Winning by the Rules: Optimizing Weapons Reviews in the Age of Technological Innovation– warontherocks.com

We spare the reader another detailed story from Ukraine to establish the now-familiar point that battlefield technology changes faster than militaries can acquire, review, and field it. The villain in this story is easy to identify: bureaucracy. The fashionable remedies are equally familiar — cut the red tape slowing procurement, or revise the policy review requirements for autonomous weapon systems. But bureaucratic reform, however necessary, cannot eliminate the fundamental challenges machine-learning-based systems pose for rapid testing, evaluation, validation, and verification. Moreover, legal and operational reasons make it unwise to cut corners on compliance with domestic and international law.

Rather than relying on red-tape cuts or curtailed review to speed things up, we argue the United States and other NATO militaries can streamline weapons review and improve design programs by embedding legal and operational advisers within defense firms who can, at a company’s discretion, give input and advice. Such advisers would support companies and speed reviews, without adding oversight or overhead. The core idea is to change the review architecture: Rather than becoming a discrete hurdle at the end of development, review becomes a continuous process running alongside development. This is no silver bullet, but a concrete step militaries and industry may take together to meet today’s challenges.

A clarification first, since “review” covers several distinct processes. In the United States, a law of war weapons review, conducted as a matter of policy since 1974 and required today by U.S. Department of Defense Directive 5000.01, asks whether a weapon could be lawfully used. A separate senior-level review under Directive 3000.09 asks both before development and fielding whether (semi-)autonomous weapon systems satisfy policy requirements. Test and evaluation establishes actual capabilities and limits. Our proposal serves all three, which draw on the same underlying evidence, though time pressure is sharpest on the Directive 3000.09 review, our running example here.