NOVEMBER 2017 EBOOK

The Future of the Army

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Forewordever since 1845, when the Royal Army dispatched its brand-new Telegraph Detachment to the fight in Crimea, electric and later electronic battlefield communications have been a part of war. Today’s battles — and the pseudo-conflicts dubbed hybrid war — are shaped by online maneuvering unimaginable to the 19th century’s light brigadiers.

Tactics and technology are changing far faster than doctrine, laws, and rules. “The next great conflict will play out not just on physical terrain but also in the electrical pulses of cyberspace and the electronic spectrum,” writes Patrick Tucker in this ebook’s first piece, “For the US Army, ‘Cyber War’ Is Quickly Becoming Just ‘War’.” He continues, “But while anonymous enemies like ISIS or Russia’s “little green men” are free to use the digital space as they like, U.S. Army leaders say legal requirements and a pre-digital rules structure complicate their response. That’s why, for the last 18 months, the service has been experimenting with different concepts of operations for the cyber units that will be on the front lines of tomorrow’s fights.”

From these nascent tactics to research into drones and even weapons that will alter their behaviors to match the mental and physical states of the troops who wield them, the future of the Army will reflect an ever-increasing reliance on and exploitation of data and information.

No doubt that some of the twists and turns of the next few years will have us feeling like the bewildered British horsemen taking orders from mysterious clicking devices.

Bradley PenistonDeputy Editor, Defense One

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the next great conflict will play out not just on physical terrain but also in the electrical pulses of cyberspace and the electronic spectrum. But while anonymous enemies like ISIS or Russia’s “little green men” are free to use the digital space as they like, U.S. Army leaders say legal requirements and a pre-digital rules structure complicate their response. That’s why, for the last 18 months, the service has been experimenting with different concepts of operations for the cyber units that will be on the front lines of tomorrow’s fights.

The Army, which already has 30 cyber teams at full operational capability and 11 more at initial operating capability, is aiming to have 41 fully operational teams by year’s end.

For the US Army, ‘Cyber War’ Is Quickly Becoming Just ‘War’

Combat brigades will soon head into firefights with cyber specialists ... and possibly IT lawyers.

Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service soldiers coordinate to tactically enter and clear rooms during an urban operation terrain exercise near Baghdad, Iraq, 2016. us army / alex manne

by patrick tucker

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“As soon as we create them, they are in operational use” in both offense and defense, said Brig. Gen. J.P. McGee, Army Cyber Command’s deputy for operations. “We have Army soldiers delivering effects against ISIS and ISIL.”

Last April, the New York Times reported that military cyber teams are helping Iraqi security forces and Kurdish units by altering ISIS fighters’ electronic messages, “with the aim of redirecting militants to areas more vulnerable to attack by American drones or local ground forces.”

Offensive cyberweapons are a key interest of the new administration. On January 20, President Trump’s team added a “Making Our Military Strong Again” page to the White House’s website: “We will make it a priority to develop defensive and offensive cyber capabilities at our U.S. Cyber Command.”

Yet the definitions of cyber weapons and cyberwarfare are not much more precise today than in 2010 when the Stuxnet worm shut down Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. In 2011, the Pentagon acknowledged a secret list of cyber weapons but did not detail what they were.

Of course, the United States has been using various cyber espionage tactics as part of real operations for years.

In his book @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex, Shane Harris describes the work of NSA hackers embedded with military squads fighting in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

“The U.S. hackers sent fake text messages to insurgent fighters and roadside bombers,” Harris writes. “The messages would tell the recipient, in effect, ‘Meet at this street corner to plan the next attack,’ or ‘Go to this point on a road and plant your device.’ When the fighter got there, he’d be greeted by U.S. troops, or perhaps the business end of a Hellfire missile fired from a drone aircraft thousands of feet above.”

Practicing for Future WarToday, the Army is putting those ideas to work at the National Training Center at California’s Fort Irwin, where soldiers and technical experts are working out formal concepts and plans for deploying cyber weapons on the battlefield. The key is to use them with precision, predictability, and maximum effect, while also defending Army networks and communications.

“What it looks like is the ability to go there and, first off map out the cyber and electromagnetic terrain. So, where is everything? Where are wireless points? Where are the cellphone towers? What does that look like?” McGee told reporters Wednesday at the Pentagon.

The U.S. hackers sent fake text messages to insurgent fighters and roadside bombers. The messages would tell the recipient, in effect, “Meet at this street ocrner to plan the next attack” ... When the fighter got there, he'd be greeted by U.S. troops, or perhaps the business end of a Hellfire missile...

Shane HarrisAuthor of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

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This new dimension of war demands changes to the Army’s tables of organization. To guard tactical networks, for example, every brigade combat team will have a warrant officer and a non-commissioned officer to mind what the Army is calling a “cyber first line of defense.”

The Army’s tactical operations centers will also get a cyber advisor to guide commanders in deploying information weapons, just as the artillery experts guide fires.

Then there are the tactical questions. If the Army’s hackers can gain access to an enemy’s wireless communications points, what should they do to them? McGee said one option is to shut down nearby civilian networks when a U.S. patrol passes through the area, to prevent insurgents from calling in aid. “Now you might ask, why not close it down completely, just put a bomb in it?” he said. “Well, potentially, that’s just a place we can collect [intelligence] later on.”Commanders must also understand the legal consequences of disrupting or bugging a civilian network. Navigating the legal environment can be much more complex than just blasting a target with a howitzer.

“We have to develop a framework and a model that allows us to describe how we can break down these authorities in terms of the effects that they would have,” McGee said. “Originally, the thought of doing cyberspace operations was that everything had to be controlled by

the president. We are discovering that we can have a localized, discriminating effect.”

Currently, even basic and relatively simple actions like mapping the digital networks and nodes around a battlespace can get snarled in bureaucracy.

“How do we visualize that environment also from the electromagnetic spectrum angle, what kind of signatures are we emitting? How can we see the enemy?” said Brig. Gen. Patricia Frost, who runs the Army’s Cyber Directorate.”The commander has [to have] a complete visualization of the domain. That’s really important. That should not take an authority granted by the SecDef.”

The Army has a tactical field manual for cyber and EW effects, but has not yet laid out — at least in public — an explicit policy for how, when, and under what circumstances it will use offensive cyber weapons.The public understanding of these questions hasn’t much advanced since two years ago, when the head of U.S. Cyber Command, Adm. Michael Rogers, has said cyber weapons should be governed by the same rules of engagement as other weapons.

“Remember, anything we do in the cyber arena must follow the law of conflict. Our response must be proportional, must be in line with the broader set of norms that we’ve created over time. I don’t expect cyber to be any different,”

Remember, anything we do in the cyber arena must follow the law of conflict. Our response must be proportional, must be in line with the broader set of norms that we’ve created over time. I don’t expect cyber to be any different.

Adm. Michael RogersHead of U.S. Cyber Command

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Rogers said in 2015.

Future adversaries won’t operate under the same constraints.

“If you don’t have to worry about authorities you can be very effective,” she said. “We look at it differently. The State Department, when we are not at war, we defer to them on information operations. It’s a different approach.”

Cyber operations are also a lot easier if you “don’t look at it through a Western lens in terms of protecting citizens’ privacy rights, also not having to be completely honest in the press,” Frost said. “That ability to use technology and be untruthful, it’s not something we would do. You’re playing on a different field. They already have an upper hand because” they can play by different rules.

The Army plans to run exercises with different legal teams to see if the soldiers of today and tomorrow need extra legal authorities in battle. Getting those proper authorities and related issues ironed out can add delays, Frost acknowledges. She says that she is “satisfied with the pace” of getting those permissions in place but added that it’s “never fast enough” if you’re the soldier in the fight.

For McGee, a bigger concern is his inability to know enough his adversary’s capabilities, a unique feature of digital weapons. There

are lot of ways to figure out the size of a conventional force, and the number of soldiers and bombs it has. But cyber capabilities, by virtue of their ethereal nature, are also opaque.

“If you look back at the Cold War, we had a rough idea of what the Warsaw Pact [the Soviet Union and its satellite countries] had in terms of divisions, ships, planes,” McGee said. “We were probably off but not by a tremendous amount. In cyberspace it’s very hard to have that degree of certainty. The possibility of unknowns in this operational space is huge. It’s impossible for us to scale what we know and don’t know.”

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imagine a group of volunteers, their chests rigged with biophysical sensors, preparing for a mission in a military office building outfitted with cameras and microphones to capture everything they do. “We want to set up a living laboratory where we can actually pervasively sense people, continuously, for a long period of time. The goal is to do our best to quantify the person, the environment, and how the person is behaving in the environment,” Justin Brooks, a scientist at the Army Research Lab, or ARL, told me last year.

Tomorrow Soldier: How The Military Is Altering the Limits of Human Performance

Breakthroughs in biometric science mean future troops will fight with weapons that understand them — inside and out.

by patrick tucker

Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service soldiers coordinate to tactically enter and clear rooms during an urban operation terrain exercise near Baghdad, Iraq, 2016. us army / alex manne

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ARL was launching the Human Variability Project, essentially a military version of the reality-TV show Big Brother without the drama. The Project seeks to turn a wide variety of human biophysical signals into machine-readable data by outfitting humans and their environment with interactive sensors.

The Army is not alone. The Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and their special operations forces are also funding research to collect biophysical data from soldiers, sailors, Marines, and pilots. The goal is to improve troops’ performance by understanding what’s happening inside their bodies, down to how their experiences affect them on a genetic level. It’s not exactly genetically engineering soldiers into superhero Captain Americas; the U.S. military insists they have no intention of using biometric data science for anything like the genetic engineering of superior traits. But it’s close. The military is after the next best thing.

If today’s Pentagon leaders get their way, the next generation of fighter jets, body armor, computer systems, and weapons will understand more about the pilots, soldiers, and analysts using them than those operators understand about the machines they are using. The very experience of flying the plane, analyzing satellite images, even firing a gun could change depending on what the weapon, vehicle, or software detects about the person

to whom the weapon is bound. To make this dream real, Pentagon-backed researchers are designing an entirely new generation of wearable health monitors that make Silicon Valley’s best consumer fitness gear look quaint. They’re discovering how to detect incredibly slight changes in focus, alertness, health, and stress — and to convey those signals to machines. Design the boots well enough and the super soldier will arrive to fill them.

Army Research Lab researchers already monitor individual subjects from six months to two years. Brooks wants to expand that to other military training environments, such as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and then to more than a dozen universities. He hopes the data will reveal how people of varied size, weight, height, health, level of alertness, etc., differ in terms of the signals they send out — hence the name

“human variability.” That, in turn, will help researchers gather much more precise information on how different people interact with their environment. The ultimate goal is sensors that can tell the Pentagon how each human soldier performs, or could perform, to their best ability, from battlefield to homefront.

“It’s not just while they’re at work, but also when they go on leave,” says Brooks. “This is continuous, with the highest practical resolution that we can obtain for a long period of time. Hopefully, we would see information

going into many programs” to build future gear. “A greater understanding of natural human variability would then feed pretty much any system that adapts to the person.”

It’s an ambitious undertaking, considering the current limitations of body-worn sensors. Over the past two years, the military bought more than $2 million worth of FitBits and other biomedical tracking devices. But it turns out that off-the-shelf consumer devices aren’t good enough for the military’s biotracking ambitions. So researchers are creating a new class of wearables, based on new research into embedding electronic components into fabric. If the electrodes are too small, the signal is worthless; too big, and they feel like an artificial electric shell separating the wearer from the real world. The connection between the environment and the human must remain seamless.

One application for such sensors is helmets that record brain activity while their wearers do their jobs. An ARL team is preparing for continous electroencephalography, or EEG, by using 3-D printing to create helmets that fit perfectly to each individual soldier’s head. But the military is not eager to embed wires and metal into gear that’s meant to protect a soldier during a massive blast. So the lab is constantly looking at new materials, solutions, and tradeoffs, inching toward sensors that collect information without getting in the way of soldiering. Lab technicians showed me

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one experimental electrode that they were making that was so small and soft to the touch it seemed to have no metal in it at all (they are in fact constructed of nanofibers that conduct electricity, encased in silicon.)

Merged and Monitored: The Fighter Pilot of the FutureThe Air Force, as well, needs a next generation of wearables to help tomorrow’s combat aircraft understand their pilots. Modern fighter jets expose human bodies to physical forces that are still not entirely understood. In 2010, multiple F-22 pilots reported in-flight episodes of confusion, shortness of breath, and skin-color changes — all symptoms of hypoxia, or decreased oxygen in the blood. The reason was speed.

“I pull a G in the airplane, blood has a tendency to collect in some of those dependent areas of the body, like the arms and legs and that,” said Dr. Lloyd Tripp, a program manager for aerospace physiology and toxicology at the Air Force Research Lab’s 711th Human Performance Wing. Two years later, the Air Force began to affix sensors inside the helmets of F-22 pilots to read the blood-oxygen level of their temporal artery.

Around the same time, the Russian military was also seeing confusion and skin-color changes among their pilots who pulled high G-forces, Tripp said. Lacking the same sensor

technology, Russian commanders began to give pilots blood transfusions before their flights. It didn’t work. Russian pilots flying at supersonic speeds suffered hypoxia at greater rates. “They didn’t actually admit that for quite a few years,” he said. Correct diagnoses enabled the U.S. Air Force to read the problem and improve performance.

Beyond helmets, Air Force researchers are working on what they call a comprehensive cognitive monitoring system. This means exploring what sensor technologies work well for what purposes, and what signals can be detected without interfering with or disturbing the pilot — who is, after all, supposed to be flying a combat mission. Depending on what you seek to measure, they found, you may no longer need a physical

sensor on the body. You can now collect incredibly intimate and important internal health data with cameras.

Take cerebral oxygenation, the amount of oxygen in the tissue of specific portions of a pilot’s brain. You can measure this key biophysical signal by shining infrared light on the forehead because the blood in front of the skull is about as oxygenated as the brain tissue behind the skull wall. “If I’m shining that infrared light through the skin, I can see the amount of oxygen within the blood in that tissue. As I increase G-force, I’m decreasing the amount of oxygen that I have here and that decrease in oxygen is directly correlated back to decreases in cognitive function,” said James Christensen, a portfolio manager with the 711th Human Performance Wing.

Another research project configured simple laptop-camera lenses to detect whether a person’s hemoglobin is oxygenated, which makes blood shows up slightly redder, or de-oxygenated, which is slightly bluer. Essentially, this lets you read a person’s heart rate from a distance.

Even your breath says something about your physical state. “The ratio between oxygen and carbon dioxide will change as I become more and more fatigued. That’s important because as I’m fatigued, it takes about 24 hours for me to actually recover 100 percent,” Christensen said. “That fatigue is important because my

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Helmet from Rockwell Collins. rockwell collins

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muscles can’t strain to push the blood back to my head and so the probability of me losing consciousness increases significantly.”

Good sensors can even detect changes in metabolism that indicate weariness and stress before the person notices. When you’re stressed, you exhale fat — or rather, water-soluble molecules called ketones that your liver produces from fat. Stress is detectable by the molecular content of your breath.

“We’re working with some folks over at our materials lab and they have a couple of companies that are looking at sensors that are going to be placed in the [pilot’s oxygen] mask that’ll look at those types of fatigue-related volatile organic compounds,” says Christensen.

Your eyes, too, give you away. “Imagine eye-tracking cameras,” Christensen said.

“If those can collect not just the motion data and the eye-motion data, but those are also getting heart rate and respiration, then we can have no hardware on you at all and still get all the same physiological metrics. A certain amount of cognitive workload tends to correlate pretty highly with stress generically. You can combine heart rate with several other measures to get at workload stress; vigilance, even.”

“We are comparing it, just for reference, with wet medical electrodes on the chest. Under most conditions, you can do about as well as wet electrodes,” he said. The lab is “testing the limits of how far away can you get and still get a reliable signal. It turns out, it’s mostly an optics problem.” That means cameras and lenses alone can detect those subtle changes in stress and attention. It’s just a matter of figuring out which ones.

There are privacy ramifications to collecting so much information. A simple camera can

gather enough biometric data on an individual to understand how small changes in heart rate can be a sign of stress. For a fighter pilot, an analyst, or a soldier, this might help warn of decreased cognitive ability. But among the general population, stress can also be a signal of deception, depending on the context in which that stress expresses itself, such as an interview at a checkpoint. Today’s military-funded biophysical research shows that it’s possible to detect that stress response from 100 meters away, and perhaps even at longer distances. In theory, if you could create a lens that could capture infrared data at sufficient resolution (currently, only a theoretical possibility), you could measure brain tissue oxygenation from low-earth orbit. You could see stress from space.

When performed without a subject’s awareness or permission, biophysical monitoring can be a violation of privacy. But conducted as part of an experiment with knowing volunteers, like elite soldiers eager to understand their bodies and improve their own performance, it becomes a powerful tool. One former special operations training psychologist, who currently works for a major league baseball team, said the elite soldiers he had served with were eager to improve their performance through data. In the Air Force, pilots want to improve how they fly, complete their missions, interact with

A certain amount of cognitive workload tends to correlate pretty highly with stress generically. You can combine heart rate with several other measures to get at workload stress; vigilance, even.

James ChristensenPortfolio Manager, the 711th Human Performance Wing

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their equipment, etc.

Bit by bit, this science is making its way into actual gear and weapons. In the year 2020, Navy SEAL teams and Army Rangers could take down high-value targets while wearing an exoskeleton that’s earned the nickname ‘Iron Man.’ Biophysical sensors will play a big role in the way the suit functions.

In February and March, the Air Force successfully tested a new helmet with

“physiological monitoring capabilities,” as Tripp put it. Its heads-up display shows different information based on how the pilot is feeling and other factors. The goal is to give every pilot a slightly different experience based on their unique physical and mental strengths and weaknesses, as well as their physical condition at the moment. Lab researchers and contractors anticipate it will guide the design of the next U.S. fighter jet, to be launched between 2025 and 2030.

“I may do a really, really good job on a spatial cognitive task where I’m looking at a radar warning display, and maybe James doesn’t,” Tripp said. “The thought, down the road, is to quantify my performance in these decreased physiological conditions from a cognitive perspective, and then use the changes in physiology to make the airplane smart about what kind of help I need.”

Kaleb McDowell, lead of ARL’s Center for

Adaptive Soldier Technologies, said there will be a fundamental give-and-take when designing the weapons of the future. People perform better when their tools are crafted specifically for them. But it’s hard to design for individuals quickly and at the scale of hundreds of thousands of troops. That’s why the design of weapons software today flows toward averages – and mediocrity. “You’re designing it to be simple for everyone,” McDowell said. “A guy that’s great spatially doesn’t use the spatial capabilities on any system that you see today. A woman that has a great math capability isn’t using that in today’s systems because no one’s conceiving of a system that actually relies on that capability. You just design it for everyone to use.”

So McDowell wants to build weapons that adapt to their users. “I want my system to be able to rely on, say a great memory, poor

math capability, and a great spatial capability. I want the system to be able to say, ‘This person’s really creative. How do I tap into that imagination when doing this dull task?’”

But that also affords the military far greater insight into what job or mission they are giving to what soldier. Researchers say that that is a key benefit of the new data-collection programs. “The basic goal here is: we want to get greater precision and accuracy in predicting which people will succeed in particular job areas or missions,” Air Force research psychologist Glenn Gunzelmann said at a National Defense Industrial Association event in March.

You Can Be Programmed and UnprogrammedWhat if the Air Force could use an airman’s personal history to predict how he would perform in his surroundings – even in battle? The military already keeps massive records on troops’ lives that, if structured properly, might furnish a treasure trove of mineable health data.

Col. Kirk Phillips, associate chief for bioenvironmental engineering at the U.S. Air Force, and his colleague Dr. Richard Hartman are pioneering a program called Total Exposure Health. The goal is simple: collect and analyze as much data as possible about what happens to soldiers beyond

In theory, if you could create a lens that could capture infrared data at sufficient resolution (currently, only a theoretical possibility), you could measure brain tissue oxygenation from low-earth orbit. You could see stress from space.

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the battlefield, right down to the kinds of molecules to which they are exposed. And in the military, a lot is recorded.

“In the Air Force, for instance, if you want your house treated for an infestation, that gets recorded,” Hartman said. “We have more opportunity to interact with them [people in the military] in that total environment. Where they live and where they work. It’s something that is better known to us. They receive health care from us. We can measure their exposure at work so we can offer to measure their exposure at home. We can know what exposures are in the environment because nobody is saying, ‘Why are you measuring the amount of chemicals in the soil?’”

If you could take that information and convert it into structured data, algorithms could produce all sorts of new insights about how individuals are interacting with their environment, in real time and in incredible detail. Phillips believes that exposure science has enormous applications in the emerging field of epigenetics research.

Here’s where Phillips’ vision becomes both revolutionary and a controversial.

Epigenetics is what your genes do with the change that you experience. It’s based not on your immutable DNA, but rather on your micro-RNA, the tiny molecules that turn on or off in response to stimuli. Think of a

stress hormone that your body creates in response to an event. When your stress level goes down, new micro-RNA are formed and that controls gene expression in everything from your metabolism to how well you recover from disease. But it’s incredibly difficult to understand these interactions, precisely because everyone’s genetic makeup is different. Phillips hopes Total Exposure Health will yield a fuller picture of how specific sets of experiences affect specific sets of micro-RNA inside a specific soldier.

“Let’s say that external stress happens to be a chemical exposure you may never encounter, or there may not even be a micro-RNA that turns that part of your gene off that it activated. You may have the gene that activates under that exposure, and I may not. You may be very susceptible to a chemical that I have very little susceptibility to,” Phillips said.

Phillips thinks that if he can detect these kinds of things for the military, Total Exposure Health could revolutionize civilian healthcare as well. It offers high specificity on individual health on a scale of billions of people.

“You’ve probably read in the newspaper that they did a big study and they looked at red wine. They tried to see whether there was a health benefit to drinking red wine. Another study says: Maybe. Another study says: Not really. That’s because it’s population-health-based,” he said. “They’re just trying to pick a

You can be programmed and you can be un-programmed.

Col. Kirk PhillipsAssociate Chief for Bioenvironmental Engineering, U.S. Air Force

random population to see a population level change. If you have a gene that’s not very prevalent in a population, then you won’t get a population result of that exposure. Precision health and medicine says, ‘I should understand your gene in a way that I can understand whether your gene is activated by red wine and whether that activation is a health benefit, or health detractor.’”

“Right now, you might go, ‘I’ve read studies about red wine and they seem to be all over the place. I don’t know whether I should do it.’ Health care of the future would look like this: your physician would say, ‘You know what? We looked at your genome. We know that red wine activates in the genome in a way that provides the health benefit. You don’t have the gene, so only drink red wine to the level that you find it pleasurable in social situations.’”

If Phillips is right, Total Exposure to Health

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may ultimately give millions of people an incredibly detailed understanding of how their health choices affect their future. Not just, for example, how much alcohol is unhealthy for an average person of their age, weight, etc. to consume, but how much red meat, caffeine sleep, etc. is good for them specifically.

It is becoming possible to know the health outcome of any action with an accuracy that would have seemed supernatural just a few years ago. The ability to comprehend the probabilities that form the future is the ability to influence it. The interplay of our genes and our experiences, of nature and nurture, moves from the mysterious to the knowable, or at least toward the more knowable.

Designing for the Soldier of Today and TomorrowFor the military, this opens up new choices that are pulled directly from dystopian science fiction: anticipating what soldier is best suited for what assignment or mission.

In 150 BC, the Greek writer Polybius observed that Roman military units were doing something that no known army had done before: keeping careful and consistent records. The Romans could ration grain and wine across soldier classes and types because they had a uniform system of recordkeeping for

just that purpose. The reduction of unpredictability was proving a great battlefield advantage.Imagine a military doing the same thing today but on a level both grander and more granular, where the substance to be rationed is a particular type of soldier personality, or even a specific kind of neurotransmitter.

Again: U.S. military officials are adamant that they are not genetic engineering military personnel and have no plans to do so. But they do not expect potential adversaries to share the same constraint, especially if it offers advantage over the military might of the United States. (Remember the movie Rocky IV? Just consider the Russian government’s recent systemic and secretive use of performance-enhancing drugs to win at the last Winter Olympics. Now imagine a battlefield of soldiers.) It’s a future to either embrace or learn to defend against.

If you were to use biometrics to genetically design a superior military, how would you do it? The outlines are visible today.

Individuals disposed toward risk-taking are probably better suited for particularly dangerous deployments and missions. But those same individuals are poorly suited for other aspects of military life, or less exciting military vocations, according to a landmark 2000 study by U.S. Army Maj. Michael Russell. He proposed that there were two primary military personalities: soldiers who exhibited a need for action and unpredictability (high stimulus-seeking) and people who were attracted to the military because its life offers a high degree of structure and discipline. A military needs both types to perform at peak but therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Military life is incredibly structured. War is unstructured. The stronger your attraction to one set of stimuli on the spectrum, the greater your aversion to the other.

Dr. Josh Hagen of the U.S. Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing briefs then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in 2016. us air force / wesley farnsworth

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“It has long been recognized that a peacetime army differs in many ways from that of an army at war. This is intuitively obvious: destruction of personnel and equipment, even enemy equipment and personnel, is somewhat antisocial,” Russell wrote, achieving a new plateau in euphemism by calling blowing up the enemy “somewhat antisocial.”

“To plan the ultimate defeat of an entire army or nation on the battlefield requires at least a dose of narcissism. Therefore, those personality attributes that make for a war hero are primarily from cluster B. These people do not function as well in garrison. Such individuals thrive on challenge and require constant stimulation,” he wrote.

Merle Parmak, a military psychologist and a former Estonian Army captain, discovered that individuals who perform better in a highly structured, less exciting environment can also have great military careers, but perhaps not on the front lines. To a certain extent, you can train risk-taking soldiers to better accept the rigid boredom of military life away from the action, just as training can help structure-minded military personnel to better cope with the unpredictability of combat. But sticking the wrong person in the wrong job has costs.

Now consider the role that dopamine plays in risk-taking, according to an established and rapidly growing body of research. Dopamine

levels are at least partially controlled by the monoamine oxidase A gene, or MAOA. A specific variant of MAOA called VNTR 2 was correlated with violent antisocial behavior, but only in the context of a stressful life event in adolescence.

If the connection between genetic factors, life experience, and risk-taking can be better observed, can they also be controlled? This is the question that will loom over military leaders in the decades ahead.

The Pentagon’s projections for future conflict are these: highly confusing and stressful urban warfare engagements. Population demographics pushing people into megacities means more door-to-door fighting, and more rules to protect civilians against adversaries who don’t have the same commitments to internal law or norms. War in the future... sucks.

Depending on the intensity level of different conflicts in which the United States is engaged, the level of violence, the effectiveness or the simple ruthlessness of the enemy, the military may feel pressure to keep up with an adversary short on the reservation. Should the United States find itself in such a conflict, Pentagon leadership may feel very differently about genetic engineering to secure better soldier performance, especially doing so might degrade U.S. military advantage at less cost.

Should some future leader – of any country – make the decision to abandon the ethical frameworks we live by today, the tools will be there for him or her to make a swift transition.

But even genetically engineered humans might lose the battle in the end. The pace of war exceeds the speed at which humans can observe what’s happening, conceptualize a strategy, and deliver commands to pull off complicated counter-maneuvers. This is sometimes called the observe, orient, decide, and act, or OODA loop, and it’s moving from a thing that humans do on the battlefield to a thing machines do. If you listen to the Pentagon’s top strategists when they talk about the future, this concern rises repeatedly.

“When you think about the day-trading world of stock markets, where it’s really machines that are doing it, what happens when that goes to warfare?” William Roper, the head of the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, asked at last year’s Defense One Tech Summit. “It’s a whole level of conflict that hasn’t existed. It’s one that’s scary to think about what other countries might do that don’t have the same level of scruples as the U.S.”

Given a choice between losing a major conflict and taking advantage of next-generation science to create a new advantage, it’s not hard to predict what any military will choose.

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the army research lab is turning more of its attention to fighting land wars against far more technologically sophisticated adversaries than it has in the past several decades. In the coming months, the Lab will fund new programs related to highly (but not fully) autonomous drones and robots that can withstand adversary electronic warfare operations. The Lab will also fund new efforts to develop battlefield communications and sensing networks that perform well against foes with advanced electronic warfare capabilities, according to Philip Perconti, who

US Army Seeks Internet-of-Battlefield-Things, Distributed Bot Swarms

After nearly two decades of war against technologically unsophisticated foes, the Army Research Lab is reorienting to counter China and Russia.

by patrick tucker

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became the director of the Lab in June.

After nearly two decades of war against determined but technologically unsophisticated foes in the Middle East, U.S. Army tech has, in some ways, fallen behind that of competing states, according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies on U.S. Army modernization.

For instance, Russia has invested heavily in anti-access / area denial technologies meant to keep U.S. forces out of certain areas.

“There are regions in Donbass where no electromagnetic communications—including radio, cell phone, and television—work,” says the CSIS report. “Electronic warfare is the single largest killer of Ukrainian systems by jamming either the controller or GPS signals.”

In the coming months, the Army Research Lab will set forth on new research programs to counter these A2/AD systems. One thrust will be equipping drones and other autonomous systems with bigger brains and better networking so that they can function even when an enemy jams their ability to radio back to a human controller for direction. That’s the idea behind the Distributed and Collaborative Intelligent Systems and Technology program, which will experiment with robots packed with much more onboard processing.

“Autonomy will play a big role” in future Army concepts of operation, Perconti said. “And it has to be able to function within this contested environment... That’s what ARL is thinking about. More than one network, working together, with as much processing as possible on the node.”

The amount of onboard processing should be sufficient to allow the drone to be highly independent. It would still call home (Perconti, like his peers across the Pentagon, sees no possibility that the U.S. military would allow a robot to kill without a human saying yes.) But the dialogue between the drone and the operator would much more closely resemble an exchange between a commander and soldier, and less a human steering a thing.

Perconti said future Army drones and robots of all types should “be able to function to provide not raw data but information, and, in a sense, decisions about what needs to happen on the battlefield. When you don’t have bandwidth, when you’re under cyber attack, when you’re being jammed. That’s the problem we’re trying to address.”

The Lab will tackle questions such as: when can autonomous systems come together to deliver effects and then disperse? How do you integrate autonomous robots into a war-fighting command?

Electronic warfare is the single largest killer of Ukrainian systems by jamming either the controller or GPS signals.

CSIS Report

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A second program called the Internet of Battlefield Things seeks to put to military use

“the research that’s going on in the commercial space” on distributed sensors and Internet-connected devices.

The CSIS report says that United States already enjoys asymmetrical advantage over adversaries like China and Russia in the way it deploys sensors and networks to maintain a view of the battlefield, or situational awareness. But that’s also part of the problem:

“Recognizing this threat, the Russians have made targeting and countering U.S. situational awareness systems a high priority of its battlefield [electronic warfare] activities, necessitating co-united U.S. investment to address and stay ahead of Russian counters,” the report says.

The challenge for the U.S. Army now is to rethink battlefield sensor networks in a way that acknowledges that rapidly advancing commercial capabilities are eroding U.S.

advantage. The U.S. needs an “understanding of where the knowledge gaps are, the voids,” says Perconti.

What exactly is an Internet of Battlefield Things? The program announcement describes it as a group of largely autonomous sensors or even robotic parts (actuators) and robots “capable of adapting to acquire and analyze data necessary to predict behaviors/activities, and effectuate the physical environment; self-aware, continuously learning, autonomous, and autonomic, where the things interact with networks, humans, and the environment.”

Perconti said he expects ARL to announce contract awards for both programs later this year, allowing them to begin in earnest in fiscal 2018.

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The Army’s doctrine chief says it’s self-defeating to switch off the networks that enable U.S. military superiority.

Forget Radio Silence. Tomorrow’s Soldiers Will Move Under Cover of Electronic Noise

future soldiers will go into battle with their favorite phones, loaded with communications apps, drone steering programs, even offensive cyber weapons — although permission to use specific software and ad-hoc hardware will depend on missions, roles, and ranks. And they’ll move under an invisible shield of electronic noise and decoy information, according to a vision of future Army battlefield networking provided by Army Gen. David Perkins.

As head of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC, Perkins peers into the future and directs the creation of new Army

by patrick tuckerU.S. Army 1st Lt. Andrew Moehl of the 101st Airborne Division radios in his team’s status with help from Spc. Joshua Rachal in Afghanistan in 2010. dod / cpl. carol a. lehman

doctrines like the one scheduled to come out later this year. But it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that a one-size-fits-all approach to troops’ electronics and other equipment slows down buying, training, and even mobility. What’s more, it’s wasteful because soldiers are increasingly training themselves on devices they carry with them.

“Soldiers are coming into the Army. They say, ‘I don’t want the Army BlackBerry, I want my iPhone 20.’ But our networks aren’t necessarily designed that way,” Perkins said Tuesday at TRADOC’s “Mad Scientist” event in Washington, D.C.“We as an Army can

decide, ‘Okay, Private Perkins, I’ll let you download this stuff onto your device but you can’t have this stuff. And then we say, ‘You know what, it’s only going to be able to work for this amount of time and then it shuts off. Meanwhile, General Perkins, you can have all of this stuff on your device, which is maybe more than Private Perkins can have.’”

A version of that system is visible today in the way a lot of Special Operations Forces personnel (and law enforcement) use distributed battlefield intelligence systems from Palantir. Operators and analysts view intelligence pieces differently depending on

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what their permission level is.

Or consider the popular home-sharing service Airbnb, which helps homeowners to rent out space in their houses or apartments based on would-be guests’ reputations, etc. Or the ridesharing app Getaround, which allows a car owner to rent out their car by sending a code to the renter’s phone. The renter can use the code to unlock the doors, start the car, and drive it until the code expires.

Today’s Army is far from that flexible. “I can’t replace all of the tanks in the whole Army every 18 months but I can probably plug a module in and out. That’s not how we design things now; we design the whole tank. The whole enchilada. When you want to update it, you bring it back to depot maintenance,” says Perkins.

Adding this kind of flexibility to the Army’s arms and equipment, Perkins said, would reinforce a key U.S. military advantage: its ability to mobilize and maneuver.Of course, modularity has its limitations. But more and more pieces of equipment connect to networks, creating more modular — think Lego-like — components will become easier.

New weapons and capabilities, things that are going to change quickly, won’t be hardwired into the system, he said. “The other ones that are not going to change that quickly, maybe

they could be more hardwired. We don’t come up with new transmission technology or engine design every 18 months, so that can be hardwired,” he said. “The network that goes into it? The protection systems? Maybe even the lethality mechanisms, they might be one of the things I can plug and play pretty quickly. There’s a module that comes in, I have a new electronic protection package, I can increase the lethality of my weapon system via directed energy or something like that if I plug in this and plug in that.”

Decoys Will Help Secure ’Networked Everything’This mass networking of troops, tanks, ships, planes, satellites, and everything else to achieve what some have called “cross-domain supremacy” has caught hold across the services. Last week, the Navy’s top officer, Adm. John Richardson, said that his service is aggressively working to better connect nearly every platform at sea, on the beach, and in the air. “I want to network everything to everything,” Richardson said at the Navy’s Future Force Expo, in Washington D.C. Interlinking weapons, ships, satellites, and aircraft offers the Navy its best shot of offsetting the threats posed by rivals eroding U.S. advantages, he said.

Arms control watcher Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College, said

Richardson’s enthusiasm made him a touch nervous.

Of course, a battlefield full of soldiers carrying off-the-shelf consumer devices poses plenty of security challenges. For Perkins, the chief one is that the enemy might sniff out electronic emissions and home in on his soldiers’ positions through digital direction finding. But Perkins said the military of the future should resist the urge to simply go quiet.

“Our initial response is: we have to turn off our radios, turn off everything to reduce our [electronic] signature. My point of view is: you’ve defined the problem, but you’re solving it the same way you solved it from an analog point of view... If you turn off all your radios, why have a network? You’re doing what they want you to do. You’re self-jamming.”

He said a better solution might be to bury the signal in noise, decoy emissions, and the like

— similar to the way the campaign of French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly set up honeypot email accounts to divert election hackers.

A similar approach might work for battlefield communications, “Maybe we should go to a needle in a stack of needles? That’s a difficult problem set. What if instead of trying to hide my signal, I try to replicate it 10,000 times,” Perkins said.

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The Kinetic Energy Projectile would be a tungsten warhead that moves at three times the speed of sound, destroying anything in its path.

US Army Exploring ‘Devastating’ New Weapon for Use In War with Russia

Were the United States to go to war with Russia, both sides could draw on deadly weapons that the world has never seen on a battlefield. On the Russian side, there are new and smaller tactical nuclear weapons. To counter them, the U.S. Army is taking another look at a

“devastating” weapon, one first tested by the Air Force and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2013, the Kinetic Energy Projectile, or KEP, a tungsten-based charge moving at three times the speed of sound that can destroy anything in its path.

“Think of it as a big shotgun shell,” Maj. Gen. William Hix, the Army’s director of strategy, plans & policy, said a few weeks ago at the Booz Allen Hamilton Direct Energy Summit.

by patrick tucker

But unlike a shotgun shell, Hix said, the KEP moves at incredible speeds of “Mach 3 to Mach 6.”

Randy Simpson, a weapons programs manager at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, explains that kinetic energy projectiles are warheads that “take advantage of high terminal speeds to deliver much more energy onto a target than the chemical explosives they carry would deliver alone.”

Said Hix: “The way that they [Lawrence Livermore] have designed it is quite devastating. I would not want to be around it. Not much can survive it. If you are in a main battle tank, if you’re a crew member, you

might survive but the vehicle will be non-mission capable, and everything below that will level of protection will be dead. That’s what I am talking about.”

The general emphasized that the exploration was in a conceptual phase and not yet any sort of actual program: “We’re looking at ways we might — key, might — use that capability in one of our existing launch platforms as part of the weapons suite that we have.”

He said the main contender for a launcher would be the Army Tactical Missile System, made by Lockheed Martin.

In October 2013, an Air Force test team

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strapped the projectile to a “sled” on the high-speed test track at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The goal: to get it moving faster than Mach 3 and see how it might actually work in the air. The test showed that the warhead design worked; it also provided data to help simulations and modeling.

Why would the U.S. military, which has put untold billions of dollars into precision weapons over several decades, need such a blunt and terrifying weapon? To counter small Russian nuclear weapons.

“The Russians... maintain their tactical nuclear stockpile in ways that we have not,” Hix said.

Potomac Institute head Philip Karber, who helped write the Pentagon’s Russia New Generation Warfare Study, offered a bit more explanation when Defense One spoke to him in January. While the United States retains just

a few of its once-large arsenal of tactical nukes, Karber estimates that Russia currently has anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 of the weapons.

“Look at what the Russians have been doing in low-fission, high-fusion, sub-kiloton tactical nuclear technology,” he said. “It appears that they are putting a big effort... in both miniaturizing the warheads and using sub-kiloton low-yield warheads.”

Why is that significant? By shrinking the warhead, you can shoot it out of a wider variety of guns, including, potentially, 152-millimeter tank cannons.

“They’ve announced that the follow-on tank to the Armata will have a 152-millimeter gun missile launcher. They’re talking about it having a nuclear capability. And you go, ‘You’re talking about building a nuclear tank, a tank that fires a nuke?’ Well, that’s the

implication,” said Karber.

Hix says that the use of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons, even very low-level ones, is not part of official Russian military doctrine, but it is a capability that they are increasingly eager to show off (and discuss) to intimidate neighbors and adversaries.

“They certainly exercise the use of those weapons in many of their exercises, including the one that participated in the parking of 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers on the Ukrainian border right before [the 2014 invasion of] Crimea. That coercive intimidation is a part of their design,” he said.

And while even Soviet generals may have shied away from using tactical nukes, Blix said, Putin’s military is “a lot more inclined philosophically to see the utility of them.”

A monorail dry-run test at Holloman Air Force Base in July 2013 had no payload and used three representative carbon-epoxy panels mounted on the top and sides of the sled. lawrence livermore national lab

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About the Author

Patrick TuckerTechnology Editor Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The American Legion Magazine, BBC News Magazine, Utne Reader, and elsewhere.