title: Understanding the strategic implications of the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence

authors: Burton, Joe

abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to have a revolutionary impact across societies and to create economic displacement and disruption in security and defense. Yet the impact of AI on national security and military affairs has received relatively scant attention. The existing policy-focused literature has concentrated mainly on the technological, ethical or legal limitations of deploying AI and on the risks associated with it. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate by outlining the strategic implications of the weaponization of AI for international security. It explores how and in what ways AI is currently being utilized in the defense sector to enhance offensive and defensive military technologies and operations and assesses the ways in which the incorporation of AI into military platforms will affect war fighting and strategic decision-making. The paper is in four sections. Section one develops a typology of military AI that forms a foundation for the rest of the paper. The second section examines the uses of AI in cyberspace and the relationships between ‘cyber weapons’ and AI capabilities. The third section examines how the embeddedness of AI-based capabilities across the land, air, naval and space domains may affect combined arms operations. The final section distills the main strategic implications of weaponized AI, which include the speed of decision-making and action as well as enhanced domain situational awareness.

text: Understanding the strategic implications of the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to have a revolutionary impact across societies and to create economic displacement and disruption in security and defense. Yet the impact of AI on national security and military affairs has received relatively scant attention. The existing policy-focused literature has concentrated mainly on the technological, ethical or legal limitations of deploying AI and on the risks associated with it. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate by outlining the strategic implications of the weaponization of AI for international security. It explores how and in what ways AI is currently being utilized in the defense sector to enhance offensive and defensive military technologies and operations and assesses the ways in which the incorporation of AI into military platforms will affect war fighting and strategic decision-making. The paper is in four sections. Section one develops a typology of military AI that forms a foundation for the rest of the paper. The second section examines the uses of AI in cyberspace and the relationships between ‘cyber weapons’ and AI capabilities. The third section examines how the embeddedness of AI-based capabilities across the land, air, naval and space domains may affect combined arms operations. The final section distills the main strategic implications of weaponized AI, which include the speed of decision-making and action as well as enhanced domain situational awareness.

year: 2019

title: Left restriction monoids from left E-completions

authors: Stokes, Tim E.

abstract: Given a monoid S with E any non-empty subset of its idempotents, we present a novel one-sided version of idempotent completion we call left E-completion. In general, the construction yields a one-sided variant of a small category called a constellation by Gould and Hollings. Under certain conditions, this constellation is inductive, meaning that its partial multiplication may be extended to give a left restriction semigroup, a type of unary semigroup whose unary operation models domain. We study the properties of those pairs  for which this happens, and characterise those left restriction semigroups that arise as such left E-completions of their submonoid of elements having domain 1. As first applications, we decompose the left restriction semigroup of partial functions on the set X and the right restriction semigroup of left total partitions on X as left and right E-completions respectively of the transformation semigroup  on X, and decompose the left restriction semigroup of binary relations on X under demonic composition as a left E-completion of the left-total binary relations. In many cases, including these three examples, the construction embeds in a semigroup Zappa-Szép product.

text: Left restriction monoids from left E-completions Given a monoid S with E any non-empty subset of its idempotents, we present a novel one-sided version of idempotent completion we call left E-completion. In general, the construction yields a one-sided variant of a small category called a constellation by Gould and Hollings. Under certain conditions, this constellation is inductive, meaning that its partial multiplication may be extended to give a left restriction semigroup, a type of unary semigroup whose unary operation models domain. We study the properties of those pairs  for which this happens, and characterise those left restriction semigroups that arise as such left E-completions of their submonoid of elements having domain 1. As first applications, we decompose the left restriction semigroup of partial functions on the set X and the right restriction semigroup of left total partitions on X as left and right E-completions respectively of the transformation semigroup  on X, and decompose the left restriction semigroup of binary relations on X under demonic composition as a left E-completion of the left-total binary relations. In many cases, including these three examples, the construction embeds in a semigroup Zappa-Szép product.

year: 2022-05

title: Tribal guns, tribal gunners : A study of acculturation by Maori of European military technology during the New Zealand inter-tribal musket wars

authors: Bentley, Trevor William

abstract: The Musket Wars were New Zealand’s longest and most costly war. Some 20,000 Maori perished in the raids, battles and sieges that convulsed the tribal societies during the 1820’s and 1830’s. The rise of powerful musket armies set in train forty major hekes or tribal migrations that emptied vast reaches of country by 1840, paving the way for European settlement that proceeded largely unopposed until the 1860’s.

There is little known about the nature of Maori warfare in this period for the Musket Wars have yet to receive the same kind of intense study currently being given by New Zealand historians to the Northern and New Zealand Wars. While other nations have conducted exhaustive research into the military history of their indigenous people, the Musket Wars remain New Zealand’s least known war.

The paucity of information on inter-tribal; warfare in this period is sourced in the fact that native warfare was actively discouraged by the missionaries, judged barbaric by most early visitors and regarded as an inferior form of warfare by settlers and English military men. Later nineteenth century writers perpetuated a distorted view of the Musket Wars as chaotic inter-tribal conflicts in which Maori fought and destroyed Maori. This distorted view has its origins in the two widely divergent systems of values that operated in nineteenth century New Zealand and in the dominance of Victorian ideas about race and colonialism.

This thesis is revisionist only in its attempt to demolish the entrenched colonial view of Maori musket warfare as disordered and exclusively Maori. It endeavours to fill specific gaps that exist in the research on this period by examining the role and purpose of the European gun trading enterprise in New Zealand and the extent of European involvement in Maori warfare. The thesis explores the deployment and effectiveness of European guns during the three phases of Maori warfare that characterise the period; predatory raiding, the great rakau-musket battles and the musket to musket conflicts of the 1830’s. The thesis also develops the theme that while the Musket Wars were shaped by non-Maori influences they were distinctly Maori in style.
While the bulk of evidence is provided by contemporary European observers and nineteenth century historians, every attempt has been made to provide a more balanced picture of Maori warfare by reporting Maori experiences wherever possible. The thesis consequently draws on current Maori oral testimony, the evidence of contemporary Maori eyewitness and the substantial and well developed body of written tribal history currently available.

The Musket Wars represent a fascinating but largely forgotten military age in New Zealand where Maori armies of unprecedented size employed powerful armaments of flintlock guns and ships cannon on long distance campaigns against remote enemies. This period has provided a unique opportunity to research the ways an indigenous warrior society acculturated European firearms technology in established tribal rituals and in warfare, independent of European military influences and in a purely Maori context. Most importantly the Musket Wars have provided the opportunity to examine Maori tactical developments through the critical stage between classical Maori warfare and the clashes with British and Colonial forces during the Northern war of 1845 and New Zealand wars of the 1860’s.

text: Tribal guns, tribal gunners : A study of acculturation by Maori of European military technology during the New Zealand inter-tribal musket wars The Musket Wars were New Zealand’s longest and most costly war. Some 20,000 Maori perished in the raids, battles and sieges that convulsed the tribal societies during the 1820’s and 1830’s. The rise of powerful musket armies set in train forty major hekes or tribal migrations that emptied vast reaches of country by 1840, paving the way for European settlement that proceeded largely unopposed until the 1860’s.

There is little known about the nature of Maori warfare in this period for the Musket Wars have yet to receive the same kind of intense study currently being given by New Zealand historians to the Northern and New Zealand Wars. While other nations have conducted exhaustive research into the military history of their indigenous people, the Musket Wars remain New Zealand’s least known war.

The paucity of information on inter-tribal; warfare in this period is sourced in the fact that native warfare was actively discouraged by the missionaries, judged barbaric by most early visitors and regarded as an inferior form of warfare by settlers and English military men. Later nineteenth century writers perpetuated a distorted view of the Musket Wars as chaotic inter-tribal conflicts in which Maori fought and destroyed Maori. This distorted view has its origins in the two widely divergent systems of values that operated in nineteenth century New Zealand and in the dominance of Victorian ideas about race and colonialism.

This thesis is revisionist only in its attempt to demolish the entrenched colonial view of Maori musket warfare as disordered and exclusively Maori. It endeavours to fill specific gaps that exist in the research on this period by examining the role and purpose of the European gun trading enterprise in New Zealand and the extent of European involvement in Maori warfare. The thesis explores the deployment and effectiveness of European guns during the three phases of Maori warfare that characterise the period; predatory raiding, the great rakau-musket battles and the musket to musket conflicts of the 1830’s. The thesis also develops the theme that while the Musket Wars were shaped by non-Maori influences they were distinctly Maori in style.
While the bulk of evidence is provided by contemporary European observers and nineteenth century historians, every attempt has been made to provide a more balanced picture of Maori warfare by reporting Maori experiences wherever possible. The thesis consequently draws on current Maori oral testimony, the evidence of contemporary Maori eyewitness and the substantial and well developed body of written tribal history currently available.

The Musket Wars represent a fascinating but largely forgotten military age in New Zealand where Maori armies of unprecedented size employed powerful armaments of flintlock guns and ships cannon on long distance campaigns against remote enemies. This period has provided a unique opportunity to research the ways an indigenous warrior society acculturated European firearms technology in established tribal rituals and in warfare, independent of European military influences and in a purely Maori context. Most importantly the Musket Wars have provided the opportunity to examine Maori tactical developments through the critical stage between classical Maori warfare and the clashes with British and Colonial forces during the Northern war of 1845 and New Zealand wars of the 1860’s.

year: 1997