By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity
SIMI VALLEY, Calif., November 8, 2015 — Defense Secretary
Ash Carter and Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work are wrestling the future to
the ground to give the nation an advantage over adversaries and Work says their
best new idea is to team troops up with machines.
Speaking last night at the closing session of the annual
Reagan National Defense Forum here in Southern California, Work and moderator
Thom Shanker discussed a way forward for DoD called the Third Offset Strategy.
“Offset strategies [involve] great powers,” Work said, “and
are focused on one thing … and that is making sure that our conventional
deterrent is absolutely as strong as possible” to seriously lower the chances
that America would go to war.
Work said the United States has never tried to match a great
power tank for tank, ship for ship, airplane for airplane or person for person.
“Generally what we try to do is offset,” he added, noting
that the first national offset took place in the 1950s when the nation could
use tactical nuclear weapons to deter a conventional attack on Western Europe.
Great Powers
The second took place in the early to mid-1970s, Work said,
when the Soviet Union gained strategic nuclear parity with America and the
United States went after conventional weapons with near-zero miss -- or
precision-guided -- weapons.
Offsets are focused on the operational level of war, or
campaigns, he added, and on conventional deterrence against great powers.
Work used international relations theorist John
Mearsheimer’s definition of great powers in the nuclear age as those that have
nuclear deterrents that can survive a nuclear strike and that also have
formidable conventional forces.
But offsets are not just about technology, he added.
“There's always a strong technological component but it is
strategy based … ” Work said. “You also want operational and organizational
constructs that give you an advantage and an offset against your adversaries,
who might outnumber you.”
Third Offset Strategy
Over the past 12 months of effort on elements of the third
offset strategy, Work said the department has begun to make investments guided
by the strategy and that the big idea right now for deterrence is human-machine
collaboration and combat teaming.
The deputy secretary said such collaboration and combat
teaming has five basic building blocks and is based on two major efforts.
One was an offset-strategy initiative called the Long-Range
Research and Development Program that focused, Work said, on “how to go up
against great powers in a conventional sense when they have as many guided
weapons as you do and a home-field advantage.”
The second effort was a Defense Science Board Summer Study
on Autonomy, he said.
“To a person, [everyone] on the summer study said we can't
prove it but we believe we are at an inflection point on artificial
intelligence and autonomy,” the deputy secretary added.
Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy
Learning machines are an example of technology that can help
turn AI and autonomy into an offset advantage, Work said.
“Learning machines … literally will operate at the speed of
light. So when you’re operating against a cyber attack or an electronic attack
or attacks against your space architecture or missiles that are screaming in at
you at Mach 6,” he said, “you [need] … a learning machine that helps you solve
that problem right away.”
Another building block, human-machine collaboration, was in
the news in 1997 when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry
Kasparov -- the first defeat of a current world chess champion to a computer
under tournament conditions.
Then in 2005, Work said, “two amateur chess players using
three personal computers won $20,000 in a chess tournament against a field of
supercomputers and grandmasters.”
Human-Machine Collaboration
As chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote about
human-computer chess playing in a recent review of a book about AI and the
human mind, “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a
computer was overwhelming.”
Work says, “The way we will go after human-machine
collaboration is allowing the machine to help humans make better decisions
faster.”
Automated systems use algorithms based on old data, he said,
noting that the coming technology assumes a thinking adversary who is
constantly changing strategies.
The best example of such collaboration is the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, he added.
“The F-35 is not a fighter plane, it is a flying sensor
computer that sucks in an enormous amount of data, correlates it, analyzes it
and displays it to the pilot on his helmet,” Work said.
Machine-Assisted Operations
“We believe and we say it over and over,” he added, “this
fifth-gen fighter, [even though] it can't out-turn an F-16 or … go as fast, we
are absolutely confident that F-35 will be a war winner … because it is using
the machine to help the human make better decisions.”
Work said the third building block is machine-assisted human
operations.
He added, “Assisted human operations, wearable electronics,
making sure that our warfighters have combat apps that help them in every
single possible contingency -- we can do this.”
The fourth building block is human-machine combat teaming
and the fifth is autonomous weapons, the deputy secretary said.
Take those five building blocks and put them on a single
network where everything is learning at the speed of light, and that is the
reconnaissance strike complex of the 21st century, Work said.
A Period of Experimentation
Achieving this important advantage will take some time, he
added.
“Essentially we said here's our second offset strategy in
1975. Fifteen years later in the Gulf War there were more bass fishermen in the
United States who had GPS receivers than people in the U.S. military,” Work
said.
At the time only a small segment of the U.S. force was
configured to fire guided munitions, he said, noting that the department today
is in a period of experimentation.
The enduring value proposition of the third offset strategy,
Work explained, “is that if we force … an adversary that is an authoritarian
power to adopt the offset strategy’s organizational and operational concepts,
that will cause changes in their military and ultimately their society that
will make it less likely that we will fight against each other.”
But Work said the offset strategy isn’t all about
technology.
“The No. 1 advantage we have is the people in uniform and
our civilian workforce and our defense industrial base and the contractors who
support us,” he added.
An iCombat World
In this offset, young officers who have grown up in an
iCombat world will have ideas that senior officers simply won’t be able to
emulate, Work said.
That’s not an indictment, he added, noting that Yann LeCun,
Facebook’s artificial-intelligence director, says old people’s creativity is based
on information they know and young people’s creativity is based on information
they don't know, allowing for a little wider exploration.
“What will happen is that our senior military officers who
know combat at the campaign level, something our junior officers don't know,
will be able to make the leap to the operational concepts and organizational
constructs,” the deputy secretary said.
If “we can tap into the captains and majors and lieutenants
who have grown up in this world and we can manage that creativity together
[with older, more experienced officers],” then great results can be produced,
Work said.
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