With the threat from enemy military autonomous systems more serious than originally thought, the U.S. Defense Science Board (DSB) is goading the Department of Defense (DoD) into developing and fielding its own autonomous systems more quickly.

DSB also issued three sets of recommendations to help DoD expand the use of self-operating platforms for the U.S. military and mature underlying systems for autonomy.

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In a new report, DSB is pushing for the ramped-up pace of development so the Pentagon can take full advantage of the "substantial operational value" of these autonomous systems and to stay ahead of potential adversaries such as Russia and China that are increasingly developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

"Autonomy delivers significant military value, including opportunities to reduce the number of warfighters in harm's way, increase the quality and speed of decisions in time-critical operations, and enable new missions that would otherwise be impossible," said the report.

DSB recommends DoD launch a set of small projects that demonstrate the near-term value of autonomy and make warfighters more comfortable with such technology.

"Given the current budget environment, the study opted not to recommend major new programs. Instead, to strengthen the operational pull for autonomy, the study recommends a set of experiments/prototypes that would demonstrate clear operational value across these operational challenges."

Among the suggested projects are using large unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) to deploy smaller UUVs armed with explosives to sink enemy surface ships; developing a swarm of 10 or more heterogeneous, autonomous unmanned aircraft to serve as a "support team" to ground troops and expanding the use of UUVs to locate and neutralize mines.

Other project ideas include making intelligence data fusion tools more autonomous and holding competitions to test autonomous military vehicles against cyber attacks.

The three recommendations include identifying methods to address autonomous system engineering, design, acquisition and security challenges; establish an autonomy-literate workforce and creating new test, modeling and simulation frameworks.

Tagsautonomous systems, department of defense, Defense Science Board, Artificial Intelligence