Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Cyber Defence

3Artificial Intelligence and Defense Issues

From the introduction of this book, we wanted to recall how AI came to be considered as a “cyber” technology, with AI a building block contributing to the expansion of the latter. AI is therefore an object that has found its proper place in the processes of appropriation of NICTs in the military field for several decades now.

3.1. Military policies and doctrines for AI: the American approach

3.1.1. American defense AI policy

3.1.1.1. AI in speeches by the Secretary of the Department of Defense

The online archive published on the United States Department of Defense website provides 1,310 transcribed speeches covering the period 1995–2019. However, not all the speeches delivered during this period are available. We therefore have only a subset, but the corpus is sufficiently complete to offer a vision of the evolution of the way in which problems, priorities and concepts are taken into account in the thinking of American defense officials.

Simply counting the terms used throughout the corpus, we have observed the position these concepts have been given (the figures provided here represent the number of times the term or expression occurs within the whole corpus).

The first observation is that so much attention is still paid to AI that all the speeches dealing with “cyber” issues are centered on the terms derived from it, and on highly generic terms (cyberspace, Internet, computer). The term “smart” also prevails over the term “intelligent” ...