Pentagon Wants to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China

[AMDR]

Pentagon Wants to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China
Pentagon Wants to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China - Defense One

More than a year in the works, Pentagon leaders are betting an ambitious effort to pair soldiers with machines to give the American military an edge on the battlefield of the future.

SIMI VALLEY, CALIF. – Pentagon leaders believe pairing soldiers with machines in combat will give American troops an edge on the battlefield of the future.

The ambitious effort is the centerpiece of what the Pentagon is calling the “third offset,” a strategy that seeks to deter countries like Russia and China from waging war against the U.S.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who is leading the offset project for the Pentagon, touted what he called “human-machine collaboration and combat teaming” at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, a gathering of American national security leaders.

“The way we will go after human-machine collaboration is allowing the machine to help humans make better decisions, faster,” Work said.

The Pentagon’s “offset strategy” makes investments in new technology that defense leaders say will “offset,” or neutralize, the technological advancements of other foes or nations.

“This third offset … is really focused on the advanced capabilities that Russia and China can bring to bear,” Work said. “The whole purpose is to convince them never to try to cross swords with us conventionally.”

At the center of the effort are learning machines, which will “literally operate at the speed of light,” Work said. These computers will help solve problems, such has how to respond to a missile traveling at six times the speed of sound.

Work said the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is one of these types of machines. “The F-35 is not a fighter plane,” Work said. “It is a flying sensor computer that sucks in an enormous amount of data, correlates it, analyzes it and displays it to the pilot on his helmet.”

Even though the F-35 has been criticized for not being able to maneuver as well as older fighter jets and has had well-noted problems in its development, the aircraft’s high-tech computers and sensors, Work said, will allow it to outperform its predecessors.

“We are absolutely confident that F-35 will be a war winner,” he said. “It’s because it is using the machine to make the human make better decisions.”

Work also pointed to “assisted human operations” and wearable electronics, which give troops access to combat apps as another game changer. “I’m telling you right now, 10 years from now, if the first person through a breach isn’t a fricken robot, shame on us.”

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced in August the Pentagon would invest in electronic components that can bend.

Humans and machines are already working together on the battlefield within the U.S.“global counterterrorism network,” which uses people, unmanned drones, computers and special operations forces to hunt militants, Work said.

Unlike the previous offsets, the fielding of tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided bombs and missiles, which deterred war and gave the American military in some cases four decades of advantages over adversaries, this new technology probably won’t provide an edge that long, Work said.

Russia is challenging “our capacity to innovate and change,” said Carter, during a luncheon address to the audience largely made up of lawmakers, industry, and Pentagon officials.

“In the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order,” Carter said.

Russia’s saber rattling has prompted a major shift of late in way the American military is looking at a future. Top uniformed officials have said nuclear-armed Moscow poses the greatest threat to the U.S., not Islamic State militants, who despite an international airstrike campaign, still hold large portions of land in Iraq and Syria and have a presence in other countries across Northern Africa.

“We do not seek to make Russia an enemy,” Carter said. “But make no mistake; the United States will defend our interests, our allies, the principled international order, and the positive future it affords us all. We’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russia’s aggression, and to help reduce the vulnerability of allies and partners.”

As such, the U.S. military is “adapting our operational posture and contingency plans as we – on our own and with allies – work to deter Russia’s aggression, and to help reduce the vulnerability of allies and partners,” Carter said.

The Pentagon is “making a number of moves in response, many but not all of which I can describe in this forum,” Carter said alluding to classified battle plans and weapon projects. It is also “updating and advancing our operational plans for deterrence and defense.”Upgrading America’s nuclear weapons is one of these areas, he said. The Pentagon plans to buy a new stealth bomber and a replacement for the Ohio-Class submarine over the next decade, both of which are being designed to carry and launch nuclear weapons.

Washington cut off nearly all but top-level dialog with Moscow after Russian forces invaded Ukraine last year. Relations between the two nuclear powers grew even more strained in recent months when Russia sent troops and weapons to Syria to back the embattled government of President Bashar al Assad. But Carter did not rule out future cooperation with Russia, pointing to Moscow’s part in helping to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran and talks with North Korea.

“It is possible … Russia may play a constructive role in resolving the Syrian civil war,” Carter said.

 

[F-22Raptor]

SIMI VALLEY, Calif., November 8, 2015 — Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work are wrestling the future to the ground to give the nation an advantage over adversaries and Work says their best new idea is to team troops up with machines.

Speaking last night at the closing session of the annual Reagan National Defense Forum here in Southern California, Work and moderator Thom Shanker discussed a way forward for DoD called the Third Offset Strategy.

“Offset strategies [involve] great powers,” Work said, “and are focused on one thing … and that is making sure that our conventional deterrent is absolutely as strong as possible” to seriously lower the chances that America would go to war.

Work said the United States has never tried to match a great power tank for tank, ship for ship, airplane for airplane or person for person.

“Generally what we try to do is offset,” he added, noting that the first national offset took place in the 1950s when the nation could use tactical nuclear weapons to deter a conventional attack on Western Europe.

Great Powers

The second took place in the early to mid-1970s, Work said, when the Soviet Union gained strategic nuclear parity with America and the United States went after conventional weapons with near-zero miss -- or precision-guided -- weapons.

Offsets are focused on the operational level of war, or campaigns, he added, and on conventional deterrence against great powers.

Work used international relations theorist John Mearsheimer’s definition of great powers in the nuclear age as those that have nuclear deterrents that can survive a nuclear strike and that also have formidable conventional forces.

But offsets are not just about technology, he added.

“There's always a strong technological component but it is strategy based … ” Work said. “You also want operational and organizational constructs that give you an advantage and an offset against your adversaries, who might outnumber you.”

Third Offset Strategy

Over the past 12 months of effort on elements of the third offset strategy, Work said the department has begun to make investments guided by the strategy and that the big idea right now for deterrence is human-machine collaboration and combat teaming.

The deputy secretary said such collaboration and combat teaming has five basic building blocks and is based on two major efforts.

One was an offset-strategy initiative called the Long-Range Research and Development Program that focused, Work said, on “how to go up against great powers in a conventional sense when they have as many guided weapons as you do and a home-field advantage.”

The second effort was a Defense Science Board Summer Study on Autonomy, he said.

“To a person, [everyone] on the summer study said we can't prove it but we believe we are at an inflection point on artificial intelligence and autonomy,” the deputy secretary added.

Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy

Learning machines are an example of technology that can help turn AI and autonomy into an offset advantage, Work said.

“Learning machines … literally will operate at the speed of light. So when you’re operating against a cyber attack or an electronic attack or attacks against your space architecture or missiles that are screaming in at you at Mach 6,” he said, “you [need] … a learning machine that helps you solve that problem right away.”

Another building block, human-machine collaboration, was in the news in 1997 when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov -- the first defeat of a current world chess champion to a computer under tournament conditions.

Then in 2005, Work said, “two amateur chess players using three personal computers won $20,000 in a chess tournament against a field of supercomputers and grandmasters.”

Human-Machine Collaboration

As chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote about human-computer chess playing in a recent review of a book about AI and the human mind, “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.”

Work says, “The way we will go after human-machine collaboration is allowing the machine to help humans make better decisions faster.”

Automated systems use algorithms based on old data, he said, noting that the coming technology assumes a thinking adversary who is constantly changing strategies.

The best example of such collaboration is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, he added.

“The F-35 is not a fighter plane, it is a flying sensor computer that sucks in an enormous amount of data, correlates it, analyzes it and displays it to the pilot on his helmet,” Work said.

Machine-Assisted Operations

“We believe and we say it over and over,” he added, “this fifth-gen fighter, [even though] it can't out-turn an F-16 or … go as fast, we are absolutely confident that F-35 will be a war winner … because it is using the machine to help the human make better decisions.”

Work said the third building block is machine-assisted human operations.

“I'm telling you right now,” Work told the audience, “10 years from now if the first person through a breach isn’t a friggin’ robot, shame on us.”

He added, “Assisted human operations, wearable electronics, making sure that our warfighters have combat apps that help them in every single possible contingency -- we can do this.”

The fourth building block is human-machine combat teaming and the fifth is autonomous weapons, the deputy secretary said.

Take those five building blocks and put them on a single network where everything is learning at the speed of light, and that is the reconnaissance strike complex of the 21st century, Work said.

A Period of Experimentation

Achieving this important advantage will take some time, he added.

“Essentially we said here's our second offset strategy in 1975. Fifteen years later in the Gulf War there were more bass fishermen in the United States who had GPS receivers than people in the U.S. military,” Work said.

At the time only a small segment of the U.S. force was configured to fire guided munitions, he said, noting that the department today is in a period of experimentation.

The enduring value proposition of the third offset strategy, Work explained, “is that if we force … an adversary that is an authoritarian power to adopt the offset strategy’s organizational and operational concepts, that will cause changes in their military and ultimately their society that will make it less likely that we will fight against each other.”

But Work said the offset strategy isn’t all about technology.

“The No. 1 advantage we have is the people in uniform and our civilian workforce and our defense industrial base and the contractors who support us,” he added.

An iCombat World

In this offset, young officers who have grown up in an iCombat world will have ideas that senior officers simply won’t be able to emulate, Work said.

That’s not an indictment, he added, noting that Yann LeCun, Facebook’s artificial-intelligence director, says old people’s creativity is based on information they know and young people’s creativity is based on information they don't know, allowing for a little wider exploration.

“What will happen is that our senior military officers who know combat at the campaign level, something our junior officers don't know, will be able to make the leap to the operational concepts and organizational constructs,” the deputy secretary said.

“But if we can tap into the captains and majors and lieutenants who have grown up in this world, and we can manage that creativity together,” Work said, “we will kick ***.”

Work: Human-Machine Teaming Represents Defense Technology Future > U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE > Article View

 

[AMDR]

The next 10 years are going to be insane. In 2025-2030 when we actually start fielding capabilities like human-machine collaboration, autonomous targeting, and "Big Data".......the whole demeanor changes

I know we throw around the phrase "game changing" a lot, but my god this takes that to a whole different level.

All praise Third Offset

 

[F-22Raptor]

We’ve talked a lot in these pages about drones and robots, networks and swarms. But there’s new way of looking at these weapons that Bob Work made clear is at the heart of the Defense Department’s high-tech “Third Offset Strategy.” It’s an approach that relies not just on technology but on the one American advantage China can’t simply copy or steal: our people. Deputy Secretary Work called it “human-machine teaming.” The chess world, which in many ways invented the idea, calls it a “centaur.”

“In 1997 [world chess champion] Garry Kasparov was beaten by a computer, Deep Blue. Everybody thought that was a big deal,” Work said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. “Well, what was a bigger deal was in 2005. Two amateur chess players using three PCs, personal computers, won a chess tournament, $20,000, against a field of supercomputers and grandmasters.”

That event — described by Kasparov himself here — tested “centaur chess,” in which human chess-players use chess software as an advisor, but the human makes the final decision about what move to take. There’s an obvious appeal here for the military, which is naturally uneasy about letting robots decide to use lethal force. Then there’s the potential for human and machine to be far more effective together than either would be alone. (A favorite book of Work’s on this topic is The Second Machine Age).

The idea is not machines replacing humans. It’s not even about machines working autonomously alongside humans. It’s about machines and humans being joined at the hip in a symbiotic relationship where each brings what it does best.

“It’s actually not an either-or,” military futurist Paul Scharre. Like the mythical centaur, we can harness inhuman speed and power to human judgment. We can combine “machine precision and reliability, human robustness and flexibility.”

Scharre heads the Center for New America Security’s 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative. 20YY just happens to have been founded by then-CNAS chief executive officer Bob Work, who co-wrote its inaugural study, which just happens to have been on robotics. Scharre spent “a lot of time with Bob when he was talking about these things” before he left for the Pentagon in early 2014.

“There’s been this important conceptual shift in the Department [of Defense] in the last year or two,” Scharre told me this morning. The armed forces started out thinking about unmanned systems in isolation: Predator drones, bomb-squad robots, unmanned mini-subs to hunt underwater mines, all sent on their own on missions too dangerous or tedious for human endurance. But now the military has begun to move towards “manned-unmanned teaming,” such as the Army’s plan to fly AH-64 Apache helicopters together with Grey Eagle drones as, effectively, remotely controlled extensions of the manned choppers’ onboard sensors.

Now Work is leading the push to broaden the concept to “human-machine teaming.” In other words, it’s not just about manned and unmanned vehicles operating together, it’s also about computers and humans helping each other to think. That’s “cognitive teaming.” Scharre said. “Most of his remarks were actually about that.”

“Human-machine collaboration is allowing a machine to help humans make better decisions faster,” Work said at the Reagan Forum. “That is a big, big difference. There is an artificial intelligence (AI) bias right now generally in the community [i.e. using unmanned systems to replace humans, rather than augment them]. But…automated systems use algorithms based on old data, [and] we’re up against a thinking adversary that is changing strategies all the time.”

“The best example” in current service, Work said, is the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. “The F-35 is not a fighter plane,” Work said. (Critics might agree, with a different emphasis). “It is a flying sensor/computer that sucks in an enormous amount of data, correlates it, analyzes it, and displays to the pilot on his helmet….We are absolutely confident that F-35 will be a war-winner. That is because it is using the machine to make the human make better decisions. “

In other words, the F-35 pilot is the human part of the centaur; the plane is the horse. Subordinate drones commanded from the F-35 complicate the metaphor, but you end up with one human leading a robotic herd.

The centaur model doesn’t always apply. Some functions in the future force will have to be completely automated, like missile defense lasers or cybersecurity. “Against a cyber attack or an electronic warfare attack, or attacks against your space architecture, or missiles that are coming screaming in at you at Mach 6, you’re going to have to have a learning machine that helps you solve that problem right away… at the speed of light,” said Work. In such cases there’s no time for human intervention.

But most of the military Work envisions sounds like centaurs: computers will fly the missiles, aim the lasers, jam the signals, read the sensors, and pull all the data together over a network, putting it into an intuitive interface humans can read, understand, and use to command the mission.

The human element is the secret sauce — the element that foreign powers can’t copy as easily as they can our software.

“The last thing I want you to go away from this is thinking this is all about technology,” Work said. “The number one advantage we have is the people in uniform, in our civilian work force, in our defense industrial base, and the contractors who support us.”

“We have an advantage in people and innovation,” Work said. But, “sure, there are going to be fast followers” who try to copy our Third Offset and catch up.

“Software can just be copied and replicated infinitely,” Scharre pointed out. Hardware is harder to copy — you need an industrial base, which requires skilled workers — but, as China has shown with its stealth fighters, hardly impossible. “But there’s also better people, training, doctrine, experimentation,” Scharre said. “That all goes into making that package together, and that’s actually really hard to replicate.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, as Work is fond of pointing out, all the great-power militaries had access to the same potentially revolutionary technology — tanks, trucks, airplanes, radios, aircraft carriers — but they took very different approaches to using it, with very different results. In 1940, for example, France actually had more and better-armored tanks than Germany, but the French didn’t have the idea of using armored vehicles for rapid maneuvers, so they didn’t bother to put radios in them — or independent-minded commanders.

The Third Offset Strategy is betting that America — with its highly professional military, its culture of innovation and initiative, its “digitally native” young people — can put together the pieces of future military power better and faster than our rivals. But that’s not guaranteed.

“If our main advantage is our people, our main disadvantage is our institutions,” Scharre warned. “We have creative people but they have this industrial age Department of Defense bureaucracy that moves at a glacial pace [and] takes good ideas and turns them into these bloated Death Stars.”

Centaur Army: Bob Work, Robotics, & The Third Offset Strategy « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary