Could AI war games predict the next Pearl Harbor? 

Once again the international community has been stunned and surprised by the events in Syria that deposed and sent former President Bashar Assad and his family fleeing to Moscow. But what is new? 

Consider how frequently geopolitics have surprised us — most notably the extraordinary dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Six months before Japan’s destruction of American battleships at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had roared into the Soviet Union. Stalin was reportedly so surprised that he was catatonic for days.

Years later, in 1979, former CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner asked how could anyone have predicted that an aged, exiled mullah living in Paris could return to Iran. Who predicted that after the U.S. and coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 — an invasion itself provoked by the September 11th surprise attacks on the U.S. — the Afghan government would instantly collapse?  

The unintended consequences of the Abraham Accords of rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia provoked Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 surprise attack catching the vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus completely unaware, not unlike in the 1973 October War. 

The latest surprise is the Syrian opposition’s offensive that overwhelmed Assad’s government almost as quickly as the Desert Storm coalition drove the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in 100 hours in 1991.

These examples of surprise raise the fundamental question of whether future geopolitical surprises can be anticipated or predicted. The obvious answer is no. 

So what can be done to minimize the uncertainties of surprise?  A second equally profound question is if the longer-term consequences of surprise can also be anticipated.

Despite initial success, the Nazi, Japanese and Arab surprise attacks all failed catastrophically.  

Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally. Egypt, Jordan and Syria suffered huge losses, including territory, although the Sinai would eventually revert back to Egypt.  

For the Syrian opposition, the fundamental question is whether governing will follow the disaster in Iraq after the 2003 invasion and the imposition of a highly repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan to become the first Arab “democracy”  or something in between.

Can the prediction of future surprise attacks and their consequences be improved? Or is the iron grasp of history and the reality that while surprise attacks such as these succeed at first — and at first is critical — fail except for the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War?  

Artificial Intelligence may have an answer.

War games have expanded far beyond traditional armed conflict in examining future scenarios and alternatives. The value of these games is not predicting the future. Instead, it is intellectual to consider many different outcomes without necessarily deciding the most likely and comparing the effects of different assumptions and variables. Despite the explosive growth of computing power, AI could bring even greater orders of magnitude capability.

Even with AI, war games are imperfect. In some cases, the outcomes are rejected for a number of reasons. The first is the absence of sufficient knowledge and understanding that explain American disasters in Vietnam and elsewhere.  The second is groupthink often infected by the third reason: arrogance and hubris.

China is a good example of this potential weakness. China is almost universally regarded by Democrats and Republicans in Congress as the “pacing” or major threat. 

Suppose a war game concluded that internal Chinese weaknesses due to economics, demographics, real estate bubbles, an Army that has not fought a major war since Korea in 1950, and the inability of the Communist Party to meet the Chinese public’s expectations makes military adventurism very unlikely, particularly against Taiwan.  Without a doubt, that war game would be rejected even if groupthink considers it a concern valid.  

AI has two major and even transformational virtues. First, it will be able to “war game” simultaneously in far more scenarios, probably by several orders of magnitude. Second, AI provides non-human-derived answers, that is thinking differently from man. 

So far, the ways AI functions have not been fully understood in creating a new universe of possible solutions. Not without downsides, the risks should be mitigated by keeping a human as the final decision maker.

Can AI defeat the flaws of decision-making? If AI had been used in the 2003 Iraq War, suppose it predicted a disaster once the Iraqi Army was disbanded? Would that have made a difference to groupthink? No!

AI provides a game-changing potential that must be pursued, in this case, regarding surprise. Whether it will work with surprise is one of AI’s greatest challenges.

Harlan Ullman Ph.D. is United Press International’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist, a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council, chairman of two private companies and principal author of the military doctrine of shock and awe. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book “The Great Paradox:  Strategic Thinking in an Unstrategic World.”