March 28, 2021
While it is time to move ahead with advanced robotics in war, governments are yet to answer ethical questions and biased disadvantages that robotic warfare leverages.
Category: military – Page 128
The speed at which new autonomous weapons are being created and improved is impressive but also staggering.
By Kris Osborn
Drone fleets, robotic vehicles, and multi-domain manned-unmanned connectivity are changing the future of warfare.
Spot was apparently being used for reconnaissance.
Pictures of the exercises were shared on Twitter by France’s foremost military school, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. It described the tests as “raising students’ awareness of the challenges of tomorrow,” which include the “robotization of the battlefield.”
A report by French newspaper Ouest-France offers more detail, saying that Spot was one of a number of robots being tested by students from France’s École Militaire Interarmes (Combined Arms School), with the intention of assessing the usefulness of robots on future battlefields.
Boston Dynamics’ vice president of business development Michael Perry told The Verge that the robot had been supplied by a European distributor, Shark Robotics, and that the US firm had not been notified about this particular use. “We’re learning about it as you are,” says Perry. “We’re not clear on the exact scope of this engagement.” The company says it was aware that its robots were being used with the French government, including the military.
I don’t see why he needed a NASA contract when he could easily pay for this himself, but whatever.
Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, was one of three companies to land the Pentagon contract for a rocket powered by a nuclear reactor.
Bill Whitaker reports on the Pentagon projects that helped combat COVID-19 and may help end pandemics forever.
FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLIR) announced it has won a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to rapidly develop novel fabrics with embedded catalysts and chemistries that can fight and reduce chemical and biological threats upon contact.
The revolutionary fabrics will be incorporated into protective suits and other equipment such as boots, gloves, and eye protection that can be worn by troops on the battlefield, medical experts, healthcare workers, and more. FLIR received $11.2 million in initial funding for the potential five-year effort worth up to $20.5 million, including options.
The goal of DARPA’s Personalized Protective Biosystems (PPB) program is to reduce the substantial weight and physiological burden of current Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) so soldiers and other specialists can better perform their tasks. PPB will combine novel, lightweight protective materials with new prophylactic medical technologies that mitigate chemical and biological threats at vulnerable tissue barriers, notably the eyes, skin and lungs.
Although universal fault-tolerant quantum computers – with millions of physical quantum bits (or qubits) – may be a decade or two away, quantum computing research continues apace. It has been hypothesized that quantum computers will one day revolutionize information processing across a host of military and civilian applications from pharmaceuticals discovery, to advanced batteries, to machine learning, to cryptography. A key missing element in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum systems, however, is meaningful metrics to quantify how useful or transformative large quantum computers will actually be once they exist.
To provide standards against which to measure quantum computing progress and drive current research toward specific goals, DARPA announced its Quantum Benchmarking program. Its aim is to re-invent key quantum computing metrics, make those metrics testable, and estimate the required quantum and classical resources needed to reach critical performance thresholds.
“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Building a useful quantum computer is really hard, and it’s important to make sure we’re using the right metrics to guide our progress towards that goal. If building a useful quantum computer is like building the first rocket to the moon, we want to make sure we’re not quantifying progress toward that goal by measuring how high our planes can fly.”
Electronic oscillators lie at the heart of virtually all microelectronic systems, generating the clock signals used in digital electronics and the precise frequencies that enable radio frequency (RF) sensors and communications. While an ideal oscillator provides a perfect signal at a single frequency, imperfections degrade the spectral purity of real-world components.
Such impairments, broadly quantified as phase noise, ultimately limit the performance of many military radars and commercial 5G systems. The issue is becoming increasingly burdensome as the airways become more congested and defense needs evolve.
Based on the recommendations of weather forecasters, Operation Overlord’s June 5 D-Day was postponed due to a weather front. However, the operation was launched one day later when analysis projected a short period of acceptable weather. Germany’s forecasters missed this break, and the results were cataclysmic for German forces.
The Korean and Vietnam conflicts highlighted a growing need for “weather superiority” as enemy forces learned to take advantage of periods of bad weather that limited the effectiveness of U.S. air forces. Even in Desert Storm, the first item in planning the daily air operations began with a weather forecast.
Today, superior knowledge of environmental conditions is a force multiplier for all the services in an era where concepts like Joint All-Domain Command and Control are accelerating the speed and precision at which war is conducted. The outcome of future conflict will depend on rapid, accurate and more fully informed decisions. If a commander lacks an assured source of high-fidelity intelligence about the environment, then tools, tactics and timing cannot be aligned to achieve desired outcomes.
NGAD is the Navy’s effort to replace the Super Hornet. Note: It’s a completely separate program from the Air Force’s own NGAD—which recently designed, tested, and flew a secret new fighter jet—and will produce a completely separate plane. The two aircraft will almost certainly be quite different, with the Air Force’s jet more optimized for air superiority. It’s likely the two fighters, developed roughly within the same time period, will share much of the same technology.
The U.S. Navy elaborated on its plans to replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, saying the service’s next strike fighter will “most likely be manned.” The jet will probably fly alongside robotic allies, and remotely crewed aircraft could eventually account for six out of 10 planes on a carrier flight deck.
“As we look at it right now, the Next-Gen Air Dominance [NGAD] is a family of systems, which has as its centerpiece the F/A-XX—which may or may not be manned—platform. It’s the fixed-wing portion of the Next-Gen Air Dominance family of systems,” said Rear Adm. Gregory Harris, the head of the Chief of Naval Operations’ air warfare directorate, during a Navy League event.
The F/A-18E/F Super Hornet dominates Navy’s strike fighter fleet, made up of fighters that can execute both fighter and attack missions. Although the Navy is buying the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, it’s only purchasing enough of the planes to replace one or two of the four strike fighter squadrons per deployed aircraft carrier. The Navy believes it needs to replace the Super Hornet and its electronic warfare variant, the EA-18G Growler, in the 2030s.