About
By Francis X. Maier
Readers with a taste for history may remember the story of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don't, it was a high-end military simulation from a couple of decades ago, run by the now defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Described as "the key to military transformation," it cost about $250 million – a huge expense for such a thing at the time. The game's premise was an armed conflict with a rogue Persian Gulf state.
The Blue team was a combined American force testing the concept of RDO – "Rapid Decisive Operations." It was based on the doctrine of "network-centric warfare" and supported by a wide range of information technologies, analytical tools, and electronic sensors.
The Red team – the bad guys – was largely a one-man show run by a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, Paul Van Riper. He was given complete freedom in conducting his side of the conflict.
The war game commenced, and Red team promptly sank an aircraft carrier, several cruisers, and much of the Blue fleet with low-tech swarm attacks. It killed thousands of simulated U.S. servicemen in the game's first two days. It also consistently evaded Blue team surveillance by using unconventional, unpredictable tactics and exploiting Blue team's technical vulnerabilities.
Red team did so well that the simulation was halted, reset, and – according to a very public and very angry Van Riper – forced to conform to a computer-projected framework and outcome favoring Blue.
The military disputed elements of Van Riper's account, but MC02 remains a lasting embarrassment and a lesson in the costs of our tech addiction. Worse, it is a lesson imperfectly learned. Today – 24 years later – our technologies, including most notably AI, are much more sophisticated, powerful, and precise. They're also more expensive. And they still have technical vulnerabilities. They can do vastly more damage in war. But they can't – by themselves – destroy a determined, low-tech adversary, no matter how wicked the enemy and how deserved the punishment might be.
Iran is Exhibit A.
High tech weaponry, no matter how "intelligent," never takes the place of mature, morally informed human command. It's true that killing an enemy remotely makes one's own safety more secure. But it also makes both the act of killing more impersonal, and the choice to kill much easier. Autonomous combat drones choosing their own targets is not an edifying thought. But exactly that reality is already a part of today's battle space.
Here's the point: The more advanced our tools, the more two-edged they become. George Parkin Grant, the great Canadian Christian philosopher, noted that North American civilization is uniquely addicted to technology in a manner resembling a secular religion. This flows from the continent's European settlers and their Calvinist roots, drained of their original Christian framework.
Fundamentally, we are a people of conquest – the conquest and remaking of nature, including human nature. This explains our genius for innovation and tools. But as we use our tools, they use and reshape us, ending in a kind of hubris that involves a blindness to nature, a refusal of limits, a skepticism toward anything "sacred," and a slavery to the power of technique. This needn't be so. We can choose otherwise. But too often, too easily, we sleepwalk ourselves into catastrophe.
MC02 reminds us of the cost of failing to see beyond our tech-dominated assumptions and the consequences that ensue. Thus, when it comes to artificial intelligence, if we don't want a real-world version of Skynet, we can never dispense with rigorous human foresight and rigorous human control of AI, its development, and its applications.
AI is here and it's not going away. So how should we proceed? Scripture tells us dozens of times to "be not afraid." That's not a suggestion. It's a command. There is a God; He loves us; and He's intimately involved in our affairs. Words like "apocalypse" and "crisis" pepper our pu...
Readers with a taste for history may remember the story of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don't, it was a high-end military simulation from a couple of decades ago, run by the now defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Described as "the key to military transformation," it cost about $250 million – a huge expense for such a thing at the time. The game's premise was an armed conflict with a rogue Persian Gulf state.
The Blue team was a combined American force testing the concept of RDO – "Rapid Decisive Operations." It was based on the doctrine of "network-centric warfare" and supported by a wide range of information technologies, analytical tools, and electronic sensors.
The Red team – the bad guys – was largely a one-man show run by a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, Paul Van Riper. He was given complete freedom in conducting his side of the conflict.
The war game commenced, and Red team promptly sank an aircraft carrier, several cruisers, and much of the Blue fleet with low-tech swarm attacks. It killed thousands of simulated U.S. servicemen in the game's first two days. It also consistently evaded Blue team surveillance by using unconventional, unpredictable tactics and exploiting Blue team's technical vulnerabilities.
Red team did so well that the simulation was halted, reset, and – according to a very public and very angry Van Riper – forced to conform to a computer-projected framework and outcome favoring Blue.
The military disputed elements of Van Riper's account, but MC02 remains a lasting embarrassment and a lesson in the costs of our tech addiction. Worse, it is a lesson imperfectly learned. Today – 24 years later – our technologies, including most notably AI, are much more sophisticated, powerful, and precise. They're also more expensive. And they still have technical vulnerabilities. They can do vastly more damage in war. But they can't – by themselves – destroy a determined, low-tech adversary, no matter how wicked the enemy and how deserved the punishment might be.
Iran is Exhibit A.
High tech weaponry, no matter how "intelligent," never takes the place of mature, morally informed human command. It's true that killing an enemy remotely makes one's own safety more secure. But it also makes both the act of killing more impersonal, and the choice to kill much easier. Autonomous combat drones choosing their own targets is not an edifying thought. But exactly that reality is already a part of today's battle space.
Here's the point: The more advanced our tools, the more two-edged they become. George Parkin Grant, the great Canadian Christian philosopher, noted that North American civilization is uniquely addicted to technology in a manner resembling a secular religion. This flows from the continent's European settlers and their Calvinist roots, drained of their original Christian framework.
Fundamentally, we are a people of conquest – the conquest and remaking of nature, including human nature. This explains our genius for innovation and tools. But as we use our tools, they use and reshape us, ending in a kind of hubris that involves a blindness to nature, a refusal of limits, a skepticism toward anything "sacred," and a slavery to the power of technique. This needn't be so. We can choose otherwise. But too often, too easily, we sleepwalk ourselves into catastrophe.
MC02 reminds us of the cost of failing to see beyond our tech-dominated assumptions and the consequences that ensue. Thus, when it comes to artificial intelligence, if we don't want a real-world version of Skynet, we can never dispense with rigorous human foresight and rigorous human control of AI, its development, and its applications.
AI is here and it's not going away. So how should we proceed? Scripture tells us dozens of times to "be not afraid." That's not a suggestion. It's a command. There is a God; He loves us; and He's intimately involved in our affairs. Words like "apocalypse" and "crisis" pepper our pu...