The AI military complex: Which are the main companies in it?

For centuries, fighting wars meant deploying hardware such as tanks, aircraft, artillery and weapons, built by a handful of prime contractors under long-term government programmes.It also meant putting boots on the ground.That paradigm is not disappearing, but software is becoming increasingly central to it. And now, more soldiers are fighting wars through a screen.The military AI industry now encompasses everything from cloud computing to autonomous drones and decision-making software. This shift traces back to the US drone programme of the 2000s and 2010s, which turned remote, screen-based killing into a feature of how wars would be fought.Billions of dollars are flowing into a handful of companies now leading the AI transformation of militaries, as the old military-industrial complex reshapes itself into a military-tech one.As part of a series on AI and warfare, Al Jazeera looks at who some of these companies are.Who are these companies?On July 10, the UK Ministry of Defence signed a 2bn pounds ($2.7bn), 15-year contract with Omnia Training, a consortium led by Raytheon UK, to train 60,000 soldiers a year on using AI to make a “combat-ready” British military.Days earlier, NATO a...