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"Joseph Votel, a recently retired head of the Pentagon's Central Command, said last year he was struck by how Israeli forces mounting strikes in Gaza in May had been integrating AI into their operations and by "the impact that is having on their targeting cycles". He says Israel is using AI to generate a large range of potential targets for surveillance to whittle down. This lets its forces "disrupt enemy attacks without the need for a lengthy development period or a longer campaign."  America's armed forces, helped by Palantir (an AI company which, like Anduril, takes its name from "The Lord of the Rings") and other contractors, is trying to build such technology into a system which can narrow down a huge range of potential targets and pass information about them freely to where it is most needed. Given the finite capacity of communication systems, not to mention the vulnerability, this requires that an increasing amount of processing be done "on the edge" - that is, on the platform carrying the sensor.  In 2016 a Pentagon project called Maven started trying to address the "lots of surveillance but not much to show for it" problem identified by General Ryan. The idea was to automate the identification of people and objects in the petabytes of video footage sent back by surveillance drones. It ended up producing software efficient enough to run on the drones themselves. In Scarlet Dragon, a recent-AI focused American exercise in which a wide range of systems were used to comb a large area for a small target, things were greatly speeded up by allowing satellites to provide estimates of where a target might be in a compact format readable by another sensor or a targeting system, rather than transmitting high-definition pictures of the sort humans look at.  In a world where bandwidth is often the biggest constraint such parsimony is a boon. It speeds up kill chains while reducing vulnerability to jamming. At the same time, it puts a greater burden on the automated parts of the system to provide reliable synopses of what they see, which is a worry for people keen to ensure that fully informed and responsible human beings stay on top of all decisions about where and when to blow things up." p.9.

 Signals from Noise. Heads in the clouds. The Economist Technology Quarterly, Defence technology, Hide and seek. January 29th 2022. 442: 9281. pp. 9-10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR_7Swtv0XM