NZ joins US military exercises deploying AI for 'kill chains'

The Defence Force has been helping the US military with artificial intelligence-powered weapons to speed up what they call "kill chains".

US reports show the NZDF is one of a half dozen militaries involved in regular exercises to link American and allied war-fighting technology more closely.

The Pentagon has been putting a lot more stress on getting allies on board to counter China.

In an exercise in California with six nations in March, a F35 jetfighter with AI-driven sensors instantly passed targeting data along the "kill chain" to an unmanned kamikaze drone.

In another exercise - also attended by New Zealand - the controversial surveillance firm Palantir supplied a so-called "metaconstellation" of submarine-hunting satellites.

US military chiefs said they were getting to the point where the combined forces can join up their technology in a "kill web".

"We've always aspired to get this 'kill web'-type of capability as a joint and combined force, and we're starting to get to that point," said the US commander of the "global information domination" exercises (GIDE) New Zealand has been part of.

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The New Zealand government recently shut down an expert advisory group on killer robots.

The NZDF and the goverment have prioritised "interoperability" with our allies' systems and technology, documents show.

The big Pentagon push on this, alongside sweeping changes under a banner of "reoptimisation for Great Power Competition", contrasts with the NZDF's own tech struggles.

Its $180m tech project to network the New Zealand armed forces has been beset by delays and recruitment and retention, funding, and technical implementation problems, its reports show.

AI is supercharging not just the race to develop non-lethal autonomous systems, such as in targeting, but potentially lethal ones, too, at a time when the UN is struggling to find consensus around international limits on killer robots.

The next meeting of global experts on this is later this month.

But the New Zealand government has just shut down its own external expert group on lethal autonomous weapons.

The NZDF has publicised its involvement in Project Convergence; less so its more regular participation in the exercises that take place every three months.

The official PR for some of the war games emphasises how they aim to "promote cooperation and safe, secure" operations.

By contrast, the British army released a YouTube video featuring the AI it deployed for Project Convergence in the Mojave Desert.

It shows drones "trying to find targets far out of view", with a "pretty much instant, almost autonomous" link back to targeters.

The British said the "major war-fighting experiment" with six partner nations, including New Zealand, was with "cutting-edge systems and technologies, designed to help make the British Army more lethal on the battlefield".

"Joint kill chains were reduced from minutes to seconds," reported enthusiasts.

Longstanding war games have attracted more attention, such as the month-long mammoth naval exercise RIMPAC, which ended on Friday in Hawaii, having antagonised Beijing.

However, much of the analysis within the US defence media suggests it is the smaller GIDE-type exercises that may count for more, by inventing new ways of forming hybrid armies and weapons.

Palantir's involvement shows how their reach extends into space - its "capabilities were tested" during GIDE, "providing data sharing and real-time situational awareness", its website said.

Under a half-billion-dollar-plus contract with the Pentagon, Palantir has built what it calls a MetaConstellation, which uses commercial data, including satellite imagery, "to give a near real-time picture of a given battle space". It can also track bushfires or floods.

Palantir's video promoting MetaConstellation simulates satellites passing data from one to another while hunting subs in the highly-fraught South China Sea.

US Congress documents show how crucial space is to the "kill chain".

The missile defence command told Congress that in the face of growing threats, it was "making every effort to help streamline and accelerate ... integrated kill chain capabilities" by shifting sensors, battle management and communications increasingly to space-based platforms; a leading one is called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

One problem for New Zealand is what taking part in this will cost.

For its beleaguered networking Digital Information Programme, it hired about 100 consultants in 2022-23; and for the whole project since 2016, the names of the consultants run to 42 pages long.