What, Why and When? A Review of the Key Issues in the Development and Deployment of Military Human‑Machine Teams

What, Why and When? A Review of the Key Issues in the Development and Deployment of Military Human‑Machine Teams

What, Why and When? A Review of the Key Issues in the Development and Deployment of Military Human‑Machine Teams

By Jean-Marc Rickli, Federico Mantellassi, Quentin Ladetto

This paper will serve as a springboard for understanding to what extent HMT is a realistic, useful and operationalisable framework to conceptualise future human-machine interactions in the military domain. It is structured in three parts. Part 1 will provide an overview of the literature and discussions surrounding the issue, both in academic and defence settings. Part 2 will analyse how the specificities of the military domain complicate, alter and possibly aggravate many of the already existing unresolved issues surrounding the desire to team humans with machines. Lastly, Part 3 will delve into some recommendations.

Dr Jean-Marc Rickli is the Head of Global and Emerging Risks and the Founder and Director of the Polymath Initiative at the GCSP. He is also the co-chair of the Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC) Emerging Security Challenges Working Group and a senior advisor for the Artificial Intelligence Initiative at the Future Society. He is the co-curator of the International Security Map of the Strategic Intelligence Platform of the World Economic Forum. He is also a member of the Geneva University Committee for Ethical Research and of the advisory board of Tech4Trust, the first Swiss startup acceleration program in the field of digital trust and cybersecurity. Prior to these appointments, Dr Rickli was an assistant professor at the Department of Defence Studies of King’s College London and at the Institute for International and Civil Security at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. In 2020, he was nominated as one of the 100 most influential Frenchspeaking Swiss by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Dr Rickli received his PhD in International Relations from Oxford University. His latest book published by Georgetown University is entitled Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-first Century.

Mr Federico Mantellassi is a Research and Project Officer at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy where he has worked since 2018. Federico’s research and writing focuses on how emerging technologies impact international security and warfare, as well as on the societal implications of their development and use. Federico is also the project coordinator of the GCSP’s Polymath Initiative; an effort to create a community of scientists able bridge the gap between the scientific and technological community and the world of policy making. Previously, he assisted in the organisation of executive education activities at the GCSP and was the project coordinator of the annual Geneva Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge. He holds a Master’s Degree in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, and a Bachelor’s Degree in International Studies from the University of Leiden. Federico speaks English, French and Italian.

Dr Quentin Ladetto is the creator and director of the armasuisse Science and Technology foresight program - https://deftech.ch. Its aim is to identify disruptive technology use cases and trends and assess their implications in a defence context. He holds a PhD in geomatics from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), an Executive MBA in Finance from HEC Lausanne and a degree in Technology Management from the IMD. Quentin is the co-founder of atelierdesfuturs.org and a founding member of the association Futurs.

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