security, believes the rivals are on about equal footing.
“The bigger question for every country is: How do you use a drone swarm effectively?” he said.
That’s one reason why all eyes are on the war in Ukraine, where drones are acting as eyes in the sky to make undetected front-line maneuvers virtually impossible. They also supply explosives and serve as ship assassins.
Drones in Ukraine are often lost due to jamming. Electronic interference is just one of many challenges to drone swarm development. Researchers are also focused on the difficulty of assembling hundreds of air and sea drones in semi-autonomous swarms over vast areas of the western Pacific for a possible war over Taiwan.
A secretive, now inactive $78 million program announced early last year by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seemed tailor-made for the Taiwan invasion scenario.
The Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms is a mouthful to say, but the mission is clear: develop ways for thousands of autonomous land, sea, and air drones to “degrade or defeat” an enemy when conquering contested terrain .
DRONES IMPROVISE – BUT MUST HOLD ON TO ORDERS
A separate DARPA program called OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics aimed to amass more than 250 land-based drones to assist military forces in urban warfare.
Project coordinator Julie Adams, a robotics professor at Oregon State, said the swarm commanders managed to choreograph up to 133 ground and air vehicles simultaneously during the exercise. The drones were programmed with a range of tactics that they could perform semi-autonomously, including indoor reconnaissance and simulated enemy assassinations.
Led by a swarm commander, the fleet behaved like an infantry unit whose soldiers were allowed some improvisation as long as they obeyed orders.
“It’s what I would call supervisory interaction, in that the human can stop the command or tactic,” Adams said. But once an action, such as an attack, was initiated, the drone was on its own.
Adams said she was particularly impressed by a swarm commander who, during another exercise last year at Fort Moore, Georgia, single-handedly managed a swarm of 45 drones for 2.5 hours with just 20 minutes of training.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” she said.
A reporter had to ask: was he a video game player?
Yes, she said. “And he had a VR headset at home.”
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Associated Press writer Zen Soo in Hong Kong contributed to this report.