Posted: December 14, 2015 12:48 PM
Work: Bold Steps Needed for U.S. Military to Keep Technological Advantage
By OTTO KREISHER, Special Correspondent
WASHINGTON — The United States is facing the return of “great power competition” with a resurgent Russia and a rising China, and the military must take bold steps to retain its technological advantage, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said Dec. 14.
The global proliferation of technology that has accompanied this end to U.S. global dominance is reflected in the growing anti-access, area-denial (A2AD) capabilities of potential adversaries that threaten America’s ability to project military power into a crucial theater, Work told the Center for a New American Security forum.
Overcoming the A2AD threat is one of the key objectives of the Third Offset Strategy that Work is leading in the Pentagon. The offset strategy also seeks to build the nation’s ability to prevent a great power conflict through “deterrence by denial,” Work said.
The offset strategy has five building blocks, Work said, which seek to use technological advances to “make the human more effective in combat.”
The first block, is what Work called “autonomous deep learning systems,” which mainly applies to communications and warning. The need is to analyze and use the huge amounts of data that can be available “faster than humans can react.”
“We firmly believe that humans should be in at the center of” crucial decisions, but with events happening at the speed of light, they need machine to help make decisions, he said.
The second step is human-machine collaboration in decision-making, Work said. He cited the high-tech helmet for F-35 pilots as “very much a human/machine-collaboration system” by giving the pilot 360-degree situational awareness of essential information.
The third block is machine-assisted human operations, Work said, noting the computer and optics systems in automobiles that can help avoid accidents, and the prototype exo-skeleton devices that would give an infantryman greater strength and endurance.
The fourth step is “advanced human-machine teaming,” Work said, which includes humans working with unmanned systems. He cited the plan to have the Navy’s P-8 maritime patrol aircraft and RQ-4 Trident long-endurance unmanned aircraft work together to monitor vast ocean areas.
Work also predicted large unmanned aerial vehicles that can deploy many smaller unmanned systems and surface vessels controlling swarms of small unmanned craft.
The fifth block is truly autonomous systems “riding on the back of a learning network,” he said.
Work cautioned not to expect the 2017 defense budget to have a huge multi-billion-dollar program to implement the offset strategy, but will start an incremental effort to develop and field those technologies and the concepts and operational doctrines to use them.
“We have to focus on agility and cost,” he said, which was “why we have to focus on acquisition reform,” he said.
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20151214-work-cnas.html
