Officials tout AI-powered sub-hunting as AUKUS defense chiefs converge

LONDON—A collaborative, AI-powered effort to hunt enemy submarines shows that AUKUS is working, U.S. defense officials said ahead of a meeting of the U.S., UK, and Australian defense chiefs here.

“It's a change in how we do things and how we're doing it with allies and partners,” a defense official said Tuesday at the Pentagon.

Just days after the three-year anniversary of the trilateral defense-cooperation pact, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in London for a Thursday meeting with his counterparts to review progress and planning for various tech-development projects.

The defense official touted the three militaries’ efforts to enable their various sub-hunting aircraft to ingest data from each others’ sonobuoys, then to process it with cooperatively developed, AI-powered algorithms.

“We have results in hand, there's shared algorithms, there's hardware deployed, but this type of work is continuously improving. So it's not—it wasn't one and done. It was…get some common gear in place, move the algorithm, be able to share algorithms and move the data. And now you're in continuous-improvement mode,” the defense official said. 

Officials touted the sub-hunting experiments as a banner display of how AUKUS has produced technological advancement through collaboration—instead of the U.S., typically companies, developing solutions and then selling them to other nations. 

“It is one of the ways that we're increasing our own ability to leverage each other's assets to rapidly process information, to have increased maritime domain awareness, to provide advantage to our warfighters by gaining that insight through collaboration and leveraging the most advanced technologies as in the algorithms that we've trained that allow us to do that processing,” a defense official said. “That's, to me, what's different here: even if you're not seeing some big project that everybody can point to. It's a change in how we do things and how we're doing it with allies and partners.”

The White House recently announced that Japan would join work on maritime autonomy under AUKUS Pillar 2, and that Canada, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand might as well.  

Officials also hailed proposed reforms to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations that could ease cooperation.

“The Australians and UK are two of our closest partners and so there are challenges, but we're working through those at pace and with a degree of commitment to break down those stovepipes and those barriers that might exist such as IT barriers to make sure that we can do what we need to do,” a defense official said.   

This is particularly important when it comes to Pillar 2 developments in cyber and electronic warfare. 

“We have many platforms in common when it comes to [electronic warfare], which helps. And we also have agreements in place to share information at the appropriate levels as well, which helps,” another official said. 

And when it comes to cyber, “information sharing is a standard thing and you see it here too just inside the US system. There are certain tools you need to have in place for convenience of use, trading against surety of protecting that information,” the official said.