1: A Colonel of Cyber Command

AI in the Battlespace: Chapter 1

1: A Colonel of Cyber Command

The banner draping the table reads 'Symposium: AI in the Battlespace'. The letters are black against a red background. At one end is the logo of Cyber Command.

Is it OK to be nervous when you’re chairing the biggest and most important conference of your career?

Liu Kee sits on the stage fronting an auditorium buried in the depths of the Pentagon. He's facing two hundred and forty mostly-empty seats: ten rows split by a central aisle running back to the exit. The black-velvet ceiling is a firmament where spotlights shine like stars. The big projection screen flickers behind him: a technician at the lectern is testing PowerPoint from the secure laptop holding today's presentations.

They’ll be starting in 40 minutes. Already a sprinkling of early arrivals have grabbed places near the back where they're locked into their phones or laptops. They look mostly army, but all the branches will be here today. These days everyone does cyber.

Liu Kee will be outranked by most of the people at this conference. There's some disdain for Cyber Command, their habitat of darkened rooms and open offices. Not so dangerous, not very macho, none of the glamour of real spooks.

Liu Kee has done basic infantry training: he knows how to fire a gun. But he's never seen actual combat, never seen a fellow soldier’s limbs blown off or had a friend bleed out in his arms. He wonders how many of the medalled warriors soon to fill this hall have seen the sharp end of combat, seen guts in the dust in front of them. He has read about the guilt Alan Turing felt during the second world war, the stinging rebukes of cowardice made against the workers at Bletchley Park by civilians who knew no better: Why aren’t you in uniform?

Cyber Command has solved that problem: they have a uniform. They even get medals - and how controversial was that?

Still, the first session will get the warriors’ juices flowing. A full-blooded covert insertion in HD. After that it gets a bit more technical; the audience will have to think with the part of their body between their ears instead.

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Liu Kee's ancestors had come to America to build the Pacific railroads back in the 1860s; their descendants have been here ever since. He did his post-grad work at Stanford, he still has a desk there.

He was just what the military needed when they woke up and smelled the shape of war to come. Discovered  the things they had to do in-house because the tech companies were too high-minded to sully their precious ethics. No-one claimed to care that he was of Chinese heritage - they were careful to assure him of that.

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