Artificial intelligence & future warfare: implications for international security

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest that this emerging technology will have a deterministic and potentially transformative influence on military power, strategic competition, and world politics more broadly. After the initial surge of broad speculation in the literature related to AI this article provides some much needed specificity to the debate. It argues that left unchecked the uncertainties and vulnerabilities created by the rapid proliferation and diffusion of AI could become a major potential source of instability and great power strategic rivalry. The article identifies several AI-related innovations and technological developments that will likely have genuine consequences for military applications from a tactical battlefield perspective to the strategic level.     

Optimal policies for stochastic clearing systems with time-dependent delay penalties

We study stochastic clearing systems with a discrete-time Markovian input process, and an output mechanism that intermittently and instantaneously clears the system partially or completely. The decision to clear the system depends on both quantities and delays of outstanding inputs. Clearing the system incurs a fixed cost, and outstanding inputs are charged a delay penalty, which is a general increasing function of the quantities and delays of individual inputs. By recording the quantities and delays of outstanding inputs in a sequence, we model the clearing system as a tree-structured Markov decision process over both a finite and infinite horizon. We show that the optimal clearing policies, under realistic conditions, are of the on-off type or the threshold type. Based on the characterization of the optimal policies, we develop efficient algorithms to compute parameters of the optimal policies for such complex clearing systems for the first time. We conduct a numerical analysis on the impact of the nonlinear delay penalty cost function, the comparison of the optimal policy and the classical hybrid policy (ie, quantity and age thresholds), and the impact of the state of the input process. Our experiments demonstrate that (a) the classical linear approximation of the cost function can lead to significant performance differences; (b) the classical hybrid policy may perform poorly (as compared to the optimal policies); and (c) the consideration of the state of the input process makes significant improvement in system performance.     

Robust preallocated preferential defense

The problem is to protect a set of T identical targets that may come under attack by A identical weapons. The targets are to be defended by D identical interceptors, which must be preallocated to defend selected targets. The attacker is aware of the number of interceptors, but is ignorant of their allocation. The size of the attack is chosen by the attacker from within a specified range. The robust strategies developed in this article do not require the defender to assume an attack size. Rather, the defender chooses a strategy which is good over a wide range of attack sizes, though not necessarily best for any particular attack size. The attacker, knowing that the defender is adopting a robust strategy, chooses the optimal attack strategy for the number of weapons he chooses to expend. The expected number of survivors is a function of the robust defense strategy and optimal attack strategy against this robust defense.     

Measuring information in right-censored models

The theory of majorization is used to develop measures of information in the randomly right-censored model when the lifetime and censoring variables are discrete. Majorization also enables us to prove some basic theorems about the measures in a simple and unified fashion. These measures include Shannon's information as a special case. The measures are inadequate in the continuous case and some alternative measures, based on the variance of the lifetime random variable, are proposed.     

The International Criminal Court and the Deterrence of Human Rights Atrocities

Research on human rights treaties has mostly reached depressingly similar conclusions – that such treaties and their resulting institutions have little or no impact on human rights. The International Criminal Court, however, possesses significant power to investigate and prosecute violations of international law that equip it with potentially more influence than previous human rights regimes. I suggest, however, that the impact of the ICC on human rights is conditioned by signatory governments’ commitment to good governance and acceptance of the role of the ICC in addressing violations of international law. I develop a two-stage model of ICC ratification and human rights abuse that shows that while many states have ratified the ICC Treaty, not all are committed to stopping the crimes under its jurisdiction. Rather, state commitment to human rights depends first on its commitment to the rule of law within its own borders. Second, commitment to human rights depends on states’ willingness to grant the ICC the powers necessary to carry out its mission. Through a number of statistical tests, I find strong support for these hypotheses on states’ human rights and propensity for violence.