Category: Uncategorized

(Editor’s Note: The Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to present the following guest blog post by Mr. Jeff Becker. If you are interested in submitting a guest post, please select “Guest Bloggers” from the menu above and review the submission instructions)

“Future conflicts will increasingly emphasize the disruption of critical infrastructure, societal cohesion, and basic government functions in order to secure psychological and geopolitical advantages, rather than the defeat of enemy forces on the battlefield through traditional military means.” National Intelligence Council, Global Trends: Paradox of Progress (January 2017), p. 7

Chairman Dunford frequently describes the future operating environment as presenting military challenges that are increasingly transregional, multidomain, and multifunctional in nature. These changes are driving the need for a Joint Force capable of conducting Globally Integrated Operations – that is, the ability to purposefully bring together the full panoply of joint capabilities in time and space to achieve military tasks under a broad range of strategic goals. The Joint Staff’s Joint Operating Environment 2035 describes these tasks as ranging from shaping and containing military challenges, to deterring and denying adversary initiatives, to disrupting and degrading adversary campaigns, to compelling adversaries or destroying their ability to resist U.S. goals and objectives.

This view is intended to drive us to think beyond the design of Army and Joint Forces as simply optimized for speedy and decisive battle. Although this happy result is always desired, as Lawrence Freedman noted in his recent book, The Future of War: A History, warfare in the future will likely be marked by adversaries that do not accept battle on our terms and societies that necessarily accept the results of battles when they do in fact occur. This disconnect between of “decisive” military engagements and sustainable political settlement suggests yet another attribute of future conflict that goes even further than the “transregional, multidomain, multifunctional” attributes of warfare – one that is critical to account for as we adapt our land and broader joint forces for the future.

This attribute – multidimensionality – was set out in the latest NIC Global Trends study, which notes that:
The 2035 Joint Force will confront adversaries that employ integrated, whole-of-government efforts to nullify current U.S. and Joint Force advantages and employ new capabilities, often in surprising ways.
(NIC) “Warring will be less and less confined to the battlefield, and more aimed at disrupting societies.”
National Intelligence Council, Global Trends: Paradox of Progress (January 2017), p. 7

This theme was further explored in The Operational Environment 2035-2050: The Emerging Character of Warfare, which goes on to note that the ability to engage in cognitive, moral, and physical attacks directly against what the Multidomain Battle Concept terms “the strategic support area,” may in fact be the primary means of great power competition going forward.

Helpfully, the new National Security Strategy highlights the multidimensional nature of warfare. For example, it describes the critical need to protect key economic assets, and defend U.S. sovereignty and national integrity in and through cyberspace “…cyberspace offers state and non-state actors the ability to wage campaigns against American political, economic, and security interests without ever physically crossing our borders.” National Security Strategy, p. 12.

Forces keyed only to geography and the physical attributes of a military force will fail. A wide range of capabilities allow adversaries to avoid the military forces of a nation to disrupt the efficient function of complicated, tightly connected advanced economies, societies, infrastructure, and the trust and common purpose on which they are based. A multidimensional character of future warfare is a Janus-faced reminder that warfare has physical and moral components, and impacts the people and government as much as the Army itself.

Jeff Becker is the Chief Futurist supporting the Joint Concepts Division at the Joint Staff J-7 and their deep futures study, Joint Operating Environment 2035. The views here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Joint Staff or the Department of Defense.

In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, O’Brien states,
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Advances in Neuroscience and technology (NeuroS/T) are bringing this capability to the brink of reality. The Future Operational Environment (OE) will not be limited to conflict in the land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains. Direct attacks upon, and the manipulation of, Soldiers’ and noncombatants’ brains represent a significant threat, challenge, and opportunity in neurotechnology. The human brain will be a specific target of Multi Domain Battle.

At the Visualizing Multi Domain Battle 2030-2050 Conference, Georgetown University, 25-26 July 2017, Dr. James Giordano, Chief of the Neuroethics Program at Georgetown University, explained how neuroscience has made huge leaps by using technology to study and understand how the nervous system is structured and functions. NeuroS/T puts the brain at our fingertips, enabling us to better understand it.

This knowledge provides the potential for new and exciting ways to improve our memories, expand our cognitive abilities, and even repair damaged brains; conversely, it also presents new vulnerabilities that technologies can target and exploit.

For operators/warfighters, these include a number of “weapons” of choice that facilitate neuro-enablement:

• Advanced neuro-psychopharmacologics




• Computational brain-machine interfaces






• Closed-loop brain stimulation approaches






• Neuro-sensory augmentation devices

While they are not traditional weapons like guns, missiles, or blades, these technologies will make warfighters more lethal, aware, resilient, and integrated with their combat systems.

On a darker note, novel neuroweapons will grant adversaries (and perhaps the United States) the ability to kill, disrupt, degrade, damage, and even “hack” human brains to influence populations, bring about confusion and panic, and disrupt an enemy’s government and society, often without mass casualties. As such, they constitute avenues of attack against the human brain, facilitating personalized warfare. Neuroweapons are “Weapons of Mass Disruption” that may characterize major segments of warfare in the future.

NeuroS/T provides a number of novel neuroweapons, including:

• Pharmaceuticals and organic neurotoxins (i.e., ultra-low dose/high specify agents for use in targeting diplomatic/local culture “hearts and minds” scenarios)







• High morbidity neuro-microbiologic agents (i.e., neuro-microbials with high neuro-psychiatric symptom clusters for public panic/public health disintegrative effects)







• Gene-edited microbiologicals with novel morbidity/mortality profiles

• Nano-neuroparticulate agents: high central nervous system (CNS) aggregation lead/carbon-silicate nanofibers (network disrupters); neurovascular hemorrhagic agents (for in-close and population use as “stroke epidemic” induction agents).







These capabilities afforded by neuroweapons and NeuroS/T bring with them a host of ethical and moral considerations and conundrums. We must address whether affecting someone’s brain purposely, even temporarily, violates ethical codes, treaties, conventions, and international norms followed by the United States military.

• Does current policy adequately address the roles and responsibilities of commanders and individual soldiers in their employment of such weapons?

• If you influence or impact human brains without causing death or physical pain, is this still an act of war or belligerence?

• How do we ensure our warfighters maintain a robust defense against and remain resilient in the face of neuro threats?

What is clear is that the United States must explore not only what is possible, but what is justified, appropriate, and legally possible in the Battle of the Brain.

For more information on this topic, please see the following presentations by Dr. Giordano:

• Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense, from this past summer’s Georgetown University Conference

• Neuroscience and the Weapons of War podcast, with Mr. John Amble, on Modern War Institute (MWI), 02 Aug 17

Karel Čapek, an early Twentieth Century Czech playwright, coined the expression “Robot” in his 1921 play entitled, “R.U.R” (i.e., “Rossum’s Universal Robots”). According to Professor Howard Markel, University of Michigan:

The word Robot “… comes from an Old Church Slavonic word, rabota, which means servitude of forced labor…. it’s really a product of [the] Central European system of serfdom, where a tenants’ rent was paid for in forced labor or service.” – from Professor Markel’s radio interview with Mr. Ira Flatow, Science Friday, on National Public Radio, 22 April 2011.

This popular play (penned three years following the Armistice ending The Great War and four years after the Bolshevik Revolution birthed the Soviet Union), ignited our collective, dystopian view of robots with a tale of rebellion and the subsequent extinction of mankind.

Flash forward a century to the Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & Autonomy Conference, facilitated at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), 7-8 March 2017, where Mad Scientists shed a more optimistic light on the role of Robotics in the future – our findings are captured in the following paragraphs:

Robotics Definition. The Joint Staff Concept for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (JCRAS) defines robotics as …

“… powered machines capable of executing a set of actions by direct human control, computer control, or a combination of both. They are comprised minimally of a platform, software, and a power source.”

The JCRAS goes on to note that “Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is an accepted term in academia and the science and technology (S&T) community; it highlights the physical (robotic) and cognitive (autonomous) aspects of these systems. For purposes of the JCRAS concept, RAS is a framework to describe systems with a robotic element, an autonomous element, or more commonly, both. As technology advances, there will be more robotic systems with autonomous capabilities as well as non-robotic autonomous systems.”

Robotics, particularly advanced robotics, typically leverage both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomy and are the physical manifestation by which we experience these trends in our daily lives.

There is a taxonomy for Robotic Systems that includes the following ranges of control:

• Remote Control. A mode of operation wherein the human operator, without benefit of video or other sensory feedback, directly controls the actuators of an Un-Manned System (UMS) on a continuous basis, from off the vehicle and via a tethered or radio linked control device using visual line of sight cues. In this mode, the UMS takes no initiative and relies on continuous or nearly continuous input from the user.

• Augmented Teleoperation. A mode of operation wherein the human operator leverages video or other sensory feedback to directly control the actuators of a UMS on a continuous basis.

• Semi-Autonomy. The condition or quality of being partially self-governing to achieve an assigned mission based on the system’s pre-planned situational awareness (integrated sensing, perceiving, analyzing) planning and decision-making. This independence is a point on a spectrum that can be tailored to the specific mission, level of acceptable risk, and degree of human-machine teaming.

• Full Autonomy. Full independence that humans grant a system to execute a given task in a given environment.

Robotics Baseline. DOD has already experienced an “Accidental Robot Evolution,” with thousands of air and ground robots developed, deployed, and employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Up to now, the default perception has been robots as caged “stupid machines” to do routine and dangerous work. Increasingly, however, robots are coming “out of the cages” and migrating into our daily lives.

Robotics Projection. Mad Scientists project a future that features ever more advanced human-robot collaboration, a collaboration that in turn will accelerate the development of improved robotics through rapid machine learning, adaptive controls, rapid algorithm development, and custom motion control systems.
Novel mechanisms and high performance actuators will emerge as new construction paradigms merge component design to generate compact multi-function systems that are both highly capable and energy efficient. Human-robotic system interaction will include conversational assistants, intent and emotion recognition, augmented reality, self-aware explainable systems, and multi-modal communications.

Robotics are already beginning to transform production capabilities; this process will accelerate as collaborative robotic autonomy enables robotic learning and adaptation by simple demonstration. Although a typical current production line today features only 1 product per line, changeover cycles of 2 weeks, and a part cycle time of 6 seconds; future robotics-enabled production will be a flexible configuration of 10+ products per line, nearly zero time required for changeover, 6 second cycle times and sub-millimeter precision.

One Mad Scientist asserted a future for “Self-Organizing Matter” in the 2030-2050 timeframe, a future where almost every object will have some degree of self-assembly and self-configuring capability, as the migration of robotics into our everyday experiences advances, robotic appearances may change. It is not likely that they will evolve to be ever more human in appearance, because humanoid shapes are sub-optimal for many jobs or tasks. Robotic forms can be tailored to the task rather than the other way around. Future robotics will be less immediately recognizable as “robots” and our human terrain will morph to accommodate optimal robotic physical configurations.

One such promising field of research is “soft” robotics – replicating living organic musculature’s ability to reach out and grasp objects delicately, using a folding origami structure.

“I started working with origami many years ago because I was interested in making modular robots that have programmable properties; I wanted to create programmable matter…. We’ve shown a combination of four muscles that forms an arm with a gripper that can pick up a tire…. If we put a joint there and added another arm, which is quite easily done, we would be able to not just lift up the tire, but move it and place it anywhere.” – excerpt from interview with Professor Daniela Rus, Director, MIT CSAIL, posted in The Verge, 27 November 2017.

Robotics Challenges:

• One to Many Control. Current robotic controls must extend from singular entities to control of multi-robot systems: formations vice individual interaction. How do we address individual control of truly large robotic teams?

• Additive Metallic Manufacturing. To date the application of robotic 3D additive manufacturing has focused on the use of resins and polymers to inexpensively generate shapes and applications amenable to those materials. 3D printing of metal parts requires relatively large and expensive machines, very high-powered lasers and expensive technicians, although there are efforts underway to extend the desktop 3D printing approach to metal manufacturing. Solving the 3D metallic manufacturing problem would truly revolutionize manufacturing.

• High Expectations. Humans will expect high reliability performance from robotic systems: ‘death by robotic accident’ will be unacceptable, even for instances where more frequent death by human accident is already tolerated for non-robotic systems.

• Cognitive Trades. Robotics generate risk reduction and performance enhancements, but trade the best cognitive computer available: the human brain. This trade can be mitigated by “Centaur Warfighting”: human-machine teaming that is not only possible but in many cases preferable. Hybrid human-machine cognitive architectures may be able to leverage the precision and reliability of automation without sacrificing the robustness and flexibility of human intelligence.

• Destructive Disruption. One should also note the potential disruptive impact of the robotics revolution, not only with respect to warfare but across the entire global economy, particularly through the displacement of a substantial portion of the labor force. The debate on the extent of that disruption – and whether this disruption is beneficial or detrimental – remains undecided. Some have argued that technology has always created more jobs than it has destroyed. They claim “Robots Will Save the Economy” and cite robotics as necessary for further improvements in productivity across a wide range of labor-intensive tasks.
Others believe that the extent of the robotics revolution is so fast and so radical that it will exceed the capacity of the labor force to adapt. It is safe to assert that the robotics revolution will challenge even the most adaptive societies and that those less adaptive may experience significant destabilization.

Relevance of Robotic Systems. Robotic systems mitigate the risk of combat while providing significant performance advantages such as speed, efficiency, and resilience. Robotic sensor applications, for example, might include precision sensor positioning, sensor placement in adverse environments, and multiple, distributed sensors and platforms. Just as robotics may advance manufacturing to the next “industrial renaissance,” they may also enable transformative efficiencies in the transportation and sustainment of land forces.

For more on Robotics, see Remarks by Dr. Robert Sadowski, U.S. Army Chief Roboticist, and The Network is the Robot by Dr. Alexander Kott, Chief, Network Science Division, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, both of which were presented at the GTRI conference this past spring.