Lifeboat Foundation

The Marines want to unleash swarms of loitering munitions on its adversaries.

It seems some countries are now switching to drone swarms.

From Syria to Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, this new method of military offense has been brutally effective. We are witnessing a revolution in the history of warfare, one that is causing panic, particularly in Europe.

Continue reading “‘Like horse-mounted cavalry against tanks’: Turkey has perfected new, deadly way to wage war, using militarized ‘drone swarms’” »

“During the summer disturbances in Washington, D.C., a top local military police officer asked the D.C. National Guard about deploying two military systems that seem to come out of science fiction. One, the Active Denial System (ADS), makes the target’s skin feel like it’s on fire. The other, called the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), directs intense sound in a narrow cone. The sound is so clear and so powerful that it was nicknamed “the voice of God.” I encountered both systems, one at Quantico, Virginia, the other in Falluja, Iraq. Here’s what I saw.”

DOD has two crowd control systems that are straight out of science fiction. One uses direct energy to create a burning sensation on exposed skin. The other is so loud that it sounds like the voice of God.

Given the possibility of orbital debris, space warfare will be different from what we imagine it to be (from Star Wars and Call of Duty). Watch this video to find out what it will look like!

*Note: I spelled the word “deficit” wrong in my subtitles. Guess I was too sleepy.

Continue reading “The Real Future of Space Warfare” »

Space Force members will be known as “Guardians” from now on, Vice President Michael R. Pence announced Dec. 18.

“Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come,” he said at a Dec. 18 White House ceremony celebrating the Space Force’s upcoming birthday.

As the Space Force turns 1 year old on Dec. 20, abandoning the moniker of “Airman” is one of the most prominent moves made so far to distinguish space personnel from the Air Force they came from. An effort to crowdsource options brought in more than 500 responses earlier this year, including “sentinel” and “vanguard.”

Popular media and policy-oriented discussions on the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into nuclear weapons systems frequently focus on matters of launch authority—that is, whether AI, especially machine learning (ML) capabilities, should be incorporated into the decision to use nuclear weapons and thereby reduce the role of human control in the decisionmaking process. This is a future we should avoid. Yet while the extreme case of automating nuclear weapons use is high stakes, and thus existential to get right, there are many other areas of potential AI adoption into the nuclear enterprise that require assessment. Moreover, as the conventional military moves rapidly to adopt AI tools in a host of mission areas, the overlapping consequences for the nuclear mission space, including in nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3), may be underappreciated.

AI may be used in ways that do not directly involve or are not immediately recognizable to senior decisionmakers. These areas of AI application are far left of an operational decision or decision to launch and include four priority sectors: security and defense; intelligence activities and indications and warning; modeling and simulation, optimization, and data analytics; and logistics and maintenance. Given the rapid pace of development, even if algorithms are not used to launch nuclear weapons, ML could shape the design of the next-generation ballistic missile or be embedded in the underlying logistics infrastructure. ML vision models may undergird the intelligence process that detects the movement of adversary mobile missile launchers and optimize the tipping and queuing of overhead surveillance assets, even as a human decisionmaker remains firmly in the loop in any ultimate decisions about nuclear use. Understanding and navigating these developments in the context of nuclear deterrence and the understanding of escalation risks will require the analytical attention of the nuclear community and likely the adoption of risk management approaches, especially where the exclusion of AI is not reasonable or feasible.

One good reason for the rarity of radical designs is the enormous expense of the research. Engineers can learn only so much by running tests on the ground, using computational fluid-flow models and hypersonic wind tunnels, which themselves cost a pretty penny (and simulate only some limited aspects of hypersonic flight). Engineers really need to fly their creations, and usually when they do, they use up the test vehicle. That makes design iteration very costly.

US Army’s mechanical engineer Dan Baechle carefully planned out a device that doesn’t need batteries, is light-weight and can evenly distribute the load.

The US Air Force has deployed its first automated unmanned air vehicle security system for an airbase.