Sunday, February 05, 2017

Revealed preferences

Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle DF-ZF

From the New York Times.
"In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Pacific. ...

"The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers."
Ultrafast AI-piloted cruise missiles, fabricated at low marginal cost, are pretty much guaranteed to take out an aircraft carrier.

The fact that the US and UK are still investing in these behemoths indicates that they see the next decades of force-projection as targeting third world states, not Russia or China.

Let's hope they're right.

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The AGM-158C LRASM is the US anti-ship weapon mentioned.

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What kind of AI could pilot a combat cruise missile?


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