Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles • Hacker News Board

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#61

Post by ethbro » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #55

ethbro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. You're describing network-centric warfare [1], which was formalized in US military theory in 1996 (22 years ago) and has guided US military doctrine since. I'm going to put th…

It will remain hard to do that whilst they still haven’t thought of the idea that perhaps killing people for money isn’t the best use of one’s productive energies.

Show me a world without violence, and I'll show you a country without an army.

Until then, I'd say the Swiss, Israeli, and American models are the most moral realistic options we've come up with. (Each with their own terrible moral compromises and failures)

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#62

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:36 PM UTC

>such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch

Replace "a missile launch" with "a peaceful protest" and the statement suddenly becomes dastardly.

The increasingly authoritarian Chinese government would absolutely adore a technology like that, I am sure of it.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#63

Post by pps43 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

APORWEVNAOEN wrote: post #27

SCHiM wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a pretty insightful an accurate point. I'd like to add the following: 'Secret' software is very hard to keep secret: once your enemy has a semi-intact drone/AI then they'll have upgraded their own fleet within months (if yours was indeed superior). I agree that it seems possible that a country with less wealth might outperform a country or group with more wealth. However, it's likely that the wealthie…

It might be possible to ship the current trained model without exposing underlying training techniques/datasets. How possible would it be to pick up a XYZ learning model, reverse engineer it, and improve it in a useful way?

Very difficult. It's much easier to train another model. Those things are mostly black boxes. Even the developers might not understand completely how they work.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#64

Post by asdfman123 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

I misread this as "secret AI program to fire nuclear missiles" and was briefly terrified.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#65

Post by forapurpose » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #53

forapurpose wrote: post #12

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ... Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and popul…

> Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. You're describing network-centric warfare [1], which was formalized in US military theory in 1996 (22 years ago) and has guided US military doctrine since. I'm going to put th…

> You're describing network-centric warfare ...

It's from an (at least somewhat) seminal paper about 10 years old from a leading defense think tank, and others discuss it too. The paper was about the future of warfare, particularly the influence of AI and robotics, and not past doctrine. It was highly respected in the defense community, AFAIK, so perhaps we shouldn't assume that HN posters are idiots who don't know what they are saying.

> it'd be nice if we didn't assume everyone in the military was an idiot and hasn't thought of the things we have.

It would be even nicer if we didn't attribute things to people that they didn't say.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#66

Post by staunch » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

0xdead_beef wrote: post #46

staunch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The US claims to have 14 active but that doesn't account for maintenance problems and the times when they're going in and out of port, something enemies track very closely. The real number is likely even lower than this already low number. 2. Why do you think superfuzes helps in a counter strike? They massively increase accuracy but that's not even the problem to solve in a MAD scenario. Superfuzes help in taking…

Don't you think any of those 1970s subs have seen modernization efforts?

Have they been upgraded? Yes. Have they replaced those 1970s era engines with subs that have quieter electric drives as planned? Nope.

From the open letter (linked above) by the experts: "The last concentrated investment to modernize the triad came during the Reagan administration."

Even if you believe the subs are in great condition, that doesn't fix the other two fundamentally broken legs of the triad. The B-52 fleet would likely get shot down because they're very slow and non-stealthy. The ICBMs probably don't even work (no public evidence they do), they're in well known static silos, and have just a few minutes of "use or lose" time.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#67

Post by forapurpose » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

otoburb wrote: post #29

forapurpose wrote: post #12

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ... Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and popul…

>> Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. I thought that military power depended primarily on the quantity of population and materiél . The latter is driven primarily by wealth, but also relies on building, operating and maintaining a manufacturing and industrial base. Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e.…

Good point about materiél. When I wrote the GP, I tried to think of a country with wealth (and population) that lost a war due to a lack of manufacturing capacity and couldn't come up with one, so I stuck with 'wealth'.

Honest question: Can anyone think of such a place? I'm not including countries that had manufacturing capacity but didn't use it for military purposes.

> Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.

That omits another application of AI: Autonomous or semi-autonomous robots that do the fighting. That greatly reduces the need for population, because the AI robots are the 'boots on the ground'.

And while you need manufacturing capacity to build lots of robots, likely the software would be the difficult part. Manufacturing capacity is no longer particularly expensive or exclusive - it's so inexpensive that developing countries do most of it while wealthy countries moved on to higher-skill, higher- profit industries decades ago (such as writing software), and arguably the wealthy could rebuild capacity quickly if needed. Also, victory might depend far more on AI quality than on hardware quantity.

That's all speculative, of course. Who knows how it will work out. On one hand, we can't even build an AI that can drive safely on the freeway; on the other, AI might be simpler in a war zone, where safety and precision may take a back seat to destructive power - see it, shoot it - especially for the unscrupulous.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#68

Post by staunch » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #49

staunch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just a handful of Ohio class subs and all of them should have been replaced by more modern and stealthier designs by now. It's conceivable that an enemy could locate most of them and hit them with nuclear torpedos or similar. And even if most of the active subs survived it might not be sufficient to ensure MAD because they don't carry all that many SLBMs.

>It's conceivable that an enemy could locate most of them and hit them with nuclear torpedos or similar. i kind of wondering which Navy in the world has (or going to have in the next 10 years - supposing that US would do nothing in those 10 years) sufficient number of such superior attack submarines (or how else you're going to attack these subs? ICBM or long range bombers are obviously out of question) Definitely it…

What about massive nuclear mines laid in front of their routes? Or long range nuclear missiles fired from ships? Long range torpedoes? Kamikaze-style mini subs? A sneak attack would probably be creative.

The Ohio subs are supposed to be hard to track. If they are being successfully tracked then they're vulnerable to attack.

The point of the nuclear triad is to be triple redundant. The system is not designed to rely solely on the ability of the subs to survive an attack. That would be a single point of failure.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#69

Post by forapurpose » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #36

forapurpose wrote: post #12

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ... Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it? Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and popul…

Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company and he said to me that the “engineering capabilities” (so to speak) of his Saudi colleagues were definitely sub-par. One of the reasons he gave me for this is that the Saudi electrical engineering students were still taught the Coran in university instead of the teachers devoting that t…

> Definitely not Saudi Arabia. A close friend of mine worked there as a engineering contractor for a big European aero-defense company ...

The Saudi's answer to the problem you raise is in your first sentence: They can hire foreigners or buy the technology. In their nuclear competition with Iran, the Saudi's apparently intended to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan.

> Coran

FWIW, it's usually spelled "Koran", "Quran", or "Qur'an" in English.

Re: Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

#70

Post by staunch » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #42

staunch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just a handful of Ohio class subs and all of them should have been replaced by more modern and stealthier designs by now. It's conceivable that an enemy could locate most of them and hit them with nuclear torpedos or similar. And even if most of the active subs survived it might not be sufficient to ensure MAD because they don't carry all that many SLBMs.

> It's conceivable that an enemy could locate most of them and hit them with nuclear torpedos or similar. By 'conceivable', you mean 'I am able to think this thought, regardless of how tied to reality it is', right?

I actually mean something more like "plausible" here.

If primary means of protection for these subs is stealth, and that stealth is no longer in effect, then it's logical to assume that they're vulnerable.

The fact that the US Navy is trying to replace them with stealthier Columbia class submarines is good evidence that this is true.

Do you any useful information or ideas to add?