Human-machine teams will have application beyond the battlefield and throughout what might be termed the enterprise of military organizations. Understanding this enterprise approach will ensure that the opportunities for human-machine teams can be exploited in institutional strategic planning, recruiting and training people, conducting procurement and strategic logistics as well as being applied in the myriad of battlefield roles currently being imagined.

This article is the first of three that examines the key aspects of human-machine teaming. This article examines the rationale for human-machine teaming through seven propositions. The second article examines three key areas where military organizations might adopt given closer integration of humans and machines. The third and final article examines the principle challenges found in human-machine teaming. These challenges—at the strategic, institutional, and tactical levels—must be tackled by military organizations that aspire to generate advantage through such an approach.

Importantly, none of these articles propose that the closer integration of humans and machines will result in any fundamental change to the nature of war. War will retain its enduring nature, with several continuities: a political dimension, a human dimension, the existence of uncertainty found with a context of a contest of wills. These articles remain focused on another aspect of Clausewitz’s examination of war—that of its changing character.

Throughout On War, Clausewitz highlights how failing to understand the character of war leads to disaster. In discussing the Prussian defeat in 1806, he chastises Prussian generals for misapplying Frederick the Great’s tactic, the oblique order, against a Napoleonic enemy waging a new type of warfare. Similarly, the integration of human-machine teams represents such a change in the character of war.

This article illuminates why such a shift may occur and why it is attractive to military institutions. It also seeks to provide a foundation for military organizations to undertake more detailed analysis of the personnel, equipment, training, education, doctrine sustainment, and infrastructure issues that a move to an integrated human-machine force will entail.

The Imperative: Human-Machine Teaming On and Beyond the Battlefield

Gill Pratt, former DARPA Program Manager and CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, has argued that technological and economic trends are converging to deliver a Cambrian Explosion of new robotic capabilities. Many of the foundational technologies for robots, such as computing, data storage, and communications, have been progressing at exponential growth rates. Two more recent technologies—Cloud Robotics and Deep Learning— are likely build upon these earlier technologies in what Pratt has described virtuous cycle of explosive growth. Cloud Robotics permits each individual robot to learn from the experiences of all robots, in turn leading to very fast growth of robot competence. Deep Learning algorithms are a way for robots to learn and generalize their associations based on very large (and often cloud-based) training sets that often include millions of examples.

Military developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and augmentation will largely be based on these developments in civil society. The development of artificial intelligence, and machine learning, is an area of significant investment in many nations. Contemporary robots and machine learning are already changing the nature of work in society, and how we conceive shopping and entertainment. Advanced computing has changed the character of mass marketing, warehousing, civil logistics, and entertainment.

A range of applications for robotics and artificial intelligence provide a rationale for military institutions to consider the design of more integrated human-machine organizations. The list of applications, which might be titled the Seven Propositions, is far from exhaustive. But these propositions provide the purpose, or the why, for military establishments to develop their future human-machine forces.

Proposition 1. Military power can be enhanced by combining human potential and robotic and/or artificial intelligence capabilities. Population size and economic strength have traditionally been important determinants of a nation’s military potential. However, the application of large numbers of robotic systems and artificial intelligence—and possibly humans with wearable, mechanical and implantable augmentation—may change this calculus. While not discounting the impact of geography and strategic culture, the combination of humans, robots, and artificial intelligence offers countries with small, elderly, or declining populations the potential to generate military capability and mass well beyond what may have been their traditional capacity. Though such a scenario is speculative, it is possible that a technologically advanced country with a smaller population could build a significant advantage in military systems based on artificial intelligence and thereby field greater numbers of more capable robotic warfighters in highly capable human-machine teams.

Proposition 2. Lethal autonomous robots can reduce threats to humans in military forces. As automatic and autonomous systems become increasingly reliable and capable, militaries have become more willing to delegate decision making authority to them. Many military organizations will face increasing temptation to delegate greater levels of authority to a machine, or else face defeat at the hands of opponents who do. For some, this may even be an existential issue. The Russian Military Industrial Committee approved a plan that would have 30% of Russian combat power consist of remote-controlled and autonomous robotic platforms by 2030. Other countries facing demographic and security challenges are likely to set similar goals. And while the United States Department of Defense enacted restrictions on the use of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems wielding lethal force, nations and non-state actors hostile to Western nations may not exercise such self-restraint.

Proposition 3. Disruptive swarming technologies enable new operating methods. The new and interdisciplinary research areas of artificial life, artificial intelligence, complex adaptive systems, and particle swarm optimization appears to offer an opportunity for self-organized robot swarms to be used in future conflict. As conventional enemy forces move to lower signature systems and operations, and non-state actors continue to hone non-linear and dispersed approaches, the ability to cover more ground by land forces becomes more challenging. One potential solution for friendly forces, described by Robert Scales in the Future Warfare Anthology is to saturate an operational area with small autonomous systems that will force an adversary—conventional or non-state—to move, be detected, and be targeted by friendly forces. As Trevor Dupuy has written, “The importance of new or imaginative ideas in military affairs, as opposed to simply new things, can best be gauged by the fact that new ideas have often permitted inferior military forces to overcome forces that were larger and better equipped.” While we would hope to apply new methods, new ideas may not always be generated by friendly forces.

Proposition 4. Preservation of the force is a tactical and strategic necessity. As of 2017, most military organizations possess equipment worth tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars. For example, helicopters cost millions of dollars and their annual sustainment costs significantly more. A high-quality quadcopter currently costs roughly $1,000; for the cost of a single high-end helicopter, an Army or Air Force might acquire one million drones. If the robotics market sustains current price decline trends, in the future that figure might become closer to one billion. This is obviously a simplistic comparison that does not consider roles and capabilities. But, in the future, drones could be cheaper than some ballistic munitions are today. How would an amphibious task group respond to an attack from millions of aerial kamikaze explosive drones? Some of the major platforms and strategies upon which military forces are currently relying upon might be rendered obsolete, or, at least, much more vulnerable.