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Preparing for Tomorrows Threats Overcoming Obstacles

/analyses/2021/10/preparing-for-tomorrows-threats-overcoming-obstacles

Preparing for future threats is a vital concern for US strategists. Innovation is one way to confront the threats we may face in the future, but achieving innovation presents organizational, cultural, decisionmaking, and technological challenges. To help strategists and policy-makers navigate these obstacles, CNA’s National Security Seminar (NSS) convened three experts to share their perspectives from their service at different offices within the Pentagon: General James T. Conway (US Marine Corps, ret.), the 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps; Dr. Jamie M. Morin, former Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) at the Department of Defense; and Dr. Francis G. Hoffman, Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University, who was instrumental in authoring the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS). The discussion, moderated by CNA’s Dr. Carter Malkasian, was divided into two parts: the first identified obstacles to innovation, and the second looked at how to overcome those obstacles. The event was recorded and is available online.

in the Department of Defense itself and within the wider defense industrial establishment.  General Conway underscored that innovation must contribute to the overall effectiveness of the joint force; must be feasible, interoperable and deployable across theaters; and must be timely—it cannot struggle through an endless development process. Proposals for innovation should be vetted against ... being expended on poorly conceived innovation that failed either to come to fruition or to be useful to the force. General Conway, overall, underlined the need for practicality in the face

ai with ai: Chasing AIMe

/our-media/podcasts/ai-with-ai/season-4/4-44

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI new and research, including: [1:28] Researchers from several universities in biomedicine establish the AIMe registry, a community-driven reporting platform for providing information and standards of AI research in biomedicine. [4:15] Reuters publishes a report with insight into examples at Google, Microsoft, and IBM, where ethics reviews have curbed or canceled projects. [8:11] Researchers at the University of Tübingen create an AI method for significantly accelerating super-resolution microscopy, which makes heavy use of synthetic training data. [13:21] The US Navy establishes Task Force 59 in the Middle East, which will focus on the incorporation of unmanned and AI systems into naval operations. [15:44] The Department of Commerce establishes the National AI Advisory Committee, in accordance with the National AI Initiative Act of 2020. [19:02] Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark publish a white paper on Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development, with predictions into the types of problems that will occur with inaction. [19:02] The Center for Security and Emerging Technology publishes a series of data-snapshots related to AI research, from over 105 million publications. [23:53] In research, Google Research, Brain Team, and University of Montreal take a broad look at deep reinforcement learning research and find discrepancies between conclusions drawn from point estimates (fewer runs, due to high computational costs) versus more thorough statistical analysis, calling for a change in how to evaluate performance in deep RL. [30:13] Quebec AI Institute publishes a survey of post-hoc interpretability on neural natural language processing. [31:39] MIT Technology Review dedicates its Sep/Oct 2021 issues to The Mind, with articles all about the brain. [32:05] Katy Borner publishes Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures, showing how models, maps, and forecasts inform decision-making in education, science, technology, and policy-making. [33:16] DeepMind in collaboration with University College London offers a comprehensive introduction to modern reinforcement learning, with 13lectures (~1.5 hours each) on the topic.

data. [13:21] The US Navy establishes Task Force 59 in the Middle East, which will focus on the incorporation of unmanned and AI systems into naval operations. [15:44] The Department of Commerce ... Should Monitor AI Development, with predictions into the types of problems that will occur with inaction. [19:02] The Center for Security and Emerging Technology publishes a series of data-snapshots ... preprint (open access) Navy to launch new task force to integrate unmanned and AI systems in the Middle East Video The Department of Commerce (DOC) establishes the National AI Advisory

ai with ai: Game of Drones - AI Winter Is Coming

/our-media/podcasts/ai-with-ai/season-1/1-34

In breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss Google’s decision not to renew the contract for Project Maven, as well as their AI Principles; the Royal Australian Air Force holds a biennial Air Power Conference with a theme of AI and cyber; the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) releases its 2017 annual report; China holds a Defense Conference on AI in cybersecurity, and NVidia’s new Xavier chip packs $10k worth of power into a $1299 box. Next, Andy and Dave discuss a benevolent application of adversarial attack methods, with a “privacy filter” for photos that are designed to stop AI face detection (reducing detection from nearly 100 percent to 0.5 percent). MIT used AI in the development of nanoparticles, training neural nets to “learn” how a nanoparticle’s structure affects its behavior. Then the remaining topics dip deep into the philosophical realm, starting with a discussion on empiricism and the limits of gradient descent, and how philosophical concepts of empiricist induction compare with critical rationalism. Next, the topic of a potential AI Winter continues to percolate with a viral blog from Piekniewski, leading into a paper from Berkley/MIT that discovers a 4-15% reduction in accuracy for CIFAR-10 classifiers on a new set of similar training images (bringing into doubt the idea of robustness of these systems). Andy shares a possible groundbreaking paper on “graph networks,” that provides a new conceptual framework for thinking about machine learning. And finally, Andy and Dave close with some media selections, including Blood Music by Greg Bear and Swarm by Frank Schatzing.

1-34 In breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss Google’s decision not to renew the contract for Project Maven, as well as their AI Principles; the Royal Australian Air Force holds a biennial Air ... AI face detection (reducing detection from nearly 100 percent to 0.5 percent). MIT used AI in the development of nanoparticles, training neural nets to “learn” how a nanoparticle’s structure affects ... ) -   AI researchers should help with some military work (June 7)   Google’s AI Ethics Principles (March 20-21) Royal Australian Air Force’s biennial Air Power Conference Conference

AI and Autonomy Opportunities and Challenges

/analyses/2017/ai-and-autonomy-opportunities-and-challenges

The military is on the cusp of a major technological revolution, in which warfare is conducted by unmanned and increasingly autonomous weapon systems. This exploratory study considers the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence (AI), machine- learning, and robot technologies, and their potential future military implications for autonomous (and semi-autonomous) weapon systems. Although no one can predict how AI will evolve or how it will affect the development of military autonomous systems, we can anticipate many of the conceptual, technical, and operational challenges that DOD will face as it increasingly turns to AI-based technologies. We identified four key gaps facing DOD as the military evolves toward an “autonomy era”: (1) a mismatch of timescales between the pace of commercial innovation and DOD’s acquisition process; (2) an underappreciation of the fundamental unpredictability of autonomous systems; (3) a lack of a universally agreed upon conceptual framework for autonomy; and (4) a disconnect between the design of autonomous systems and CONOPS development. We examine these gaps, provide a roadmap of opportunities and challenges, and identify areas of future studies.

, and their potential future military implications for autonomous (and semi-autonomous) weapon systems. Although no one can predict how AI will evolve or how it will affect the development of military ... unpredictability of autonomous systems; (3) a lack of a universally agreed upon conceptual framework for autonomy; and (4) a disconnect between the design of autonomous systems and CONOPS development. We ... deeper connection between the development of technology and weapons systems has been forged by national offset strategies. An offset strategy is a general set of peacetime policies designed to mitigate

Insights for the Third Offset

/analyses/2017/insights-for-the-third-offset

CNA conducts analysis for the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense (DOD), and other sponsors, ranging across policy, strategy, organizational processes, technical performance of military systems, and current operations. Because of the expected impact of autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI) to the character of warfare, CNA has created a Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence to focus on these emerging technologies and their significant role in U.S. defense policy and all the military services. The Center combines CNA’s strengths and experience in conducting objective analysis of U.S. military operations with focused expertise in autonomy and other aspects of AI. This report, the first created by the new Center, takes lessons and insights from CNA’s body of work for the Navy and the joint force, including CNA’s field program of embedded analysts in military commands around the world. Though much of the emerging technology examined in this report is new, the approach of applying lessons from U.S. operations and institutional processes to key challenges in leveraging autonomy and AI continues CNA’S applied research paradigm of exploring many opportunities to resolve or work around challenges that have been seen before. The aim of this report is to anticipate challenges of “Third Offset” implementation based on past lessons, and then provide concrete recommendations for promoting the effective incorporation of autonomy, AI, and related technologies in U.S. military operations. This report discusses making autonomy and AI militarily effective from an acquisition and technology perspective, and how to pursue these capabilities in ways that are consistent with long-standing U.S. values and that promote broader U.S. national interests.

in autonomy and other aspects of AI. This report, the first created by the new Center, takes lessons and insights from CNA’s body of work for the Navy and the joint force, including CNA’s field program ... has led to fundamental changes in the character of war and the tools used in its conduct. Examples include the development of the crossbow; gunpowder-powered projectile weapons; chemical weapons ... reflect the new reality that for the underlying technology, commercial research and development (R&D) efforts will dwarf that of the U.S. military. Thus the Third Offset must rely on developments

Are We Winning

/analyses/2014/are-we-winning

In more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States’ armed forces have encountered myriad challenges in their efforts to execute simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns. Assessing progress on the ground—what we will refer to here as “operations assessment”—has proven an especially challenging task. For CNA analysts, as well as uniformed operations research and systems analysis (ORSA) personnel, the operations assessment process has grown in importance and consumed increasing analytic resources over the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). While there have been new and innovative approaches to operations assessment in recent years, there has also been a great deal of relearning old lessons from previous eras (under different conditions). This relearning is, at least in part, attributable to the lack of a comprehensive history of operations assessment.

analysis (ORSA) analysts, among others, strove to find ways to measure progress on the ground. The main driving force behind this effort was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A strong proponent ... came several new conceptual undercurrents that would ultimately influence the development of a new approach to operations assessment. Network-centric warfare, the “Revolution in Military Affairs ... assessments in ways that paint a picture of progress consistent with their intended message. This development has had significant implications for operations assessment, and the processes at numerous

Forward from the Start

/analyses/2003/forward-from-the-start

Why was the Navy at the forefront of the far-forward attacks on alQaeda in Afghanistan and the move against Iraq, while willing to take a back seat to the Coast Guard at home? Why did the Navy respond to one of the worst failures in defense at home in the nation's history principally by striking farther forward than it ever had before? Current national policy and naval strategy provide much of the answer, of course. History, however, also provides some clues.

and development projects were launched. Navy and joint staffs ground out plans, Navy intelligence efforts in Maritime Domain Awareness vastly increased, and a few imaginative force protection games ... for that much smaller service. Much of its force structure on the East Coast sped for New York, where the Coast Guard provided security for the evacuation of a million people from the lower Manhattan ... changes in naval programs or force dispositions ensued. The carriers left their stations off America's harbors as quickly as they had taken them up. No new, dedicated Navy "Homeland Defense Squadrons

The Great Peace and Development Debate of 1999

/analyses/2000/the-great-peace-and-development-debate-of-1999

This paper explores the context, conduct, results, and implications of what we might call “The Great Peace & Development Debate of 1999.”

The Great Peace and Development Debate of 1999 China Reconsiders Its National Security This paper explores the context, conduct, results, and implications of what we might call “The Great Peace & Development Debate of 1999.” In the mid-1980s Deng Xiaoping provided an assessment of the international security environment that has since provided a rationale for the basic direction of China’s ... of China’s national defense policies were especially subjected to fervid debate. This paper explores the context, conduct, results, and implications of what we might call “The Great Peace & Development

The Promise and Pitfalls of Extended Reality in Naval Training

/quick-looks/2023/extended-reality-in-naval-training

This summary discusses the use of extended reality, a broad term for virtual, augmented and mixed/merged reality, and its potential for naval training.

for overseeing the Navy’s force development. This includes recruiting sailors and conducting their initial and technical training. NETC continuously evaluates the effectiveness of naval training ... ? If current XR systems do not yet provide acceptable metrics, what obstacles are hindering the development of this capability? How can the Navy foster the development of acceptable XR performance metrics

The Maritime Prepositioning Force: Floating Warehouses and Flying Marines

/about-us/research/case-studies/maritime-prepositioning

CNA research and analysis on the maritime prepositioning force help the Marine Corps save time when deploying into conflict zones, including for Desert Shield.

for combat. The “new” way of moving Marines — known as the Maritime Prepositioning Force, or MPF — had actually been in development for well over a decade. A squadron of five ships designed as floating ... Maritime Prepositioning CNA research and analysis on the maritime prepositioning force help the Marine Corps save time when deploying into conflict zones, including for Desert Shield. /images/research/maritimeprepositioning.jpg The Maritime Prepositioning Force: Floating Warehouses and Flying Marines Maritime Prepositioning Force Analysis and Desert Storm In August of 1990, the Iraqi Army