During the ceremony, Intel Corp used over 1, specially designed drones to light up the night sky in a never-before-seen swarm that danced and maneuvered in formations that included a giant moving snowboarder, an enormous flying dove, and the iconic Olympic rings. Commercially available, high-performance, small unmanned aerial systems can be easily modified to carry a variety of lethal payloads, identify targets at long ranges and carry out a wide range of attacks.
The exponential advance of technology and the emergence of low-cost manufacturing has enabled state and non-state actors to develop both fixed and rotary wing small unmanned systems. These are effective counters to U. While the current force is still useful in the short term, senior Navy and Marine Corps leaders must strike a balance between continuing to pursue traditional capability sets and developing innovative solutions to defeat future threats. Just as the massed formations of soldiers during World War I presented an ideal target for the newly invented machine gun, existing and programmed land, sea, and air platforms are optimized targets for the game-changing weapon of the future: Current Marine Corps warfighting platforms consolidate firepower, communication, and manpower in a single target that can be easily destroyed by inexpensive, easy-to-produce ground, air, or subsurface drones.
Like a swarm of bees, a colony of fire ants, or a school of piranha, swarm technology overwhelms conventional defenses us military robot horse iconic to defeat linear attacks from incoming rockets, missiles, or torpedoes.
The threat is already here. Those attacks, however, employed approximately a dozen drones, which hardly qualifies as a swarm. As technology develops and proliferates, swarms of hundredsif not thousands, are a us military robot horse iconic expectation.
The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning combined with additive manufacturing will represent a quantum leap in the character of future conflicts. Blast or fragmenting defenses against multi-engine swarming drones may prove moderately effective, but will be difficult to employ. If a swarm attacks an enemy position from every direction, defensive weapons must also fire in every direction and any friendly personnel or non-combatants inside the effective range of those defensive weapons would also likely be hit.
Directed energy or microwave defenses show potential as defenses against swarm attacks, but suffer from the same problem regarding friendly and non-combatants. Directed us military robot horse iconic defenses also must contend with the significant power requirements against hardened drones and the time required to track each target. Drones can use visual recognition to destroy aircraft on the flight deck, destroy specific features on the ship, or perhaps fly inside a well or hangar deck and detonate.
Although slightly more expensive, undersea drones can be used to mimic submarine acoustics, harass adversary shipping, or sink enemy vessels at great distances. The approach of helicopters on land or sea can be met with drones designed to foul the rotors or fly into engine intakes, similar to a bird strike.
This has already played out in the sky above New York City and in South Carolinawith the drone in the latter case likely responsible for causing a helicopter crash.
Tracked or wheeled vehicles can be immobilized and destroyed by task-organized anti-armor swarms followed by micro drones programmed to identify and attack U. Any drones not destroyed in an attack can be recalled and consolidated into another swarm, or they can land and wait for more targets to appear before striking again.
Once fully integrated with reconnaissance platforms, this technology could make manned combat missions ashore prohibitively costly or viable only after the vast majority of machine-based threats have been neutralized. Even in conflicts among proxies, networked learning and access to components whether acquired, adaptively manufactured, or industrially produced will permit adversaries to exploit capabilities that can catastrophically impact U.
All this technology either already exists or will exist in the next few years. Actors no longer us military robot horse iconic a us military robot horse iconic military research and production capability to develop and utilize this emerging technology, as was demonstrated in Syria. However, countries that do possess a robust military industrial base can expect exponential growth in the sophistication and effectiveness of swarms in the coming years.
To stay ahead of the swarm of the future, senior leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps need to take at least six steps. Develop an Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Navy and Marine operating concepts are beginning to address the gaps in operational design for conventional forces in the near term, but not enough is being done to develop new concepts based on the eventual dominance of swarm tactics.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the capabilities of emerging technology and current operational concepts such as Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment. Leadership must prioritize the development of a service and department-level artificial intelligence strategy that incorporates the way emerging technology is expected to affect operations across us military robot horse iconic, sea, air, space, and cyber domains.
Moreover, senior leaders must find ways to better partner with private industry as well as recruit and retain data and computer scientists, operations research analysts, and other necessary talent. To achieve a dominant swarm and anti-swarm capability, the Navy and Marine Corps will have to develop us military robot horse iconic command structures, military occupational specialties and operational authorizations. Us military robot horse iconic doing so, it is important not to confuse adaptation with innovation.
Adaptation means executing the same mission sets more efficiently, while innovation creates entirely new missions and eliminates the need for old ones.
At a time when adversaries are rapidly advancing in new technology development, the opportunity costs for investing in outdated capabilities are unacceptably high. Funding the areas of machine learning, coordination and control of swarms, additive and expeditionary manufacturing including the printing of warheadsand defense and deception against adversary swarms offer a much more significant return on investment.
Senior leaders have the opportunity to make a generational leap in capability rather than mere incremental improvements to current joint force capabilities. The challenge is to achieve an acceptable level of programmatic and operational risk while making this leap.
Moreover, us military robot horse iconic active programs, even if they are obsolete, will require a herculean effort. Large investments in old systems and equipment tend to prevent the pursuit of fresher, more relevant ones, especially given congressional involvement and an often emotional attachment to sunk equipment costs and the status quo.
The Marine Air Ground Task Force of the future must develop a viable mix of unmanned and manned capabilities. The naval service should conduct significant analysis, wargames, simulation, experimentation, and force on force exercises to determine the impact emerging technology will us military robot horse iconic on air, land, and sea capabilities. This analysis should feed into a roadmap that critically examines at what point current tactics and equipment are no longer survivable or relevant, and whether are they worth continued investment.
New classes of survivable air, land and sea platforms will be needed to deliver U. Instead of supercarriers of manned aircraft, smaller carriers of unmanned aerial systems will be cheaper, us military robot horse iconic resilient, and able to generate and sustain more sorties with fewer aircraft. A flotilla of unmanned missile boats launched from such us military robot horse iconic ship, each capable of distributing and recovering a variety of unmanned systems will epitomize distributed lethality at sea.
A new suite of unmanned land vehicles will also be needed to project U. The Navy and Marine Corps are falling short not only in lethal offensive us military robot horse iconic defensive swarms, but also in platform-level, physical non-lethal tools. The services need a suite of non-lethal capabilities for land and sea to counter malicious behavior that falls below the threshold of lethal armed conflict.
Operational commanders and us military robot horse iconic partners need more flexible options between an overwhelming lethal response and mere offensive posturing. For example, the ability to disable ships at sea without harming the crew or stop vehicles or construction equipment without destroying them enables a range of responses and reduces the likelihood of escalation to lethal conflict. The more the military insists on focusing only on lethal tools, the less likely it will be able to prevent the conditions that usher in their use.
The Navy and Marine Corps need a suite of unmanned, non-lethal capabilities for land and sea, along with an updated operating concept and a policy for employing these systems. Establish a Permanent Experimentation Force. The services also need a dedicated experimentation force will to increase the pace of innovation. The current approach of forcing concept or equipment experimentation to compete against the training needs of deploying units has so far proven unproductive. Using operational units to test new equipment in a temporary or ad-hoc way may have incrementally improved understanding, but us military robot horse iconic necessary rapid force-level changes have not resulted.
The Marine aviation community has an effective model for concept testing, operational instruction, and fleet introduction that can be adapted for the other elements of the Marine Air Ground Task Force.
Autonomous systems may, sooner rather than later, be the only systems able to reliably penetrate and remain inside the range of those enemy weapons. The Marine Corps should not attempt to force ill-fitting legacy capabilities into future plans solely because they have been used in the past or because the service has a program of record and nostalgia for them. The National Defense Strategy rightly recognizes that organizational and technological innovation is essential for continued U.
Navy and Marine Corps team finds itself at an inflection point similar to where U. The advances in tanks, machine guns, and weaponry during the war made it clear that there would be no more glamorous horse-mounted cavalry charges. Yet despite the revolution in mechanized and motorized warfare, some refused to accept the obsolescence of the horse. As late asMajor General John K.
Us military robot horse iconic Navy and Marine Corps leaders embrace the potential and future dominance of swarms, or will they continue buying more saddles? David Pinion is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U. The views expressed here are his alone and do not reflect those of the U.
Understanding the Challenge Just as the massed formations of soldiers during World War I presented an ideal target for the newly invented machine gun, existing and programmed land, sea, and air platforms are optimized targets for the game-changing weapon of the future: A Solution to the U.
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