Needed: The Prefect Crystal Ball for Gray War

The activity, hostile action that falls short of–but often precedes–violence, is sometimes referred to as gray zone warfare, the ‘zone’ being a sort of liminal state in between peace and war. The actors that work in it are difficult to identify and their aims hard to predict, by design…

Dubbed COMPASS, the new program will “leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies, game theory, and modeling and estimation to both identify stimuli that yield the most information about an adversary’s intentions, and provide decision makers high-fidelity intelligence on how to respond–-with positive and negative tradeoffs for each course of action,” according to a DARPA notice posted on March 14, 2018.

Teaching software to understand and interpret human intention — a task sometimes called “plan recognition” …has advanced as quickly as the spread of computers and the internet, because all three are intimately linked.

From Amazon to Google to Facebook, the world’s top tech companies are pouring money into probabilistic modeling of user behavior, as part of a constant race to keep from losing users to sites that can better predict what they want. A user’s every click, “like,” and even period of inactivity adds to the companies’ almost unimaginably large sets, and new  machine learning and statistical techniques make it easier than ever to use the information to predict what a given user will do next on a given site.

But inferring a user’s next Amazon purchase (based on data that user has volunteered about previous choices, likes, etc.) is altogether different from predicting how an adversary intends to engage in political or unconventional warfare. So the COMPASS program seeks to use video, text, and other pieces of intelligence that are a lot harder to get than shopping-cart data…

Unlike shopping, the analytical tricks that apply to one gray-zone adversary won’t work on another. “History has shown that no two [unconventional warfare] situations or solutions are identical, thus rendering cookie-cutter responses not only meaningless but also often counterproductive,” wrote Gen. Joseph Votel, who leads U.S. Central Command, in his seminal 2016 treatise on gray zone warfare.

Exceprts from The Pentagon Wants AI To Reveal Adversaries’ True Intention,, Mar. 17, 2018

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