Major General Tony Wright participated in the 5th edition of the Vauban Sessions, speaking on the exploitation of artificial intelligence in the military decision-making process and engaging with senior military and industry officials.
Allied Command Transformation is working to better understand the role of emerging and disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence to enable the Alliance’s Digital Transformation. These efforts will enable Allied Command Transformation to ensure that NATO’s warfighters retain a decisive advantage by facilitating data-driven decision-making that will help the Alliance out-pace adversaries. In support of this outcome, the Command is engaging with industry and subject matter experts from across the Alliance to exchange ideas to help NATO stay at the forefront of current developments.
Major General Tony Wright, Deputy Chief of Staff Strategic Plans and Policy, attended the 5th edition of the Vauban Sessions that took place in Lille, France, on May 23-24, 2023. The topic of this year’s conference was the implications of using artificial and human intelligence within the decision-making process, and the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence presents for command and control at the strategic and operational levels. Major General Wright participated in the third panel of the conference, discussing if and how new cognitive computing capabilities can become an operational advantage, alongside the French Army’s former Head of Digital Transformation and the Vice-President of VMware.
During his remarks, Major General Wright highlighted that as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, NATO must examine how it can leverage this technology to produce operational advantages across the conflict spectrum. A key area that artificial intelligence will be able to assist is in reducing sources of human error such as fatigue and limits on a person’s ability to process large quantities of information. However, as Major General Wright noted, this raises questions about whether it would be more beneficial to have a human in the loop, impacting the artificial intelligence decision-making process, or having a human on the loop, observing and influencing the artificial intelligence decision-making process.
Major General Wright also stated that NATO is considering the implications of artificial intelligence as it works towards becoming a Multi-Domain Operations-enabled Alliance. In particular, he underscored that the Cognitive Warfare and Multi-Domain Command and Control concepts developed by Allied Command Transformation examine how to integrate artificial intelligence and explore how it will affect our understanding of the operational picture.