Christopher S. Chivvis and Jennifer Kavanagh
The American Statecraft Program develops and advances ideas for a more disciplined U.S. foreign policy aligned with American values and cognizant of the limits of American power in a more competitive world.
Imagine a meeting of the U.S. president’s National Security Council where a new military adviser sits in one of the chairs—virtually, at least, because this adviser is an advanced AI system. This may seem like the stuff of fantasy, but the United States could at some point in the not-too-distant future have the capability to generate and deploy this type of technology. An AI adviser is unlikely to replace traditional members of the National Security Council—currently made up of the secretaries of defense, state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But an AI presence at the table could have some fascinating—and challenging—implications for how decisions are made. The effects might be even more significant if the United States knew that its adversaries had similar technology at their disposal.
To get a grip on how the proliferation of artificial intelligence might affect national security decisionmaking at the highest levels of government, we designed a hypothetical crisis in which China imposed a blockade on Taiwan and then convened a group of technology and regional experts to think through the opportunities and challenges that the addition of AI would bring in such a scenario. We looked in particular at how the proliferation of advanced AI capabilities around the world could affect the speed of decisionmaking, perception and misperception, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics. Our conclusions were not always what we expected.
AI Could Slow Down Decisionmaking
Because AI systems may be able to accumulate and synthesize information more quickly than humans and identify trends in large datasets that humans might miss, it could save valuable analytic time while offering human decisionmakers better-informed grounds for their judgements. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks argued in November 2023, “AI-enabled systems can help accelerate the speed of commanders’ decisions and improve the quality and accuracy of those decisions.”
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