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Artificial intelligence (AI) is on everybody’s minds these days. Most of the world’s leading companies are making massive investments in it. Governments are scrambling to catch up. Every single one of us who uses Google Search or any of the new digital assistants on our smartphones has witnessed first-hand how quickly these developments now go. Many analysts foresee truly disruptive changes in education, employment, health, knowledge generation, mobility, etc. But what will AI mean for defense and security? In a new study HCSS offers a unique perspective on this question. Most studies to date quickly jump from AI to autonomous (mostly weapon) systems. They anticipate future armed forces that mostly resemble today’s armed forces, engaging in fairly similar types of activities with a still primarily industrial-kinetic capability bundle that would increasingly be AI-augmented. The authors of this study argue that AI may have a far more transformational impact on defense and security whereby new incarnations of ‘armed force’ start doing different things in novel ways. The report sketches a much broader option space within which defense and security organizations (DSOs) may wish to invest in successive generations of AI technologies. It suggests that some of the most promising investment opportunities to start generating the sustainable security effects that our polities, societies and economies expect may lie in in the realms of prevention and resilience. Also in those areas any large-scale application of AI will have to result from a preliminary open-minded (on all sides) public debate on its legal, ethical and privacy implications. The authors submit, however, that such a debate would be more fruitful than the current heated discussions about ‘killer drones’ or robots. Finally, the study suggests that the advent of artificial super-intelligence (i.e. AI that is superior across the board to human intelligence), which many experts now put firmly within the long

One of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization s (NATO) goals is to ensure that its member states collectively have the capabilities required to apply decisive force whenever the alliance s political leaders decide to achieve certain effects around the world. Yet the history of NATO s influence on actual defense capabilities is a checkered one at best. Since the height of the Cold War, when NATO set itself a level of ambition of 100 divisions and then promptly proceeded to ignore it, all the way to more recent efforts such as the Defence Capabilities Initiative (1999), the Prague Capabilities Commitment (2002), the Istanbul Usability Targets (2004) and the Lisbon Capabilities Package (2010) the direct impact of NATO on national capability development has proved disappointing. If we think of the life cycle of defense capabilities from the moment they are conceived to the moment they are disposed of, NATO s effort throughout these years has focused predominantly on the employment stage. NATO s Defence Planning Process (NDPP) indicates what its analyses and foresight efforts (and increasingly its operational experiences as well) show is required to be effective in the employment stage and then translates these minimally required capabilities into national targets that are presented to and discussed with the NATO member states. But these collective NDPP inputs remain by and large peripheral to the much more dominant national defense planning processes through which the overwhelming majority of Alliance capabilities are born and grown. To put it in business terms: NATO asks for a product and essentially stays aloof from the way(s) in which its providers produce it. In river terms: NATO positions itself downstream where it has to work with the capabilities that the tributaries bring to it.