Integrators at War: Mediating in AI-assisted Resort-to-Force Decisions
This addresses the problem of effective AI integration in high-stakes military decisions for policymakers and military organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sociotechnical frameworks without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating AI systems into military resort-to-force decisions by focusing on the neglected role of integrators, identifying challenges from technology, their mediating role, and human-machine interaction, and providing policy recommendations to address these issues.
The integration of AI systems into the military domain is changing the way war-related decisions are made. It binds together three disparate groups of actors - developers, integrators, users - and creates a relationship between these groups and the machine, embedded in the (pre-)existing organisational and system structures. In this article, we focus on the important, but often neglected, group of integrators within such a sociotechnical system. In complex human-machine configurations, integrators carry responsibility for linking the disparate groups of developers and users in the political and military system. To act as the mediating group requires a deep understanding of the other groups' activities, perspectives and norms. We thus ask which challenges and shortcomings emerge from integrating AI systems into resort-to-force (RTF) decision-making processes, and how to address them. To answer this, we proceed in three steps. First, we conceptualise the relationship between different groups of actors and AI systems as a sociotechnical system. Second, we identify challenges within such systems for human-machine teaming in RTF decisions. We focus on challenges that arise a) from the technology itself, b) from the integrators' role in the sociotechnical system, c) from the human-machine interaction. Third, we provide policy recommendations to address these shortcomings when integrating AI systems into RTF decision-making structures.