Artificial Intelligence and the Offense-Defense Balance of Emerging Technologies

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence & International Security

Abstract

Under what conditions do interacting emerging technologies of warfare impact the offense-defense balance? In the traditional offense-defense literature, the state of military technology is a key factor in affecting whether offense has an advantage over defense, or the reverse. More recent work examines how certain technologies can be substituted to enhance security (Cunningham 2022), impact intra-war escalation (Talmadge 2019), and shape international stability (Sechser et al. 2019). Other scholarship directly tackles the question of the offense-defense balance for emerging technologies such as cyber capabilities and uncrewed aerial vehicles (Slayton 2016; Calcara et al. 2022). Yet, many of these approaches take a siloed approach to evaluating the implications of emerging technologies—even though, in practice, most modern military organizations employ them (or aspire to employ them) in an integrated fashion. Therefore, rather than analyzing emerging technologies on a stand-alone basis, we should consider how they interact with each other, especially across different domains.

In this paper, we assess how two technologies, cyber capabilities and uncrewed aerial vehicles, interact with artificial intelligence through the lens of the offense-defense balance. Broadly defined, AI involves the use of computing capabilities to learn and make decisions in ways that simulate human intelligence. AI has the potential to revolutionize the volume, speed, and scale with which states gather and process information, with potentially transformative effects for both cyber and drone warfare. However, we posit that the effects of the interaction between AI and other emerging technologies on the offense-defense balance is not likely to be uniform. In particular, we examine how salient variables such as skills, organizational capacity, and costs are key in distinguishing how these technologies operate with one another and, as a result, the conditions under which they are likely to privilege offensive versus defensive forms of warfare. With process tracing, our case studies of the interaction between AI and uncrewed aerial vehicles, respectively, provide support that interacting emerging technologies do not have a uniform effect on the offense-defense balance, but rather have varied consequences. By evaluating the interaction of artificial intelligence and other technologies, we provide a nuanced understanding of how the offense-defense dynamic takes place in digital and air domains. Overall, scholarly attention to interacting emerging technologies is increasingly important as these innovations continue to take shape and impact the nature of national and international security.

Authors

• Julie George, Cornell University

• Erica D. Lonergan, Columbia University