“How Large-Language Models Can Revolutionize Military Planning”, 2023-04-12 ():
…Below, a team that includes a professor from Marine Corps University and a portfolio manager from Scale AI share our efforts to bridge new forms of data synthesis with foundational models of military decision-making. Based on this pilot effort, we see clear and tangible ways to integrate large-language models into the planning process.
…A volunteer team from Scale AI, a commercial artificial intelligence company that works with the Defense Department, adapted a planning exercise hosted by and the US Marine Corps’ School of Advanced Warfighting to explore how large-language models could augment military planning. The team selected an exercise that focused on allowing teams to design operations, activities, and investments at the theater level to deter an adversary. This focus on theater shaping and competition helped the team tailor the large-language model, loading doctrinal publications alongside open-source intelligence and academic literature on deterrence to orient the model to what matters in a competitive military context short of armed conflict. The result was Hermes, an experimental large-language model for military planning.
…Since the planning exercise dealt with campaigning beneath the threshold of armed conflict, many of the questions generated by the planners focused on understanding the interplay between strategy and non-military instruments of power and the employment of military forces to set conditions during peacetime. As seen in the graphic below, students often sought to use Hermes to understand the economic dimensions of statecraft shaping lines of communication and theater strategy. The large-language model helped military planners see battlefield geometry in multiple dimensions.
Student teams used the model to move between macro understandings of regional economic linkages to country-specific looks at political timelines (eg. elections) and major infrastructure investments like China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Moving across different levels of analysis helped students visualize and describe seams in the operational environment they could exploit in their competition concepts through targeted activities. Beyond factual questions, students used Hermes to help generate hypotheses about temporal and positional advantage in competition. The large-language model helped military planners refine their courses of action.
Students also used the model to better understand the adversary’s system. Since the design team loaded adversary doctrine into the data corpus, students could ask questions ranging from “What is a joint blockade?” to “How does country X [China] employ diesel submarines?” While large-language models tend to struggle with distances and counting, Hermes proved outstanding at helping students answer doctrine-related questions that assisted with the development of adversary courses of action. The large-language model helped military planners orient on the enemy.
This produced the third critical insight: Used correctly, large-language models can serve as an extension of “operational art”—“the cognitive approach by commanders and staffs…to develop strategies, campaigns, and operations to organize and employ military forces by integrating ends, ways, means, and evaluating risks.” The dialogic format of asking and refining questions with the assistance of a large-language model helped military planners gain a better appreciation of the operational environment and identify how best to understand concepts in terms of time, space, and forces.
…This experiment demonstrated that there is a need to start integrating large-language models into military planning. As a pilot effort, it was only illustrative of the art of the possible and suggestive of how best to integrate AI, in the form of a large-language model, into military decision-making. Based on the pilot effort, 3 efforts warrant additional consideration in future experiments.
First, future iterations of Hermes and other large-language models for the military profession should integrate a historical mind. By incorporating historical case studies—both official and academic—into the corpus of data, planners will have access to a wider range of novel insights than any one mind can retain. Back to the blockade example, a planner could ask how historical blockades were defeated and generate new concepts of operations based on reviewing multiple cases. Synthesizing diverse historical examples and comparing them against current context would help the military profession preserve its historical sensibility while avoiding the pitfalls of faulty analogical reasoning.