Leading the Blind: Teaching UCAV to See

July 25, 2013 Guest Author 3 Comments

In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, Sherlock Holmes laments, “You [Watson] see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.” Such is the current lament of America’s fleet of UCAVs, UGV’s, and other assorted U_V’s: they have neither concept nor recognition of the world around them. To pass from remote drones living on the edges of combat to automated systems at the front, drones must cross the Rubicon of recognition.

To See

The UCAV is the best place to start, as the skies are the cleanest canvas upon which drones could cast their prying eyes. As with any surveillance system, the best ones are multi-faceted. Humans use their five senses and a good portion of deduction. Touch is a bit too close for UCAV, smell and hearing would be both useless and uncomfortable at high speed, and taste would be awkward. Without that creative deductive spark, drones will need a bit more than a Mk 1 Eyeball. Along with radar, good examples for how a drone might literally “see” besides a basic radar picture are the likes of the layered optics of the ENVG (Enhanced Night Vision) or the RLS (Artillery Rocket Launch Spotter).

Operators for typical optical systems switch between different modes to understand a picture. A USN Mk38 Mod-2 24MM Bushmaster has a camera system with an Electro-Optical System (EOS), Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR), and a laser range-finder. While a Mod-2 operator switches between the EOS and FLIR, in the ENVG, both modes are combined to create an NVG difficult to blind. For a drone, digital combination isn’t necessary, all inputs can be perceived by a computer at one time. Optical systems can also be put on multiple locations on the UCAV to aid in creating a 3D composite of the contact being viewed. Using an array of both EOS and FLIR systems simultaneously could allow drones to “see” targets in more varied and specific aspect than the human eye.

For the deployment of these sensors, the RLS is a good example of how sensors can “pass” targets to one another. In RLS, after target data is collected amongst audio and IR sensors, flagged threats are passed to the higher-grade FLIR for further designation and potential fire control solution. A UCAV outfitted with multiple camera systems could, in coordination with radar, pass detected targets within a certain parameter “up” to better sensors. Targets viewed in wide-angle scans (such as stealth aircraft only seen) can be passed “down” to radar with further scrutiny based on bearing. UCAV must be given a suite of sensors that would not merely serve a remote human operator, but for the specific utility of the UCAV itself that could take advantage of the broad-access of computer capabilities.

And Observe

In-game models for real-life comparison.

However, this vast suite of ISR equipment still leaves a UCAV high-and-dry when it comes to target identification. Another officer suggested to me that, “for a computer to identify an air target, it has to have an infinite number of pictures of every angle and possibility.” With 3-D rendered models of desired aircraft, UCAV could have that infinite supply of pictures with varying sets of weapons and angles of light. If a UCAV can identify an aircraft’s course and speed, it would decrease that “range” of comparison to other aircraft or a missiles by orienting that contact’s shape and all comparative models along that true motion axis. Whereas programs like facial recognition software build models from front-on pictures, we have the specifications on most if not all global aircraft. Just as searching the internet for this article, typing “Leading” into the search bar eliminates all returns without the word. In the same way, a UCAV could eliminate all fighter aircraft when looking at a Boeing 747. 3-D modeled comparisons sharpened by target-angle perspective comparisons could identify an airborne contact from any angle.

A UCAV also need not positively identify every single airborne target. A UCAV could be loaded with a set of parameters as well as a database limited to those aircraft of concern in the operating area. AEGIS flags threats by speed, trajectory, and other factors; so too could a UCAV gauge its interest level in a contact based on target angle and speed in relation to the Carrier Strike Group (CSG). Further, loading every conceivable aircraft into an onboard database is as sensible as training a pilot to recognize the make and model of every commercial aircraft on the planet. A scope of parameters for “non-military” could be loaded into a UCAV along with the specific models of regional aircraft-of-interest. The end-around of strapping external weapons to commercial aircraft or using those aircraft as weapons could be defeated by the previously noted course/speed parameters, as well as a database of weapons models.

Breaking Open the Black Box

The musings of an intrigued amateur will not solve these problems; our purpose here is to break open the black box of drone operations and start thinking about our next step. We take for granted the remote connections that allow our unmanned operations abroad, but leave a hideously soft underbelly for our drones to be compromised, destroyed, or surveilled at the slightest resistance. Success isn’t as simple as building the airframe and programming it to fly. For a truly successful UCAV, autonomy must be a central goal. A whole bevy of internal processes must be mastered, in particular the ability of the UCAV to conceive and understand the world around it. The more we parse out the problem, the more ideas we may provide to those who can execute them. I’m often told that, “if they could do this, they would have done it”… but there’s always the first time.

Matt Hipple is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy. The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.

Events

CIMSEC Membership Outlook

July 24, 2013 Guest Author Leave a comment

As I conduct turnover with Chris Barber, CIMSEC’s new 2013-14 Director of Membership, I have found it exciting to reflect on the growth that CIMSEC has seen in the last year.

Upon assuming the inaugural position of Membership Director in June of last year, I found CIMSEC to have a whopping 30 ‘official’ members. But this was not an insurmountable challenge: Scott C-P, Matt Hipple, and other CIMSEC leaders were actively engaged through social media and other outlets. There were many great candidates corresponding and participating in our discussions. The great aspect of CIMSEC is that we have been very open and flexible to the topics discussed here, and I personally believe that this fundamental strength has drawn in many more interested participants and willing blog posters. This angle of CIMSEC, along with social gatherings, membership recruiting, social media feeds, hat-tips from other bloggers, CIMSEC published works, and down-right good articles – has expanded membership to an exciting level.

In the last year, CIMSEC has grown by 99 members (I could not hold out writing this post any longer for that milestone 100) and the physical locations and areas of expertise are vast:

Ladies & Gentlemen, Please start a line to the left!

USN, USNR, and USMCR
USN and USCG (Retired)
E-5 to 4-star Admirals
CEOs of various companies
PhDs, MBAs, Masters, Bachelors, and Midshipmen
Contractors, Government Employees, and Congressional Aides
International Military Officers (Philippines, Cameroon, Uruguay, Norway, Poland, Royal Navy)
US and International Organization members (UN, ACC, EIAS, ICWA, NOAA, USNI, Institute for Security Policy, and Pew Trust)
Other international locations: Japan, Canada, Germany, Australia, Lebanon, India, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Hong Kong, R.O.K, Djibouti, and New Caledonia)

Despite this great growth of membership, we know that there are many more interested CIMSEC followers out there. They may just need a slight incentive or urging to apply for membership and start participating. I ask all current members to reach out to their family, friends, and co-workers who have the potential of providing valuable articles, counter-points, or comments to consider joining CIMSEC – strengthen the discussion of International Maritime Security.

I know Chris will do an outstanding job as the new Director of Membership and with our member’s assistance I believe we can see membership increase threefold in the next year.

A.J. “Squared-Away” is a husband, father, U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer, and is currently a joint planner at a US combatant command. He has completed multiple deployments to the Mediterranean Sea and Arabian Gulf on patrol boats, destroyers, aircraft carriers and aboard an Iraqi oil terminal. He is a graduate of the USMC School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW) and holds two master’s degrees from Marine Corps University. The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.

Strategic Outlook

Does Seapower Pay?

July 23, 2013 Guest Author 2 Comments

Daniel Drezner is an International Politics professor at Tufts University with an informative and entertaining blog at Foreign Policy. He recently published an article in the journal International Security asking whether “military primacy yields direct economic benefits.”

This is an important issue for seapower advocates, with organizations like the U.S. Navy traditionally claiming that American dominance at sea is part of the bedrock foundation of a smoothly running international economic system. The 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower argues that the “maritime domain…carries the lifeblood of a global system that links every country on earth,” and that “United States seapower will be globally postured to secure our homeland and citizens from direct attack and to advance our interests around the world that relies on free transit through increasingly urbanized littoral regions.”

The 2010 Naval Operations Concept similarly envisions U.S. naval forces that “effectively conduct the full range of maritime security operations and are instrumental in building the capacity, proficiency and interoperability of partners and allies that share our aspiration to achieve security throughout the maritime commons.”

The current strategy document for the U.S. sea services, a Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower — The current strategy document for the U.S. sea services, *A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower*

Drezner examines three potential ways in which a state’s military primacy could provide tangible benefits:

1. Geoeconomic Favoritism: “Military preeminence” may spur private sector investment both domestically and from abroad, as “all else being equal, a country is far more likely to attract foreign capital if it is secure from foreign invasion.”

2. Geopolitical Favoritism: Weaker states may “provide voluntary economic concessions to the dominant security actor.”

3. The Public Goods Benefit of Military Primacy: Military “primacy facilitates the creation of global public goods” with “a wide range of international relations theorists” claiming “that a liberal hegemon is a necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of an open global economic order.”

The particular potential benefits of U.S. seapower in its current, globally-deployed state would most likely be realized in terms of the “Public Goods Benefit.” The particular hypothesis which Drezner is trying to test here is whether “by acting as a guarantor of the peace in hotspots such as the Middle East and Pacific Rim, the United States keeps the international system humming along-which in turn yields significant benefits to the United States itself.”

In terms of concrete examples of how the U.S. military has secured the global economy by protecting the sea-lanes, Drezner cites naval operations in the Middle East, an area of both political instability and significant economic importance due to the need to securely ship oil out of the region as well as the recent multi-national campaign against Somali pirates. However, he then proceeds to question whether naval or military power can be credited with minimizing energy market disruptions or defeating piracy, pointing out that “world oil markets” can be relatively resilient and are capable of adjusting to severe price changes, and that “improved private security on board” merchant shipping may have been a more important factor in the decreased threat from Somali pirates. With his focus being military power in general, however, he does not provide a detailed discussion of seapower’s role in the global economy other than his brief discussion of oil and piracy.

Keeping the trucks rollin' — Keeping the trucks rollin’

Drezner claims that if “unipolarity” and military primacy worked as predicted, China should have been “pacified” by the various manifestations of U.S. policy towards the Far East as part of the the 2011 “pivot,” but instead has acted increasingly aggressive towards its neighbors. Unaddressed in this article, yet probably at the top of the list of factors impacting and/or justifying continued U.S. naval hegemony in the Pacific, is the tangible impact of growing Chinese strength afloat. It is often assumed by China-phobes that a China with a strong navy acting assertively in regards to its claims over the surrounding oceans would be bad for the international system (presumably through somehow limiting freedom of navigation in the region), hence justifying continued American military presence in the Pacific. However, there is no empirical evidence to prove that case yet (because it has not happened), and advocates of both sides are forced to rely on hypotheticals. Drezner has asked the right macro-level questions, but it is unclear if there is specific enough data to generate a definitive answer regarding the tangible benefits of specifically American (or Chinese) naval primacy in East Asia.

Drezner concludes that military primacy is an important resource for a Great Power, but that “military preeminence” alone does not produce “significant economic gains.” Although primacy can be an “an important adjunct to the creation of an open global economy and the reduction of militarized disputes and security rivalries,” a hegemon whose economic strength is declining may not be capable of reaping the benefits of the economic system it has established and protected.

While members of the sea services or naval enthusiasts generally embrace the notion that seapower is an important element of protecting the international system and prosperity both at home and abroad as undisputed truth and gospel, the jury is still out on whether military power is always worthwhile in economic terms, and Drezner questions those often reflexive assumptions here. In an era of budget uncertainty, the Navy needs to have good tangible answers to justify its continued existence when these types of questions are asked in the future.

Lieutenant Commander Mark Munson is a Naval Intelligence officer currently serving on the OPNAV staff. He has previously served at Naval Special Warfare Group FOUR, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and onboard USS Essex (LHD 2). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official viewpoints or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

Strategic Outlook

Budget Spin for Dummies

July 22, 2013 Guest Author 14 Comments

Not that we’re calling you a dummy…

In his talk at the U.S. Naval Warfare Development Command last Friday, CDR Bryan McGrath (ret.) made some important assertions about the affordability of our Navy in the context of the Federal Budget. At about the five minute point, he describes what he envisions as the ideal Navy to meet the United States’ security needs and proposes that it would cost about $25 Billion more than what we currently spend. He then goes on to place $25 Billion in context:

$25 Billion Dollars is:

4.6% of the base Defense budget
1.9% of the National budget
0.16% of projected GDP

“…so don’t tell me we can’t afford a bigger Navy,” commands McGrath. “We can afford it. We choose not to have a bigger Navy.”

If we’re going to talk about government spending, it is important to make sure we’re all reading from the same sheet of music. DoD advocates like CDR McGrath assert that the portion of national treasure we’re willing to invest in Defense is approaching record lows. Defense spending critics suggest that even in spite of cuts, we are throwing more money at DoD than at almost any point in history, to include the heights of the Cold War arms races. They are all correct; whether we are at a low point or a high point in defense spending is entirely subject to the frame of reference. Which reference we choose will invariably be determined by our motives.

Discussions of Defense spending are generally framed in one of three ways:

1. Defense Spending as a Function of Dollars Spent

It’s hard to argue with cold hard cash. The money we spend on Defense has grown at an accelerating rate over the last century:

However convincing this graph is at first glance, you’ll find that only the most hyperbolic of critics of Defense spending will rest their argument on it. It is based on nominal or “actual” dollars spent, which do not account for the erosion of purchasing power that is inflation. We can correct for inflation by selecting a “base year” and then adjusting the dollar amounts at every other point to the purchasing power of an equivalent sum of money in the base year. Using 2014 as the base year, our corrected graph of defense spending looks more like this:

The blue line indicates what Defense spending would have been if the purchasing power of a dollar had always been equal to its 2014 value. While spending has oscillated pretty widely, the overall trend is positive: the price, presumably, of steady growth in things like technological complexity, personnel benefits, veteran health care, and administrative overhead. One major source of contention when framing arguments around inflation-adjusted dollars is exactly which rate of inflation is correct. Economists do not all agree, and DoD claims yet another rate of inflation from the economy at large due to a variety of factors.

2. Defense Spending as a Function of Resource Allocation

We’ve all seen a graph like this:

We can’t even balance the budget, and we’re spending over half of it on the military!? Preposterous!

Are we really, though? Pay attention to the title: this graph shows “Discretionary Spending,” which is that portion of the federal budget that is determined by Congress through an appropriations bill. This is opposed to “Mandatory Spending,” which is the outlay of government funds required by law. If we include Mandatory Spending, allocation of federal spending will look more like this:

Mandatory Spending is effectively made up of entitlement programs. It is important to point out that in the fiscal sense, “entitlement” is not the sense of privilege attributed to Millennials by the previous generations. Entitlement is a technical term which describes expenditures which are not limited by any budget, but instead are a function of the number of people who qualify for them and the expenses incurred by the services promised. Because they don’t need to be re-approved every year, unlike discretionary spending, most entitlement expenditures will grow uncontrollably without a change in the law.

3. Defense Spending as a Function of Economic Output

Described in terms of Gross Domestic Product, or the total economic output of the United States, Defense spending looks something like this:

The graph illustrates a downward trend in economic capacity committed to the military. Most DoD budget people will describe Defense spending in terms of GDP, ostensibly because it most accurately conveys economic burden. Bryan McGrath described his ideal Navy in terms of dollars, and then convincingly justified his position in terms of GDP.

Critics argue that using GDP as a yardstick merely serves the purposes of those who would seek more money by obfuscating actual dollar costs. Making sense of what is spent is made even more difficult by fluctuations in the denominator: GDP can vary wildly from year to year, which would appear on this graph as drastic changes to Defense spending. Yet another argument against measuring spending by GDP is that GDP is an estimate at best, and there is much disagreement between economists as to how it should be measured.

Bringing it All Together

If we lay out the various methods of describing Defense spending on the same graph, we get something like this:

As you can see, Defense spending can look completely different depending on how it is framed. It can be described as a dollar cost, a portion of federal spending, or a portion of economic output. Each perspective illustrates important information that the others fail to address, and each one can be abused to promote an agenda.

LT Will Spears, USN, is an Active duty submariner; post-JO shore duty type. His last tour was aboard a WESTPAC Fast-Attack; he is now at NPS focusing on family and personal development. He is the author of the leadership blog JO Rules.

Note: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the Center for International Maritime Security.

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.