The Risks of Autonomous Weapons Systems for Crisis Stability and Conflict Escalation in Future US-Russia Confrontations
Motivations and General Aims Driving AWS Development Efforts
The Pentagon views AI and robotics, along with several other emerging technologies including hypersonics and directed-energy, as key to offsetting the anti-access and area-denial capabilities and concepts developed by China and Russia over the past two decades, thereby regaining and sustaining U.S. conventional deterrence overmatch. Meanwhile, China’s People’s Liberation Army anticipates that AI could fundamentally change the character of warfare even as it fears the emergence of a generational gap between its capabilities and that of the U.S. military. It thus seeks to develop AI and other “strategic front-line” technologies in future military competition with the United States.
Concluding Thoughts
Much attention has been paid to the operational advantages to be gained from the development of AWS. By contrast, much less attention has been paid to the risks AWS potentially raise. There are times in which the fundamental tensions between the search for military effectiveness and the requirements of ensuring that crises between major nuclear weapons states remain stable and escalation does not ensue are pronounced and too consequential to ignore. The development of AWS may well be increasing the likelihood that one day the United States and Russia could find themselves in just such a time. Now, while AWS are still in their early development stages, it is worth the time of policymakers to carefully consider whether the putative operational advantages from AWS are worth the potential risks of instability and escalation they may raise.
See the full story here: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/risks-autonomous-weapons-systems-crisis-stability-and-conflict-escalation-future-us-russia