Washington is increasingly concerned about Pyongyang’s development of mobile missiles that can be hidden in tunnels, forests and caves.
According to Reuters: "''What AI and machine learning allows you to do is find the needle in the haystack,'' said Bob Work, a champion of AI technology who was deputy defense secretary until July 2017, without referring to any individual projects. One person familiar with the programs said it includes a pilot project focused on North Korea. While that project has been kept secret, the military has been clear about its interest in AI. This project involves military and private researchers in the Washington D.C. area. It is pivoting off technological advances developed by commercial firms financed by In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s venture capital fund, officials said. In order to carry out the research, the project is tapping into the intelligence community’s commercial cloud service, searching for patterns and anomalies in data, including from sophisticated radar that can see through storms and penetrate foliage. Experts at the Rand Corporation, a public policy research body, and elsewhere say there is a high probability that countries like China and Russia could try to trick an AI missile-hunting system, learning to hide their missiles from identification. Last year, NGA said it used AI to scan and analyze 12 million images."
Although some officials believe elements of the AI missile program could become viable in the early 2020s, others in the U.S. government and the U.S. Congress fear research efforts are too limited. ''The Russians and the Chinese are definitely pursuing these sorts of things,'' Representative Mac Thornberry, the House Armed Services Committee’s chairman, told Reuters. ''Probably with greater effort in some ways than we have.''