Ash Carter, USV swarms, autonomy roundtable & more
Our takes on a recent USV swarm in Crimea, Ash Carter's career, a defense autonomy roundtable, virtual panel discussion, and other recent news
The Nexus Newsletter
Welcome to the 11th edition of The Nexus Newsletter - a bi-weekly newsletter covering important news from the nexus of national security and autonomy.
First up: the drone swarm attack on Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea. The combination of aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels (USVs) damaged at least one Russian ship anchored in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. First-person footage of the attack was captured by several of the USVs - this is something you’ll want to see.
Remembering Ash Carter
Last week, the national security community was saddened by the passing of Dr. Ash Carter. A transformational leader for the Department of Defense (DOD), Dr. Carter pushed the DOD to more rapidly adopt cutting edge technology through initiatives including the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the Defense Digital Service, and others that enable the Department to engage and harness commercial innovation.
In this 2018 interview, Dr. Carter talks about how he connected the commercial tech industry with the Department of Defense:
“What I was most proud of was the mechanism by which I connected us to the tech community. … I knew that, unlike when I started out in my life, when most of the technologies that were built for defense were built and funded by the DOD - the internet, the jet engine, the satellite - that is no longer true, there’s a lot of stuff going on outside. So, to have the best, which we have to have to protect our people, we need to be connected to the outside world.”
Roundtable: The Future of Defense Autonomy
Earlier this week, our team moderated a roundtable discussion on the future of defense autonomy. The roundtable convened leaders from government, academia, and industry for a discussion on best practices for Department of Defense (DOD) autonomy programs, including how DOD can leverage commercial best practices to improve program design and accelerate the delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter.
Panelists at the roundtable included:
Representative Rob Wittman (VA-01), Vice Ranking Member of the House Committee on Armed Services
Dr. Dai Hyun Kim, Director for AI and Machine Learning at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research & Engineering
Dr. Danda Rawat, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at Howard University
Dr. Caitlin Lee, Senior Fellow for UAV and Autonomy Studies at The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
Dr. Arun Seraphin, Deputy Director of the Emerging Technologies Institute at NDIA
Kevin Gates, Professional Staff Member at the Senate Committee on Armed Services
We are proud to lead the way in engaging government, academia, and industry leaders to identify ways to bring commercially-proven best practices for autonomy to the DOD.
PAVE Virtual Panel: “The Road to AVs: Testing and Simulation”
Autonomous systems - including those built for commercial and defense applications - require exhaustive testing to validate vehicle safety and performance against requirements.
Sunmin Kim, Director of Public Policy at Applied Intuition, recently joined Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) for a virtual panel discussion on testing and simulation strategies to ensure autonomous systems meet the highest standards of safety and reliability. In the panel, she discussed:
How are vehicles tested?
What do concepts like verification and validation (V&V) mean?
How do developers determine when a vehicle is ready for the road?
News we’re reading
Autonomous systems are gaining momentum in the national security space. Below, we’ve pulled key quotes from recent articles of interest, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition’s government team:
Atlantic Council | How will the US Navy navigate an uncertain security environment? A conversation with ADM Mike Gilday
Key quote: “I would say that with regard to fielding platforms, whether manned or unmanned, things have changed. We have to take a look at what we learned from the past… We need to prove to ourselves and to Congress that the investment we are asking for to scale a capability has a high degree of confidence that the technical risk is acceptable, that the platforms are operationally relevant, and that they are going to deliver on time and on budget. So the work we are doing with Task Force 59 will inform what we are going to buy and scale.” – Admiral Mike Gilday
Our take: Great interview by our partners at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. We found our nation’s most senior Naval officer’s candor to be refreshing. We couldn’t agree more that the Chinese Communist Party will likely deliver the capability it needs to invade Taiwan on a faster timeline than those stated in its public statements. The CNO has a clear-eyed understanding of the value of unmanned systems to achieve tactical tasks in the maritime domain and the critical role that Congress and operational commands play in scaling these capabilities. We argue that a program that incorporates real-world and virtual testing of maritime unmanned systems is the fastest, cheapest, and safest way to build confidence in these technologies.
C4ISRNET | Pentagon’s Shyu, LaPlante push to get critical tech into production
Key quote: Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu said that as her team prepares for the first Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve demonstrations early next year, she’s working “hand in glove” with Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante to ensure the most promising projects don’t languish — a concern expressed by Senate lawmakers, who are proposing cuts to the program’s fiscal 2023 budget.
“The best critical prototypes that we define, he will look to accelerate the acquisition pathway to get [them] into production as quickly as possible,” Shyu said during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s DARPA Forward conference in Atlanta this week. […]
“If you have a great prototype that’s solving a capability that I need, we want to test it out,” she said. “Let’s test it out in a contested environment. Does it still work [outside] your lab? If it still works, there’s an option. We can go into rapid fielding.”
Our take: Moving promising programs from prototype to production as rapidly as possible is more important than ever, particularly in light of the “pacing challenge” posed by China, as the Administration called it in the latest version of the National Defense Strategy. To mature the capabilities that we will need to deter and, eventually, win a high-end fight with a near-peer competitor, it is imperative that we accelerate uptake of innovative solutions developed in the commercial sector by the DOD. Virtual testing and evaluation certainly has a role to play in speeding the deployment of safe and effective autonomous systems at scale, and we’re looking forward to discussing this in depth with USDR&E in the near future.
Breaking Defense | ‘Lightning in a bottle’: Inside the ‘Origin’ of the Army’s future robotic fleet
Key quote: After three years of Project Origin, the robotic vehicle demonstrators that have been in the field have shaped how the Army thinks about the capabilities that a robot can provide and its approach to the acquisition program.
“A robot, more or less, is a system of systems. It’s comprised of the software, the autonomy, the payload interface, the user interface and the data management systems,” Maj. Cory Wallace, the robotic combat vehicle lead for the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team, told Breaking Defense. “So viewing a robot in that context, what Origin does is, we’re able to collect the lessons learned from those particular areas (or) subsystems, and then scale them to the level of relevancy within the RCV (program).”
Our take: Developing and testing new concepts of operation is a key component to developing autonomous systems for defense applications. It’s important that defense autonomy programs understand how soldiers will interact with autonomous systems early on in their development, so we’re happy to hear that the Army will use lessons learned from Project Origin to inform its approach to acquisition and requirements for RCV. While Origin was focused on the tactical employment of robotic vehicles, we are curious if there are lessons to be learned on how to accelerate the development and testing of autonomous vehicles as well.
War on the Rocks | Fixing Defense Innovation: Rewriting Acquisition and Security Regulations
Key quote: Congress and the executive branch cannot call on the Department of Defense to take the risks necessary to innovate if they will not take risks themselves. Rather than wait for yet another panel of experts to offer tomes of suggestions, legislators and officials should re-write and revise acquisition laws and regulations now, assess impacts, and iterate until outcomes match expectations. It is difficult to foresee the impact of policy changes on complex systems, and it is for this very reason that legislative and regulatory experimentation must occur. While there is risk in this approach, it pales in comparison to the geopolitical risk of allowing a peer competitor, like China, to maintain an edge in the weapons acquisition and procurement cycle.
Our take: The call to re-calibrate risk tolerance across the Department of Defense, Congress, and the executive branch echoes CIA Chief Technology Officer Nand Mulchandani’s comments at Nexus 22: An undue focus on downside risk associated with failed programs has slowed the adoption of innovative technologies. It also echoes ADM Gilday’s comments at a recent Atlantic Council event, described above. At this point, it makes more sense to emphasize the risk of not investing in innovative technologies, rather than focusing on the financial and reputational risks associated with programs that don’t pan out. Our warfighters need innovative capabilities, including a wide range of autonomous systems across domains, in the short term and in large quantities. There is a clear national security imperative to re-calibrate risk tolerance in a way that supports innovation.
Breaking Defense | At Project Convergence, Army doubles down on ‘fully autonomous’ Black Hawk experiments
Key quote: “My requirement was ‘don’t even bring it if it can’t be flown fully autonomous,'” said Lt. Gen. Thomas Todd, deputy commanding general for acquisition and systems and chief innovation officer at Army Futures Command, told reporters on Monday. “The point being that we have to take a step every year. We have to push ourselves to take steps.”
The Army’s experiments [sic] autonomous Black Hawk program started under a DARPA project called Black Hawk Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS), in which Black Hawk manufacturer Sikorsky developed a software to fly the bird without an on-board pilot. At last year’s Project Convergence, the helicopter flew autonomous, simulated resupply missions with on-board safety pilots.
Our take: The autonomous Black Hawk is the latest example of how autonomy is a software problem, not a hardware problem: a modified version of a 40+ year-old airframe can be made autonomous with the right combination of software, sensors, and payloads.
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