Modern war is fought over strategic influence more than territory. Win the first and the second is gained easily. In this struggle, we are battling over perceptions and in the hyper-communications environment today, facts do not matter. We risk tactical and strategic success as we rely on a lawyerly conduct in war resting on finely tuned arguments of why and why not. Human nature in a crisis doesn’t care about the finer points that exist further up Maslow’s pyramid, human nature falls back on the quick response of emotions and are vulnerable to rumor and simple distortions, especially those reinforced over time.

Sharon Weinberger at Danger Room noted the government’s concern over the potential for the Active Denial System in the war of ideas.

Not only did Pentagon officials refuse to send the controversial weapon to Iraq, they blocked a request that came as late as December 2006. The big concern is clearly the public fallout from deploying a microwave weapon.

Senior officers in Iraq have continued to make the case. One December 2006 request noted that as U.S. forces are drawn down, the non-lethal weapon “will provide excellent means for economy of force.”

The main reason the tool has been missing in action is public perception. With memories of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal still fresh, the Pentagon is reluctant to give troops a space-age device that could be misconstrued as a torture machine.

“We want to just make sure that all the conditions are right, so when it is able to be deployed the system performs as predicted – that there isn’t any negative fallout,” said Col. Kirk Hymes, head of the Defense Department’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

As revolutionary as it is, the Active Denial System is not a sea-change in warfare. It’s simply a hi-tech water cannon. There is, however, a sea-change in warfare coming that is not being accompanied with an equivalent discussion over the impact on perception, even though potential impact and repercussions are several orders of magnitude greater than the ADS.

It’s interesting because my work on this sea-change does use much of the same branding principles found in a recent RAND report. No real details now because I don’t want take away from a report-in-progress I presented as a working draft at a workshop a few weeks ago…

See Noah’s post earlier this month on NavSec Winter’s comments at the DARPATech:

…he just informed the 3,000 geeks gathered at the DARPATech conference in Anaheim that all their gee-whiz gadgetry may not help at all in the war on terror. 

There’s a tendency to view Islamists as backwards barbarians, Winter said.  This image is “misleading and very dangerous.”  The terrorist enemy is more likely to be a “engineer in a lab” than an “evildoer in a cave.”

Growth in commercial computing power has “eroded” America’s Cold War “technical edge,” Winter said.  The same – or even better – gear gets out to kids worldwide, before soldiers ever see it.  “The playing field has thus been leveled.”  Just look at how Iraqi insurgents have been able to the Internet to recruit, train, and spread propaganda. And check out the network-like “command and control” structures that these guys are using, compared to our old military hierarchies. 

There is more here than command and control, it goes to understanding the value and purpose of technologies. Without an R&D budget that exceeds the GNP’s of many countries as well as the entire defense budgets of many of our allies, we look for the magic bullet in technology, an American tradition.

Continue reading “Better tech isn’t always the answer
“ →

The first survey is mine, and to those who filled out my short — less than 60s — survey on robots in a COIN/SASO environment, thank you. This survey is intentionally brief and focused on a few points. It is not meant to be comprehensive, which have noted. The survey is still open, so please take it if you haven’t already. The results will be compiled this weekend for a presentation next week. I will post the results here in the next 10 days.

The second survey is what happens when you have a sponsor. Money makes for a bigger survey with more depth. As part of a research project under a grant from the Army Research Office, Dr. Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Tech Mobile Robot lab is conducted a comprehensive (15-25 minutes) survey on the Use of Robots Capable of Lethal Force in Warfare. Take his survey and pass along the survey link to others to help fill out his demographics. I’m very interested to see what he comes up with.

Please take a moment to fill out this short survey on armed robots in modern information age conflict. I’ll report the results back here in about 10 days. Feel free to forward the survey.

At Danger Room, Sharon Weinberger posted this morning about sims in predicting cause and effect, notably in insurgencies.

Can modeling tools help predict (or forecast) the future? Well, that’s not quite what the Pentagon wants to do, but it’s similar. The goal of “Agent-Based Modeling of Irregular Warfare (ABMIW)” is to use computer models to forecast the consequences of specific actions on, for example, insurgency:

If you’re interested in previous versions of an “Artificial-Life Laboratory for Exploring Self-Organized Emergent Behavior in Land Combat” that doesn’t include sociological variables, you might enjoy EINSTein, the Enhanced ISAAC Neural Simulation Tooklit (ISAAC standing for “Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat”), available here. (Note: this is a “very” old program.)  I’m sure some of you might enjoy playing with this software, if you haven’t already. It’s fascinating to watch the little guys swarm. 

Multiagent-Based Models (MBMs) incorporate complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to simulate and understand. EINSTein looks at two living forces colliding, Blue v Red. Unlike EINSTein, newer versions of MBMs incorporating many sociological dimensions (tribe, sect, gang, etc) aren’t freely available for obvious reasons.

Useful for programming robots, no?

The Autonomous Coordinated Organic Reconnaissance Network speaks for itself.

(Graphic courtesy SWJ, seeded by this post)

My mind is on robots right now (it is actually directly on target of the core mission of this blog… more to be revealed later)… follow me there and watch this clip. The beginning is ok, but my favorite is the last third when they start the “Pacific Islander” dancing.

The category “Unmanned Warfare” on this site is intended to highlight and comment on unmanned & remote warfare. In this context, I will use unmanned vehicles to refer to the collective aerial, ground, and naval vehicles (and vessels). This is better than writing all the acronyms. These may be not, semi-, or full-autonomous. They may be controlled on the battlefield or on the homeland by a civilian or a soldier.

The pace of unmanned vehicles, increasing sensors and even increasing autonomy will have a visible impact in the near future on the conduct of war. Just as private military companies affect foreign policy, military effectiveness, and national images through intended and unintended means, unmanned or remotely manned vehicles will alter policy. Perhaps PMC use is a foreshadowing of the mass deployment of unmanned vehicles. I suggest that decision-making modeling for the AI of semi- and full-autonomous unmanned vehicles be based on private security contractor decision-making. Eliminating the outliers of national fanaticism and opportunist mercenary, in the middle we have a skilled operator professionally and wholly committed to the job. However, this operator (as the older veteran, likely with a family) will avoid suicide missions, will have different cost-benefit analysis to live another day.

In the deployment of unmanned vehicles, what are we to expect? There are some hints today, including failures to communicate (including between robot and personnel… hopefully not too reminiscent of RoboCop). What about the Laws of War when an unmanned vehicle, “driven” by a civilian on the battlefield, in the US, or even sitting in an allied country kills a US soldier, a civilian, IGO/NGO personnel, or an allied soldier?

With that, here is a blast of unmanned vehicle news, mostly from the UAV blog, but not all:

• Boeing to Perform Front-Line UAV Support for USMC, Navy
  Boeing contractor support personnel… have been involved in front-line support for their Scaneagle UAVs for some time now, and those UAVs have proven useful in campaigns like Fallujah and al-Anbar, operating from forward-deployed land locations and even from onboard high-speed ships.
• UAVs get smaller: the Micro Air Vehicle nears readiness
  As each new conflict redefines war based on the technologies coming of age at that time, the Iraq campaign has seen the coming of age of the UAV in its many wonderous forms. It is the most-requested capability among combatant commanders and in the last 18 months, UAV numbers in Iraq have jumped from fewer than 100 to more than 400 and there are now nearly 600 UAVs in the Afghanistan and Iraq theatres. Even more interesting is the dizzying array of unmanned aircraft used in traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance UAV roles.
• Israeli UAV Fires Upon Own Troops
  The IAF revealed on Tuesday that it had prevented a severe disaster on the previous day when it had halted the fire that a UAV was shooting at Israeli troops.
• Unexpected Consequences of UAVs
  ‘While the U.S. Army has come to use its growing number of UAVs with great success, there have been negatives as well. For one thing, there are so many UAVs in the air, that the U.S. Air Force, which manages use of air space for all three services, has sometimes declared that even the smallest UAVs have to file flight plans. This usually means planning your UAV use 24 hours in advance. Ground combat commanders do not always have the luxury of 24 hours notice, and often find themselves calling for army helicopters or air force jets, already in the air, to please stop by and give them some top-down views of a ground battle in progress. These restrictions tend to be in effect only in busy areas like metropolitan Baghdad.’
• UAV Planes’ tiny brains could save lives in war
  The brains of the Mosquito, as with all unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is a tiny electronic circuit board called an autopilot that controls the flight and the camera. The Mosquito’s autopilot comes from Winnipeg-based MicroPilot Inc., a leader in a suddenly hot market.
• Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies
  A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday (March 2006) heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring.

More to come later.

Related to unmanned vehicles is unmanned warfare, the title of this category. Below are is remote sensing link:

• Mini-Sensors for "Military Omniscience"
  Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it’s beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon’s answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to “detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments.” It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”