[Noah Sylvia is a Research Fellow for C4ISR and Emerging Tech at the Royal United Services Institute.]
As advanced digitalised systems have become ubiquitous in modern warfare, the policy community primarily engages with these technologies through discussion of Decision Support Systems (DSS). DSS (or sometimes AI-DSS) encompass the range of digital systems used in decision-making processes, especially those incorporating some type of AI.
While serving a useful purpose at the time, continued focus on ‘DSS’ now inhibits the sector’s ability to move towards effective international governance on digitalised military systems, and should be discarded in favour of architectural frameworks of oversight.
The Problem Set and DSS’s Progress
On the subject of military technology and IHL, opinions are varied on where priorities should lie, ranging from the sufficiency of existing IHL for the use of military AI, dehumanisation due to increasingly technical means of waging warfare from a distance, the dangers of automation or autonomy in targeting, to the dual use nature and potential targetability of digital technology infrastructure and contractors. While the specific focuses differ, I posit that our cohering problem set is essentially the increased use of complex digitalised systems to enable, support, and execute military operations in a manner that has the potential to undermine responsible and legally-compliant military conduct. Analysis using DSS as the framing terminology has permitted the policy community to progress significantly in their analysis and assessments of this problem set.
DSS are typically defined along the lines of ‘tools that…collect and analyze data, provide information about the operational environment as well as actionable recommendations, with the aim of aiding military decision-makers in evaluating [relevant] factors’. Whether defined as ‘tools’ or ‘teammates’, DSS thus typologises digital systems based on a functionalist approach, defined by ‘decision-making functions’ like ‘ingest’, ‘generate’, ‘enable’, ‘automate’, ‘share’, and ‘interface’. Originating in many ways to contrast the focus on lethal autonomous weapons, DSS thus aided non-technical experts in grasping and discussing a conceptual layer of technology that is one step abstracted from physical platforms. Conversations could now begin to address some of the many tools, platforms, and applications comprising the modern battlefield digital architecture.
By moving away from weapons platforms to software systems, DSS terminology expanded how legal and policy experts could understand how military processes align with the digital systems enabling them. Several publications have mapped the components of combat processes like targeting, highlighting where DSS influence, shape, and even direct elements of the targeting process, as well as teasing out the frictions, legal vulnerabilities, and human-machine misalignments involved.
Yet despite the progress made using DSS as a framework, the shortcomings of reliance upon the term begin to become apparent.
