U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work talked about the Pentagon’s new “third offset strategy” to defeat future adversaries at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Nov. 8.
By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Staci Miller [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The first offset strategy occurred in the 1950s when nuclear weapons were used to deter the much larger Warsaw Pact conventional forces.
When the Soviets achieved nuclear parity in the 1970s, the second offset parity took place with the emergence of smart weapons to overcome the numerical disadvantage.
The third offset will be about exploiting artificial intelligence to help make decisions autonomously and at the speed of light.
Humans will benefit from collaborating with machines by allowing the machine to help humans make better decisions faster.
Work cited the F-35 as an example. He describe the plane as a flying sensor computer that sucks in an enormous amount of data, correlates it, analyzes it and displays it to the pilot on his helmet.
“This fifth-gen fighter, [even though] it can’t out-turn an F-16 or … go as fast, we are absolutely confident that F-35 will be a war winner … because it is using the machine to help the human make better decisions.”