The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own

Those advantages have now evaporated, and of all the new technologies that have emerged in recent decades, such as genomics or miniaturization, “the one thing that has the widest application to the widest number of D.O.D. missions is artificial intelligence and autonomy,” Mr. Work said.

Today’s software has its limits, though. Computers spot patterns far faster than any human can. But the ability to handle uncertainty and unpredictability remain uniquely human virtues, for now.

Bringing the two complementary skill sets together is the Pentagon’s goal with centaur warfighting.

Mr. Work, 63, first proposed the concept when he led a Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security. His inspiration, he said, was not found in typical sources of military strategy — Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, for instance — but in the work of Tyler Cowen, a blogger and economist at George Mason University.

In his 2013 book, “Average Is Over,” Mr. Cowen briefly mentioned how two average human chess players, working with three regular computers, were able to beat both human chess champions and chess-playing supercomputers.

It was a revelation for Mr. Work. You could “use the tactical ingenuity of the computer to improve the strategic ingenuity of the human,” he said.

Mr. Work believes a lesson learned in chess can be applied to the battlefield, and he envisions a military supercharged by artificial intelligence. Brilliant computers would transform ordinary commanders into master tacticians. American soldiers would effectively become superhuman, fighting alongside — or even inside — robots.

Of the $18 billion the Pentagon is spending on new technologies, $3 billion has been set aside specifically for “human-machine combat teaming” over the next five years. It is a relatively small sum by Pentagon standards — its annual budget is more than $500 billion — but still a significant bet on technologies and a strategic concept that have yet to be proved in battle.

At the same time, Pentagon officials say that the United States is unlikely to gain an absolute technological advantage over its competitors.

“A lot of the A.I. and autonomy is happening in the commercial world, so all sorts of competitors are going to be able to use it in ways that surprise us,” Mr. Work said.

The American advantage, he said, will ultimately come from a mix of technological prowess and the critical thinking and decision-making powers that the United States military prioritizes. The American military delegates significant decisions down its chain of command, in contrast to the more centralized Chinese and Russian armed forces, though that is changing.

“We’re pretty confident that we have an advantage as we start the competition,” Mr. Work said. “But how it goes over time, we’re not going to make any assumptions.”

Experts outside the Pentagon are far less convinced that the United States will be able to maintain its dominance by using artificial intelligence. The defense industry no longer drives research the way it did during the Cold War, and the Pentagon does not have a monopoly on the cutting-edge machine-learning technologies coming from start-ups in Silicon Valley, and in Europe and Asia.

Unlike the technologies and material needed for nuclear weapons or guided missiles, artificial intelligence as powerful as what the Pentagon seeks to harness is already deeply woven into everyday life. Military technology is often years behind what can be picked up at Best Buy.