| On a summer evening in 2020 at Fort Liberty, a sprawling US Army installation in North Carolina, soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps pored over satellite images on the computers in their command post. They weren't the only ones looking. Moments earlier, an artificial intelligence program had scanned the pictures, with instructions to identify and suggest targets.  The headquarters of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Liberty. Photographer: Cornell Watson for Bloomberg Businessweek The program asked the human minders to confirm its selection: a decommissioned tank. After they decided the AI had it right, the system sent a message to an M142 Himars—or High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, the wheeled rocket launcher that's a mainstay of America's artillery forces—instructing it to fire. A rocket whistled through the air and found its mark, destroying the tank. The explosion was unlike any other in the hundreds of live-fire exercises that occur each year on Fort Liberty's 146,000 acres of training grounds. In fact, it had no precedent in the Army. For the first time, American soldiers had struck a target located and identified by an AI program. Less than four years after that milestone, America's use of AI in warfare is no longer theoretical. In the past several weeks, computer vision algorithms that form part of the US Department of Defense's flagship AI effort, Project Maven, have located rocket launchers in Yemen and surface vessels in the Red Sea, and helped narrow targets for strikes in Iraq and Syria, according to Schuyler Moore, the chief technology officer of US Central Command. The US isn't the only country making this leap: Israel's military has said it's using AI to make targeting recommendations in Gaza, and Ukraine is employing AI software in its effort to turn back Russia's invasion. Navigating AI's transition from the laboratory into combat is one of the thorniest issues facing military leaders. Advocates for its rapid adoption are convinced that combat will soon take place at a speed faster than the human brain can follow. But technologists fret that the American military's networks and data aren't yet good enough to cope; frontline troops are reluctant to entrust their lives to software they aren't sure works; and ethicists worry about the dystopian prospect of leaving potentially fatal decisions to machines. Meanwhile, some in Congress and hawkish think tanks are pushing the Pentagon to move faster, alarmed that the US could be falling behind China, which has a national strategy to become "the world's primary AI innovation center" by 2030. A growing number of US military officers predict that AI will transform the way America and its enemies make war, ranking it alongside the radio and machine gun in its potential to revolutionize combat. In a signal of its possible ambitions, the US recently argued at the United Nations that human control of autonomous weapons is not required by international law. Katrina Manson reports how AI is reshaping warfare at home and abroad. | 
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