"30 Seconds to Decide": How AI Will Compromise Military Command, According to Eric Schmidt
"There is a Hypersonic missile coming at your boat. You're the captain, and your iPad shows up with a clock saying you have 30 seconds to press this button or you're dead. How many captains are going to exercise independent judgment and not press that button? Zero," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a packed audience at a recent technology forum.
End of Miles reports that Schmidt's sobering scenario illustrates the fundamental challenge confronting military decision-making in an era where artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons compress reaction times beyond human capabilities.
The Illusion of Human Control
Speaking at the PARC Forum in March, Schmidt directly challenged the notion that existing laws requiring human control of military systems will remain meaningful in practice. The tech executive pointed to US law 3.09, which mandates human decision authority in military operations.
"There is a law in the US called 3.09 and it says that a human must be in control of what's going on. So everyone says 'no problem,'" Schmidt explained, before describing how time compression effectively eliminates meaningful human judgment. Eric Schmidt, PARC Forum
The Stanford-educated technologist emphasized that current defense policies haven't adequately addressed the reality of decision-making under extreme time pressure, creating a dangerous gap between legal frameworks and battlefield realities.
Microsecond Wars on the Horizon
Schmidt's concerns extend beyond individual tactical decisions to entire conflicts conducted at machine speed. He described future scenarios where combat operations might unfold and conclude before humans could meaningfully intervene.
"In the future there will be a war between North Korea and the US. North Korea attacks, the US counterattacks, and China shuts the war down. The entire war occurred in one microsecond: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Supervisory system shut it down. Humans can't react that quickly." Eric Schmidt
The former tech executive's warning comes amid accelerating development of autonomous weapon systems and hypersonic missiles capable of traveling at more than five times the speed of sound, drastically reducing decision windows for defensive responses.
Beyond Military Implications
Schmidt connected these military scenarios to broader concerns about human agency in AI-dominated systems, suggesting that similar dynamics will appear across society.
"Whether we like it or not, the efficiencising, the creation of efficiency systems within the network of computing, will ultimately affect human freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of thought," Schmidt cautioned.
The AI investor argued that these challenges reflect a fundamental tension between the legal fiction of human control and the practical reality of machine-speed operations. As systems grow faster and more complex, Schmidt believes maintaining meaningful human decision authority will become increasingly difficult without new approaches to governance and design.
Rethinking Human-Machine Decision Systems
For Schmidt, the solution isn't simple. He acknowledged the complex tradeoffs involved when human decision cycles are fundamentally incompatible with the speed of modern warfare.
"When you're in a situation where the time cycle for the decision is faster than the human can think, then you have to rely on something that you may not wish to give the right to make that decision," Schmidt noted, highlighting what he sees as an unavoidable paradox in modern military operations.
The remarks reflect Schmidt's longstanding concerns about AI governance and control, which he has previously addressed in books co-authored with Henry Kissinger, including "The Age of AI" and "Genesis," the latter completed shortly before Kissinger's death.
