During the last armed clash with Palestine in the territory Gaza Strip last month, Israeli commanders deployed for the first time an AI bot called “Knowledge Well” that promptly provided detailed information about Palestinian rocket launches: where they took place, how fast and how far they were fired, and so on.

For the next clash, Colonel Eli Birenbaum, head of operations for data and applications in the Israeli army, plans even more actively use the capabilities of artificial intelligence to predict enemy salvos.

“This is an interesting step forward that we have to take. I want to be where I can best use the information to ensure the advantage of our forces on the battlefield,” Birenbaum said.

According to the colonel, by 2028, almost every second military technologist in Israel will be involved in working with artificial intelligence. This will mark a new milestone for automatic defense systems that began in 2016, when Birenbaum led the development of a machine learning platform for advanced detection of hacking attacks on critical systems.

Currently, according to the colonel, there are hundreds of employees in the Israeli armed forces who are engaged in a wide range of projects related to artificial intelligence. Such employees make up about 20% of all military technologists. And within five years it is planned that their number will reach several thousand.

However, training such specialists from scratch means that you need to conditionally take an 18-year-old high school graduate and somehow motivate him to study for six years at the university, then six years in the army, in order to then offer the newly minted specialist a much less competitive salary than he could receive with the same set of knowledge in any even slightly large IT company.

“It’s no secret that I can’t compete with the salaries of Google or Facebook*. What can I offer you, you ask? Meaningfulness!” Birenbaum explained.

“We are not repairing any button in the program. We solve problems at the national level. It’s not looking for one needle in one haystack. This is a search in eight, eighty, eight thousand haystacks piled on top of each other,” the colonel added.

“Militaries from different countries are increasingly thinking about the moral consequences of the arms race against the backdrop of the development of artificial intelligence. For Israel, the ability to find and mark potential targets using artificial intelligence will not mean the automatic destruction of these targets,” Birenbaum emphasized, hinting at the peaceful use of such technology.