AI Strategic Frontline! A Demanding Roadmap for the Indian Navy!

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) applications is the Indian Navy's new strategic frontline.

The rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have such widespread implications that it is time to consider AI development, funding, and implementation as a national imperative. Indian Navy is focused on the incorporation of AI and Machine Learning (ML) in some specific critical mission areas.

Artificial Intelligence is assured to swap the complete dynamics of the world as well as military technology and it is revising the art of war with intelligent and self-controlled weapons. AI technology is expected to drive positive modifications across the economy as well as national security. The Indian Navy is serious about AI and modern artificial intelligence technologies and plans to execute with "Capability-Enhancement-Objective (C-E-O)" to increase the situational understanding and situational reactions of sea operations. In that background, AI is converting itself into a major driver for future battles and could change the internal dynamics of the war with the broader concept.

In modern geopolitics, the duty of the Indian Navy is going to showcase more challenges and its energetic participation could decide the place of India in the global power play. The seminar "Swavlamban" chaired by PM Modi on SPRINT Challenges on July 18th, 2022, is showing the seriousness of New Delhi towards reinforcing the Indian Navy through modern indigenous AI technologies. The existence of Chinses third-generation research and survey ship "Yuan Wang 5" in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, is more than enough to explain that the Indo-Pacific is going to be the future coliseum of geopolitics. And the Indian Ocean may witness more international advanced warships and stealth submarines from global powers. It is evoking India to embrace modern cutting-edge naval technologies to protect the country's interest and control the foreign powers. Technology is always a primary agent to decide or redefine the war parameters with some distinctive outputs. In modern warfare, the Naval forces are coming across hybrid warfare, and simultaneously it is converting the war from human-centric to technology-centric. To improve the war capabilities of the Indian Navy with the resilient indigenous technological ecosystem, the INIP (Indian Naval Indigenisation Plan) 2015-2030 is formulated to improve the state-of-art with high-end technologies. Intelligent warfare is demanding a revolution in military technologies and calling for artificial Intelligence enhancement.

AI the Driving force: the demanding roadmap for the Indian Navy

January 2022, a workshop had been organized by the INS Valsura on 'Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (Al) for Indian Navy' to recognize the opportunities of advanced AI technologies for the Indian Navy. AI technologies are redefining the navel's warfare and allowing global powers to revitalize and refresh their strategic trends. That continues technological changes could be implemented within the existing system or in new systems. The incremental changes in naval-war technologies do not transform into segregation. War Machines or War-Technologies are always erect through ongoing operations and continuous innovation. The people-centric smart naval-war machines are gradually built on intelligent technologies, searching AI for future battlegrounds.

The application of AI technologies in war is extensive and it addresses the battel field struggle with enhanced accuracy, flexibility, and insightful approach. Fabricating the AI mesh for naval combat is the constant theme for the global naval powers and India is also creating the journey map towards this path. The plug-in of AI technologies with strategic technologies could develop a good amount of potential to respond to the unpredictable environment. AI, deep learning, machine learning (ML), and reinforcement learning is going to be the primary catalyst for next-generation warfare. The involvement of Machine Learning (ML) is imposing the systems to perform better than humans.

Presently AI is encapsulated for the number of naval applications or technologies by most global powers and their competitors. The application of AI is not limited to deep intelligence, active surveillance, and reconnaissance, supportive logistics, cyber security, effective command and control, and autonomous naval systems. Modern military powers are concentrating on the deployment of AI technologies to reinstate human intelligence and trying to prepare the naval machines for a more complex and cognitively difficult locus with admirable self-learning situational awareness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a field of deep interest and huge expectations within the defense technology community. AI technologies contain great promise for facilitating military decisions, reducing human causalities and enhancing the combat potential of forces, and in the process dramatically changing, if not revolutionizing, the design of military systems. This is especially true in a wartime environment when data availability is at the pick, decision periods are short, and decision effectiveness is an absolute necessity.