December 3, 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Florence Parly
Robot vs. human: This is the new battle in vogue. Ask Col. Gene Lee, a former fighter pilot and U.S. Air Force pilot trainer, defeated in 2016 by artificial intelligence in an air combat simulation. This specific AI program, even deprived of certain controls, is able to react 250 times faster than a human being. It is one story among many others of how AI technologies play and will play a leading role in operational superiority over the next decades.
I personally choose not to oppose the human to the robot. There is no discussion of replacing human intelligence by artificial intelligence, but it will be essential in increasing our capabilities manyfold. AI is not a goal, per se; it must contribute to better-informed and faster decision-making for the benefit of our soldiers.
AI means unprecedented intelligence capabilities. Crossing thousands of satellite images with data provided by the dark web in order to extract interesting links: This is what big-data analysis will make possible. AI also means better protection for our troops. To evacuate wounded personnel from the battlefield, to clear an itinerary or a mined terrain — as many perilous tasks that we will soon be able to delegate to robots. Lastly, AI means a stronger cyber defense. Cyber soldiers will be capable of countering at very high speed the increasingly stealthy, numerous and automated attacks that are threatening our systems and our economies.
We have everything to win in embracing the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence. This is why the French Ministry of Armed Forces has decided to invest massively in this area. However, we are not naïve, and we do not ignore the risks associated with the development of emerging technologies such as AI.
Hence, we chose to develop defense artificial intelligence according to three major principles: abiding by international law, maintaining sufficient human control and ensuring the permanent responsibility of the chain of command.
To ensure daily compliance with these principles over the long term and to feed our ethical thought, as new uses of AI appear every day, I decided to create a ministerial ethics committee focused on defense issues. This committee will take office at the very end of this year and will come as an aid to decision-making and anticipation. Its main role will be to address questions raised by emerging technologies and their potential use in the defense field.
At the heart of these questions stands an issue that is of interest but also of concern, both within the AI community and within civil society. It comes down to the lethal autonomous weapon systems that some call “killer robots” — weapon systems that would be able to operate without any form of human supervision, that would be able to alter the framework of the mission they are allocated or even assign new missions to themselves.
It is important to know that such systems do not exist yet in today's theaters of operation. However, debating about them is legitimate. In fact, France did introduce this issue in 2013 to the United Nations in the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. We do wish these discussions to continue in this multilateral framework, the only one that can eventually bring about a regulation of military autonomous systems, as it is the only one that is altogether universal, credible and efficient. We cannot rule out the risk of such weapons being developed one day by irresponsible states, or falling into the hands of nonstate actors. The need to federate with all other nations in the world is even more imperative.
France defends its values, respects its international commitments and remains faithful to them. Our position is unambiguous and has been expressed in the clearest terms by President Emmanuel Macron: France refuses to entrust the decision of life or death to a machine that would act fully autonomously and escape any form of human control.
Such systems are fundamentally contrary to all our principles. They have no operational interest for a state whose armed forces abide by international law, and we will not deploy any. Terminator will never march down the Champs-Elysées on Bastille Day.
Florence Parly is the armed forces minister in France.
August 9, 2023 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
The Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office will tackle drone swarms in its next quest to find a capability to counter the rising threat.
June 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Security, Other Defence
By: Nathan Strout The U.S. Air Force's first next-generation GPS satellite launched in December and the second GPS III satellite is slated to liftoff in July. But there Air Force has a problem: The ground system currently in use isn't fully capable of controlling GPS III satellites. Worse, a new ground system that can, formally known as the next-generation operational control system (OCX), is five years behind schedule and won't be delivered until June 2021 at the earliest, according to the Government Accountability Office. Enter the GPS III Contingency Operations (COps) software—a critical stop gap measure that will update the current ground control system and allow it to access some of the more advanced features of the GPS III satellites until the next-generation operational control system is ready. On July 11, primary contractor Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered the COps upgrade to the Air Force. “Positioning, navigation and timing is a critical mission for our nation and COps will allow the Air Force to gain early access to its new GPS III satellites,” said Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed Martin's vice president for Navigation Systems. “We just finished final qualification testing and delivery on COps, and it will be integrated and installed on the [Architecture Evolution Plan Operational Control System] over the summer. We look forward to the Air Force ‘flying' a GPS constellation on the COps OCS which includes the new GPS III satellites, later this year.” The new GPS III satellites are built to be more robust and accurate than their predecessors and come with advanced features such as the ability to use M-Code, an encrypted GPS signal for use by the military. The COps upgrade will allow the current ground system to control the GPS III satellites as well as the legacy GPS satellites. It will also allow the current system to access M-code Early Use, an encrypted GPS signal with improved anti-jamming and anti-spoofing capabilities, beginning in 2020. The Air Force contracted with Lockheed Martin to deliver the patch in 2016, the same year that the OCX program triggered a Nunn-McCurdy cost breach—a type of violation caused by significant cost growth that requires a program to be shut down unless the Department of Defense intervenes and approves a new cost estimate. The $6.2 billion OCX program is already five years behind schedule, and a May 21 Government Accountability Office report warned that the OCX program could be delayed even further. In addition, the Air Force has acknowledged that delays are possible during the seven-month testing period following delivery. Raytheon, the primary contractor behind OCX, rejected the GAO report, claiming that its findings were inaccurate. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2019/06/11/air-force-gets-new-stopgap-system-for-gps-3-satellites/
December 17, 2023 | International, Land
The designation is a recognition that SPACECOM meets the criteria to conduct its mission to deliver a range of space capabilities to military users.