RUNNING HEAD: Artificial Intelligence in the Military 1

Development of Artificial Intelligence to Improve US Military Tactics

Faris Syed & Joshua De Vera

10/24/19
Artificial Intelligence in the Military 2

Rationale

In 2002, The Millennium Challenge was a simulated war game between the United States

and the Middle East which was monitored by US generals with live exercises and computer

simulations. Although the US won the competition, Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K.

Van Riper was able to counter well known US defense and attack strategies and led the Middle

East forces ann early advantage before being overwhelmed by US supplies. This was found

rather interesting due to the large increase of advancements in superhuman artificial intelligence

programs across multiple fields except for the case mentioned above. The purpose of our project

is to create an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze the possible factors in a military conflict

and provide the best decision with the least amount of losses. Our objective is to simulate a

similar war game between two countries and have the program try to beat its opponent despite

having a disadvantage. Furthermore, a more realistic simulation will try to be achieved by adding

multiple countries and alliances to the environment. This project would be done to reduce the

casualties in conflicts and improve the allocation of military resources. It will also have larger

implications with the use of artificial intelligence in the military to predict conflict outcomes and

increase US chances of victory. However, it can be applied to multiple fields to predict the best

decision and increase the possibilities of successfully helping others.

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Question

Can we utilize artificial intelligence to predict military outcomes and find flaws in the US

defense strategy?

Hypothesis

Null: If we use artificial intelligence to predict military outcomes the find flaws in US defense

tactics, the program will not be able to reliably predict and win simulated war games.

Alternative: If we use artificial intelligence to predict military outcomes the find flaws in US

defense tactics, the program will be able to reliably predict and win.

Application to Rationale: The question and hypotheses provide an experiment to test whether we

can utilize artificial intelligence to consistently win despite having a disadvantage and improve

US defense tactics.
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Materials and Methods

In order to create the program, we will use the following programming languages to

create the algorithm and a game environment to test it:

Python.

Python is a programming language that can be applied to many different applications of

software. There are numerous third-party modules and libraries that can be paired with the

Python language to fully utilize the processing speed and power of the language. With this

project, we will be using various libraries that utilize different artificial intelligence algorithms

with Python to generate the basis for our artificial intelligence program which we will further

edit in order to achieve our goal of a superhuman program.

TensorFlow.

TensorFlow is an open-source library for numerical computation and large scale machine

learning analysis. TensorFlow combines many algorithms and models of machine learning and

deep learning to create a convenient and easy front-end API to build applications within the

framework. TensorFlow is able to run deep neural networks for image recognition, word

embeddings, recurrent neural networks, sequence-to-sequence models for machine translation,

natural language processing, etc. Dataflow graphs can be created to show nodes. Nodes in graphs

demonstrate mathematical operations with the connections between other nodes representing

tensors which are multidimensional data arrays. TensorFlow makes it easier for the programmers

to focus on the logic of the actual program while the intricacies of algorithms and functions are

taken care of behind the scenes by TensorFlow.

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Keras.

Keras is a high-level neural networks API, that is written in Python. This API will be able

to run on top of the software library, TensorFlow. This API will enable us to perform rapid

experimentation without the friction and delay of running multiple libraries to generate

significant data.

Using these languages and open-library resources we will create an artificial intelligence

program to consistently win battles. This program will make decisions based on certain factors of

each country in which the program will analyze.

USA Canada Britain China Saudi North etc

Arabia Korea

Funding

Army

Navy

Air Force

etc

Figure 1. ​The following is a chart that we will use to measure the strengths and weaknesses of

each country into a quantifiable number which will be used in the algorithm.

Based on this data table above, the factors will be put into an equation that will weigh the

factors based on a coefficient to get the probability of winning a certain encounter. Throughout
Artificial Intelligence in the Military 6

testing, the weight of each factor will change until the algorithm and effective decide the best

plan of attack with minimal losses.

P (x) = M x + Ax + N x + AF x

Figure 2. ​ The following equation is an example of an algorithm which may be used to

determine the probability, P(x), of winning an engagement based on the factors of monetary

strength (M), army strength (A), and navy strength (N), and air force strength (AF) alongside

many other factors.

Once the optimal program is created, we will run the program against humans to test whether it

can consistently outsmart the average human in terms of military strategy.

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Data Analysis

The data for our project will be recorded based on the program’s win rate against human

entities. We will start the learning process by having the program run the simulation with a

one-on-one battle to develop an algorithm. By running the program against a similar version of

itself, we can slowly evolve the program until one is able to realistically and consistently beat

other versions of itself. Once this is accomplished, we will try to make the simulation more

realistic by including multiple countries in the simulated war game to add to the complexity seen

in modern warfare.

Figure 3. ​This graph shows the win percentage over time measured in terms of the number of

games played. This will allow us to see a trend in how the program learns from itself over time

and if there is a stagnant win rate that can be increased by optimizing different factors of the

program.
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Efficiency of the program can be further deemed as optimized when the adjustments to

the algorithm when playing against itself doesn’t increase the win rate. At this point, further

adjustments wouldn’t have a marginally big increase in win rate and confirm the creation of an

effective program.

The data collected from this program can be used in future applications within militaristic

operations. Many types of machinery lack intelligence and require human operators which also

causes risks in lives. Upon further investigation, military operations can be optimized with

different machinery being able to operate on its own. With this design, many different machines

will be able to communicate with each other and provide information that can be processed in

real-time to assess current situations and modify the desired action based on the incoming data.

Our algorithms can also be further investigated to create guided plans of attack for a given

country. There are many factors affecting the results of warfare such as social, political,

economic, etc. With these algorithms, analysts will be able to quantify, to an extent, of how a

country may perform in warfare based on these factors.

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Bibliography

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argames/​.

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https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/keras/overview​.

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