Data management, SCSP report, and recent news
A recent blog post on enterprise data management for defense autonomy programs, a new report from the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), our takes on recent news, and more.
The Nexus Newsletter
Welcome to the eighth edition of The Nexus Newsletter - a bi-weekly email newsletter covering recent announcements from Applied Intuition and important news bridging national security and autonomy.
This edition of the newsletter includes a recent blog post on enterprise data management for defense autonomy programs, a new report from the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), our takes on recent news, and more.
Enterprise Data Management for Defense Autonomy Programs
Defense autonomy programs - including those under development by the Department of Defense (DOD), the UK Ministry of Defence, and others - must invest in the infrastructure tools required for program success. Chief among those tools is a platform that enables autonomy programs to make full use of the sensor data they collect by quickly ingesting, visualizing, querying, labeling, and sharing data across the program and organization.
In a new blog post, we outline the importance of a data management platform to the success of nascent defense autonomy programs, the status quo in DOD autonomy programs, and our approach to sensor data management.
SCSP Report: Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness
Last week, the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) - a bipartisan, non-profit organization led by high-profile technologists and national security leaders including Eric Schmidt, Ylli Bajraktari, Michèle Flournoy, and others - published its first report: “Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness.”
The report argues that the United States risks losing the technological competition with China if dramatic action is not taken across a broad range of public policy arenas to:
Invest in U.S. technology advantages
Strengthen the techno-industrial base
Deploy disruptive technologies democratically and responsibly
The report is the culmination of months of work and hundreds of direct engagements with senior leaders from government, academia, and industry, including Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis.
We are proud to drive innovation in U.S. commercial and government sectors, and are honored to be part of this national effort to develop a strategy of tech-centered national competitiveness.
News we’re reading
Autonomous systems are gaining momentum in the national security space. Here are key quotes from a few relevant articles, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition’s government team:
War on the Rocks | Reliance on Dual-Use Technology is a Trap
Key quote: Incorporating dual-use technology certainly has its place in constructing the defense ecosystem. Among other things, it helps to mitigate some of the Department of Defense’s first-order challenges in technology adoption, particularly with regard to commercial off-the-shelf technologies. But an overreliance on the commercial-first dual-use hack has generally failed to live up to the hopes laid out almost 30 years ago in the 1995 Dual Use Strategy: A Defense Strategy for Affordable, Leading Edge Technology. This strategy was supposed to ensure that the Defense Department could keep costs low, speed up innovation cycle times, and ensure that America’s industrial base did not atrophy in an environment of falling defense budgets. It has failed at all three of these goals. Costs have skyrocketed, new platform generations take literal generations to release, and America’s defense industrial base has been dangerously eroded in many different sectors.
Our take: Perhaps the most important word in this analysis is “reliance.” Relying exclusively on dual-use technologies developed initially for the commercial market and then re-purposed for defense customers, applications, and use cases may be problematic, but dual-use technologies and companies still represent a valuable component of America’s defense industrial base. Bringing innovations developed in the commercial sector - where they benefit from the type of vibrant competition that is not always present in the defense industry - to the defense sector remains deeply valuable. As a true dual-use company working to enable the development of autonomous systems across both commercial and defense applications, we know this well: The commercial autonomous vehicles (AV) industry has benefitted from massive venture capital investment (many times more than both traditional defense contractor independent research and development, and DOD research), broad competition across a number of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and tool and service providers, incentive to get to commercial markets quickly, and the ability to rapidly experiment. When done correctly, commercial technology transition to defense is absolutely the right answer. You don’t see the DOD trying to rebuild Office 365, for example (although, if given the chance, someone somewhere in DOD R&D would probably try…).
Defense One | Get to Know the Middle Tier of Awesome… Er, Acquisition
Key quote: MTA accelerates learning and focuses leaders and practitioners to identify opportunities to learn processes, tailor documents, and rethink strategies. It is not a radical, high-risk approach to acquisition. Successful MTA programs will often turn into major capability and software acquisition pathways to fully scale and advance their capabilities.
Today, MTA programs remain a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s overall investment budget, but they represent a large slice of the recent success stories in DoD acquisition – especially in maximizing experimentation, competition, and rapid fielding. If the U.S. military is to keep up with China, far more defense acquisition programs must move toward MTA and pathways like it.
Our take: We’re looking at MTAs very closely from the perspective of unmanned and autonomous vehicles. To be clear, an MTA is a stage of a program’s acquisition cycle - it is not a type or category of program. A good example of an ongoing MTA for an unmanned vehicle program is the Robotic Combat Vehicle out of PEO Ground Combat Systems in Detroit. The RCV program will likely be successful because of the experimentation it has conducted prior to the MTA, after the start of which the requirements are more or less locked (unless the program reboots at the next milestone and does not proceed into low-rate production). In other words, at the start of the MTA, the program needs to know what it wants in order to rapidly prototype it competitively. Unfortunately, programs that do not conduct rigorous experiments prior to the MTA will probably suffer. Even the learnings of the MTA’s operational assessments will not inform requirements or the winning design due to competitive considerations - the government cannot tip the scales for any vendor by providing feedback until after the conclusion of the MTA period. It would be interesting to explore methods that enable the sharing of MTA experimentation lessons learned within the limitations of the MTA design. As we have mentioned before, RCV is different from even the normal MTA because it pairs its hardware acquisition via MTA with the new software acquisition pathway. It will be exciting to see this novel approach in action, and interesting to see how agile software development, testing, and deployment could inject into the competitive MTA.
Nextgov | DOD Needs to Modernize its Software Architecture for Next-Gen Warfare, Report Says
Key quote: “One of the greatest challenges the DOD and other U.S. federal agencies face is that they were built from the ground up as industrial-age, hardware-centric organizations,” the report says. “Making the transition to digital age, software-centric, more risk-tolerant organizations is exceedingly difficult. But it is also the only path to future success.”
The paper says that this type of software-defined warfare, where software is at the core of DOD’s operating model, will strengthen the effectiveness of existing military hardware and weapons systems by allowing them to better handle “all of the complexity of decisionmaking, targeting and resourcing.”
Our take: +1, but since this is the Nexus Newsletter, we will hone in on autonomy. Making autonomy a reality will require us to shift our thinking toward building systems, rather than conventional platforms. Creating networks of interconnected autonomous systems requires a software-centric approach to ensure that those systems are interoperable with each other, and team effectively with manned platforms. Building risk tolerance in DOD is important as well, and echoes CIA Chief Technology Officer Nand Mulchandani’s comments at Nexus 22: An undue focus on downside risk associated with failed programs and investments has slowed the adoption of innovative technologies. Re-balancing risk tolerance within the Department by placing a greater emphasis on the risk of not investing in innovative technologies, rather than the risk associated with programs that don’t pan out, will support the development of much-needed next-generation capabilities.
Hear more from Nand Mulchandani at Nexus 22.
FedScoop | Air Force sees opportunities to scale production of drones, software for wars of attrition
Key quote: “It certainly looks like some sort of autonomous aircraft that are using the air littorals seem to be something that might scale. There are several manufacturers that I’m aware of today in the United States — and I’m not counting around the globe with our allies and partners — that can produce these things. We would need all of them to go after that,” Hinote said.
Software is another complementary technology that Air Force officials believe could potentially be rapidly acquired during a conflict and boost military capabilities.
“We’re clearly seeing DevOps scaling in ways that we’ve never seen before. So if you put those two together, you might have autonomous flight plus software, so that if the autonomous vehicle is so flexible, every day you have a different autonomous vehicle because you load new software in it. We could probably scale that,” Hinote said.
Our take: Great work by our partners at the Atlantic Council. We live in a world saturated with sensors. Gone are the days when the U.S. military could set the theater mostly unopposed, with uncontested airspace and border access. Instead, our adversaries will engage U.S. forces across multiple domains, including cyber and space, to disrupt, delay, or even deny access months before a conflict. Similarly, the prevalence of sensors enables adversaries to more easily detect and understand one another’s intentions and capabilities earlier than in previous conflicts. This can easily lead us down the path to a bloody war of attrition where low-cost attritable autonomous systems are needed to reconstitute capability. But we believe that these technologies hold even more promise to prevent such a conflict in the first place, through deterrence. Through independent and coordinated movement, autonomous unmanned vehicles can create uncertainty and dilemmas for the adversary, slowing down decision processes and enabling the Joint Force Commander to operate from a position of potential dominance. They can also collect information that increases their understanding of the environment faster than the adversary, enabling action that will compel the adversary to back down.
Defense One | NATO Readies Strategy To Steer Use Of Autonomy
Key quote: “What we’re trying to do, just like we did with the AI strategy, which is very not-NATO-like, is to make as much unclassified as we can. Because we feel it's also about creating trust with the populations and if you keep this all secret then there's not much trust to be gained,” van Weel said at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s Global Emerging Technologies Summit.
The alliance released several strategies around emerging or disruptive technology areas, including artificial intelligence and space. Van Weel said the autonomy strategy would follow similar paces as the AI strategy, accounting for moral and ethical uses. NATO is also exploring other technologies, including quantum and biotechnologies, with initial reports expected by early 2023. Other work in data exploitation and operationalizing responsible AI in defense is also underway.
“So we’ll be looking at responsible use of autonomy. We’ll be looking at common standards that we expect all the allies to adhere to,” he said. “I feel that the moral and ethical side will be important” to address potential dilemmas for autonomy and other areas like human enhancement or bio-attack.
Our take: We’re looking forward to the release of NATO’s autonomy strategy. NATO’s AI strategy, adopted last October, rightly emphasized the responsible use of AI technologies across six tenets: Lawfulness, responsibility and accountability, explainability and traceability, reliability, governability, and bias mitigation. We’re glad to hear that NATO’s autonomy strategy will be similarly focused on the responsible use of autonomous systems and technologies.
Defense Scoop | Navy working to prevent unmanned shipbuilders from monopolizing software integration
Key quote: “What we’re trying to do is not to have one company basically have a monopoly on both platform and software AI integration that’ll actually drive the machine, but to keep them separately. And what we want to do is create some competition there … across that marketplace, if you will. It’s been very successful so far.”
Our take: We support the use of a modular approach to the development of both the software and hardware components of autonomous systems. Commercial vendors must design the components such that they are separable and open architecture, thus enabling those components to interact with components produced by other vendors. At the same time, the government should continue to work with industry to define common standards in line with DOD’s Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) principles so that modular tool-building doesn’t result in siloed products that slow the development process and delay the delivery of autonomous capability to the warfighter.
Upcoming conferences & events
Tracking new events in the autonomy and national security space can be difficult. Here are a few of the upcoming conferences and events that Applied’s government team is attending - find us there!
September 18-22, 2022 | ITS World Congress
September 22, 2022 | AUVSI Defense
September 27-30, 2022 | 39th International T&E Symposium
September 27-29, 2022 | Fed Supernova 2022
September 28-29, 2022 | Unmanned Maritime Systems Technology USA 2022
October 10-12, 2022 | AUSA 2022 Annual Meeting & Exposition
November 28-December 2, 2022 | I/ITSEC 2022
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