National Security Dialogue - Strategic Role of AI in India's Military Preparedness

Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities have become increasingly pivotal to modernisation efforts by militaries around the world. Despite significant allocations for capital acquisition, modernisation, and R&D for emerging technologies like AI in the defence budget, India faces stiff competition from other military powers like the United States, Russia, and China who continue to invest heavily in this space. In addition, Big Tech have also forayed into the military AI domain highlighting strategic considerations for competitiveness and sovereignty. 

  These conditions have profound implications for India which is confronted with not just the need to innovate but also compete in the face of unequal distribution and access to critical capabilities like compute capacity. In tandem, India also faces the trifecta of risks spanning ethical, operational, and strategic that includes compliance with international laws governing war and armed conflict; trust, reliability, and security; and threshold, escalation management, and proliferation.

  This edition of the NSD will identify priority areas for India in terms of domains and functions which would have the highest efficiency gains through integration of AI as well as how to deal with conditions of infrastructural gaps and institutional needs that are required to optimise the integration of AI in the military.

Programme