Mad Scientist Laboratory

[Editor’s Note:  Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to publish today’s post by guest blogger Chris Kramer, advocating for a whole-of-government approach to re-invigorate and build resiliency into our national Science and Technology (S&T) infrastructure and human capital. His prescription consists of eight actions designed to better prepare the United States population and Department of Defense for Competition and Conflict in the future — Read on!]

The weakest link in a chain determines the chain’s strength. Right now the weakest links in the extended American chain of national defense capabilities are not its physical weapons of war. They are its diminishing numbers of students pursuing STEM degrees.¹  We must put as much energy into preparing our minds and our culture as we are into so energetically modernizing our weapons and equipment.

Edison did not invent the modern light bulb over breakfast one morning following a breathtaking single insight into the interplay of matter and electricity. The technologies all around us, from light bulbs to communications and sensors to computing, biological, and materials science, all required massive amounts of time and effort to reach their current state. They required people with the intellectual depth and breadth to design and build them. All of this took time, money, and much intellectual effort.

We all know people with “the knack” for fixing or building things. Designing a better hammer or screwdriver takes a certain amount of innate skill and practical experience, but one does not necessarily need to attend higher education to create or perfect such relatively simple items, just a fortuitous inborn strength in the capacity to visualize engineering at the practical level and the ability to translate that vision into a hand-held reality.

One does need copious amounts of specialized higher education and training in Science and Technology (S&T) to design and build advanced equipment and realize technological innovation, however. This requirement will only increase as we continue to gain new knowledge about how to make matter and energy do our bidding and how to harness “quantum” in all its various applications.

One also needs this higher education and training in order to cross increasingly higher thresholds of understanding and insight in the fields we need to pursue. As people rise from students to seasoned practitioners, and continue their research and professional development, they will continue to more rapidly and thoroughly intuitively integrate the masses of knowledge and experience they and their peers have accrued. They will use this intellectual gestalt to make deeper and more penetrating insights into their own and possibly other fields. These insights will lead to ever deeper penetrations into the potential of S&T and will result in ever more advanced technologies and the applications of those technologies. Facilitating this paradigm on scales both broad and deep must be a national focus area if we are to maintain our strength and security across all the elements of national power.

No other activity in human history except the pursuit of science has led to actual advances, and many advances were in support of the security of a tribe or nation. Note that science includes not only advancements in the hardware and software of implements for both destruction and deterrence, but also the sciences of diplomacy, economics, political and military affairs, and indeed every other endeavor that affects or informs the dynamics of human life and group interaction.

The last time our nation awoke to the national significance of STEM was in 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 and the collective American heart stopped. Rightly seeing this as a leading indicator of a potential existential threat to America, the U.S. went into a frenzy of       scientific revivalism. This flurry of activity and resourcing led to a massive improvement in the national S&T infrastructure and capability, and uncountable technological spinoffs from the space and other programs which benefited human well-being and improved our defense capabilities.

Science and history prove that keeping ahead of the competition is essential to individual and group survival. Our adversaries have inspected both our vulnerabilities and our strengths and are designing, building, and applying hybrid strategies and capabilities to exploit the former, while avoiding the latter. The Operational Environment is now ubiquitous and our adversaries’ work is often unseen. No longer is a war fought “in faraway places against people of which we know nothing,” to modify Neville Chamberlain’s quote from 1938; the fight is here. Battle lines are no longer linear and on foreign soil; our adversaries operate in the light of day through cyber lines of communication and are even now reaching into governments, businesses, homes, and devices right here in our homeland. Smart bombs can attack single buildings, but weaponized information can facilitate personalized warfare, precisely targeting specific devices and attacking individual brains.

As has been much discussed lately, the Age of the DeepFake, in which the very nature of reality is thrown into question, is upon us.

It costs large amounts of blood and treasure to win wars, but even more to lose them.

All of the aforementioned circumstances mean that every citizen is now a de facto combatant, no matter how unwelcome this thought may be. Consequently:

– Every citizen must begin to think and respond like a combatant.

– Every citizen must be a sensor, able to apply critical thinking and scientifically-informed education and rationalism to their daily lives and to the information they encounter.

With the proliferation of potential threats and attacks facing the average citizen, we as a nation need to be brought to a baseline of competence in science, rationalism, critical thinking, and frankly an understanding that we now exist in a time and place in which individual action and inaction guided by misinformation can harm large numbers of people and resources.

Adaptation is critical to survival. Failure to adapt means losing one’s place in the hierarchy, assimilating into someone else’s culture, or going extinct. History shows that no empire or nation is immune to the corrosive effects of insular thinking, hubris, and the failure to adapt. All of the empires throughout history upon which “the sun never set” have seen their power and reach shrink or vanish. If we wish to avoid this, we must adapt our weapons of war, our human capital, and our society at the same time. And we must do it quickly, because “the rate of change of the rate of change” and the capabilities and approaches used by our adversaries are increasing in scope and reach.

Here are eight actions we should take:

1. Aggressively identify and groom high-achieving/high-potential students while they are in middle and high school. Facilitate their movement into higher education, and then on into the professional or academic worlds. Have them be the foundation for the next great generation of (government?) scientists and engineers. Some of these people will be born in extremely depressed socioeconomic areas; we must leverage the schools and communities across the nation to identify these students as well.

2. Once onboard and contributing, reward and recognize these people in public for their work and contributions. Work to make intellectual achievement as publicly desirable as possible. Our future S&T and cyber warriors are going to help us win these fights, especially when the field of battle has now been extended through virtual tentacles into our own homes.

3. Elevate science as a national asset and a national treasure. As long as science is denied, it will be marginalized. As long as science is marginalized, it will be rejected, unfunded or inadequately funded. As long as it is not properly resourced, we will feel the harmful effects of the lack of resources.

4. Every S&T professional and every S&T organization should either lead or support activities, both organized and large-scale down to individual efforts, to promote S&T and its acceptance. Do outreach with kids and local groups. Guest-lecture at schools from elementary to graduate levels. Volunteer to support local S&T and scholastic improvement events. Find people who will be the next generation of patent producers, researchers and developers, and discovers of new technologies and new solutions. Bring them onto the right teams and help them to pay this forward until it is the organization’s business model.

5. Work with the Department of Education and school boards to introduce critical thinking as a stand-alone skill and subject, introduced no later than the middle school years, then fold it into all subsequent student evaluation.

6. Require objective peer-reviewed science be the deciding factor in all government decisions.

7. Implement the research that has already been done on these topics. Five minutes of research showed there is sufficient work² already done³ on the STEM education issue to get a great start.

8. Finally, have DoD work with the federal, state, and local governments to identify the threats and the actions all citizens need to take to be part of the collective national defense, then educate the population on them and hold periodic drills to ensure horizontal and vertical readiness.

If you enjoyed this post…

• Learn how Finland has implemented a whole-of-government approach to counter weaponized information in:

– Why Is Finland Able to Fend Off Putin’s Information War?

– Russia’s Neighbor Finland Mounts Defenses Against Election Meddling

• See the following MadSci blog posts:

– Four Elements for Future Innovation, by Dr. Richard Nabors

– The Trouble with Talent: Why We’re Struggling to Recruit and Retain Our Workforce, by Sarah L. Sladek

– Making the Future More Personal: The Oft-Forgotten Human Driver in Future’s Analysis, by Ian Sullivan

Chris Kramer is a retired Army engineer officer and futurist working to further the advancement of science, technology and critical thinking. The perspectives described in this article are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by any person or organization within the U.S. Government.

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¹ Pew Research Center information regarding American student aversion to STEM, dated January 17, 2018, at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/17/half-of-americans-think-young-people-dont-pursue-stem-because-it-is-too-hard/

² National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2016). Barriers and Opportunities for 2-Year and 4-Year STEM Degrees: Systemic Change to Support Diverse Student Pathways. Committee on Barriers and Opportunities in Completing 2-Year and 4-Year STEM Degrees. S. Malcom and M. Feder, Editors. Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Board on Higher Education and the Workforce, Policy and Global Affairs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21739. Found at https://www.nap.edu/read/21739/chapter/1

³ Report by the Committee On STEM Education of the National Science & Technology Council, Dated December 2018, titled “Charting A Course For Success: America’s Strategy For STEM Education”. Found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/STEM-Education-Strategic-Plan-2018.pdf

“If we don’t study the mistakes of the future, we’re doomed to repeat them the first time :o(” — Ken M, comedian

[Editor’s Note: Since its inception two years ago next month, Mad Scientist Laboratory has expanded the U.S. Army’s reach by engaging global innovators from across industry, academia, and the Government on the Operational Environment (OE), emergent disruptive technologies and their individual and convergent impacts, and the changing character of warfare. Simultaneously, the blog site has broadened public access to related open source content on the OE, facilitating further dialog and enhancing its role as “a marketplace of ideas.”

Our Mad Scientist Community of Action continues to grow — in no small part due to the many guest bloggers who have shared their provocative, insightful, and occasionally disturbing visions of the future. To date, 54% of the blog posts published have been submitted by guest bloggers!  Thanks to their diverse contributions and perspectives, our blog site has accrued over 182K views from visitors from around the world!  We challenge you all to continue contributing your insights regarding the OE and the changing character of warfare!

In today’s post, we recognize Mr. Robert J. Hranek as our “Maddest Guest Blogger” for the past six months.  We excerpted elements of his short story entitled “Angry Engineer,” and published it on this site as “The Otso Incident with Donovia in 2030” on 2 May 2019.  This piece skillfully imagines what the United States and its allies learn following our first battle with a near-peer competitor in over 80 years.  Among the many future innovations addressed, Mr. Hranek’s “pre-mortem” of two dozen lessons learned especially resonated with our readers.  In identifying potential “mistakes of the future,” Mr. Hranek enabled us to consider them when shaping and tailoring our thoughts about Multi-Domain Operations so that we’re not “doomed to repeat them the first time!”  Enjoy!]

The U.S. responded to Donovia’s invasion of Otso by initiating combat operations against the aggressors on 1 April 2030 — April Fools’ Day. Thousands of combatants died on both sides, mostly on ships; hundreds more were wounded, primarily from the land battle, and an unverifiable number of casualties occurred worldwide due to the sabotage of power grids and other infrastructure. An accurate civilian count was impossible in the chaos of reestablishing power, computer, and financial systems worldwide.

Although U.S. forces were considered to have ‘won’ tactically, no significant change in control of territory resulted from the war.  Both sides’ weaponry was very lethal and very fast.  Overall this worked in the defender’s favor because attacking forces were too exposed, detectable, and vulnerable to last very long on the battlefield.  Stealth AI drones (both airborne and undersea) were the only systems that survived very long in combat, and then only as long as they remained undetected. Even an airborne drone with the signature of a small bird would be shot down quickly if it could be tracked and engaged by speed-of-light directed energy weapons. With no strategic victor and government leadership on both sides fearful of starting World War III, an uneasy military stalemate continued for several weeks…

The following are 24 lessons learned from the U.S.’s first battle with a near-peer competitor in over 80 years:

Lessons Learned 1 (LL1): History repeated itself in that no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. The unforeseen consequences of reliance on automation and the resulting escalations almost lead to World War III. No matter how sophisticated our systems become, it will always be important to keep human decision-making in the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop.

LL2: Donovia was able to launch a ‘surprise’ attack on Otso because U.S. human intelligence analysis grew too dependent on their automated tools. The National Technical Means (NTM) software identified the Donovia troop movements as something it had seen many times before, labelled them as routine, and therefore the analysts reported them as routine as well.

LL3: Directed microwave and other Electro-magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons performed within accepted parameters. The 20th century legacy electronic systems were rendered completely useless when overwhelmed with more energy than they could handle.

LL4: Differences in assumptions is what lead to the escalations on April 1st. The U.S. model of Artificial Intelligence (AI) weaponry was to always require human authorization before firing a weapon. Donovia’s paradigm was that if an AI had its ‘secure’ communications severed, then that meant it was to engage the enemy ASAP. Donovia’s Lurker Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) had their communications severed with their parent vessels in a way that was interpreted by its on-board AI as the destruction of its parent vessel. At that point, it located the highest value target in range, maneuvered into position, and fired its supercavitating torpedo into the USS Ronald Reagan, inflicting crippling damage leading to the deaths of over 1,000 crewmembers.

LL5: There is still no effective defense versus a supercavitating torpedo once launched. Any platform capable of carrying one must be considered a threat and be dealt with accordingly. Therefore, research into better detection of all stealth platforms is critical to the future of U.S. Naval dominance.

LL6: Stealth technology cannot be relied upon to keep pilots safe. Modern stealth aircraft are very effective at diverting radar energy away from its source, but that same aircraft becomes very detectable when a radar source is synchronized with a separately located radar receiver. All that is required is a significant offset angle between the radar source, the target aircraft, and the radar-receiving sensor.

LL7: The “Four-ship” concept of each F-35 controlling three Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) in combat is still considered the most effective way to employ these aircraft, but the piloted F-35 may need to control its UCAVs without coming into Line of Sight (LOS) of sophisticated enemy air defenses. The alternatives are to allow the UCAVs to perform combat missions completely independently once in flight, accept the risks of controlling UCAVs remotely with the possibility of communications loss, or even to risk those UCAVs being taken over by the enemy.

LL8: Evaluation of Donovia’s long-range stealth UCAV capabilities were incomplete. They were correctly analyzed to be too small to deliver a significant missile or bomb load, so they were incorrectly surmised to be of little threat as just another reconnaissance drone. U.S. intelligence intercepts of Donovia incorporating low power lasers on them assumed that this would be used for the designation of targets for separately launched laser-guided weaponry. The truth that they were designed to blind the pilots of aircraft deep within enemy airspace was not realized until after the loss of an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. The only current defense against this is to wear headgear designed to instantly darken when encountering a nuclear flash, which many pilots did not wear — until now.

LL9: Stealth UCAVs proved to dominate the airspace, unless they could be shot down with energy weapons. Their combat capabilities were superior to much larger piloted vehicles due to not being hampered by human limitations. They instantly followed their programming, regardless of how long they were airborne, could maneuver at much higher gees than piloted fighters, and cost less to deploy.

LL10: Our Matter Lasers were much more effective at destroying incoming artillery and mortar shells than Donovia’s more conventional laser defenses. It vindicated all the effort and expense that was undertaken to transform this technology from a research project into the most effective air defense system on Earth. By delivering an energy density thousands of times stronger than conventional lasers, it destroyed each incoming round hundreds of times faster.

LL11: Donovia’s standard laser point defenses also proved capable of destroying incoming missiles and artillery, but they were relatively easy to overwhelm, since they took much longer to eliminate each incoming threat. Their lasers proved to be useless at intercepting U.S. naval hypervelocity railgun rounds.

LL12: The U.S. was not as reliant of GPS guidance as Donovia assumed. The deployment of advanced inertial guidance systems rivalling GPS accuracy had come just in time to prevent the loss of high-precision GPS from being a crippling blow to U.S. combat capabilities.

LL13: The Expanded Advanced Battle Management System (EABMS) multi-service network was critical to U.S. forces being able to effectively coordinate their efforts even while exposed to Donovian electronic warfare. EABMS proved that integrated warfighters can still perform their missions even after several parts of the network were destroyed or disabled.

LL14: The Exoskeleton enhancements of the first pilot’s rescue team were deemed crucial to his successful retrieval. Their greater strength, endurance, and body armor helped them to safely return to U.S. lines. Perhaps even more valuable than the physical aspects of their equipment were their Augmented Reality (AR) displays that allowed them superior battlefield awareness and the ability to see through camouflage as if it was not even there. It is recommended that the U.S. continue development of the next generation of full-body powered exoskeletons.

LL15: The performance of U.S. fast-attack hovercraft was disappointing. Their battlefield speed advantage was offset by their vulnerability. Even minor damage to their air-cushion skirts would degrade their maneuverability so much that they suffered twice the casualty rate as their wheeled and tracked counterparts.

LL16: Most U.S. Soldiers Wounded In Action (WIA) on the battlefield suffered from burn-like damage. The same Donovian non-lethal microwave projectors used for crowd control had a high-power capability used to inflict severe skin damage through cloth armor.

LL17: U.S. medical triage was greatly aided by medical sensors woven directly into Soldiers’ uniforms. This led to faster diagnosis, treatment, and recovery of casualties than in any previous conflict.

LL18: Mines remain the scourge of the battlefield, with AI-controlled mines being particularly insidious. Some were even programmed to let several combatants pass by before detonating in the middle of a formation of troops that thought the area had already been cleared.

LL19: The fledgling industry of orbital cleanup services (satellites designed to collect and/or dispose of other inactive satellites) received a major inadvertent boost from renewed concerns over orbital debris.

LL20: The chaos of the space battle allowed our Space Force to capture and return to Earth a few chosen Donovian high-interest military satellites. U.S. analysts were surprised by several aspects of Donovian design, but those results have no further need for discussion in this review of the conflict over Otso.

 

 

LL21: There was speculation of possible Donovian deployment of tailored genetically-engineered bioweapons, but these were not supported by any confirmable evidence. On tactical timescales, bioweapons are still deemed ineffective. The ability to inflict casualties on an enemy with bioweapons while trying to limit the damage to your own personnel is still an unresolved strategic issue.

LL22: The reports of Donovia having anti-personnel weapons that used nanites were also unsupported. This technology is just starting to be used industrially, and nanite-based weapons are considered to be at least a decade away from being ready for battlefield use.

LL23: There were also reports on social media of Donovian atrocities towards Otso’s civilians, but no supporting evidence has been found for these numerous dubious claims.

LL24: This conflict resulted in most nations turning back to the U.S. in a leadership role in a way that completely healed the damage to U.S. prestige resulting from its involvement in decades of warfare in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

If you enjoyed these lessons learned, please read Mr. Hranek’s complete “Angry Engineer” short story here, hosted by our colleagues at Small Wars Journal…

… check out the U.S. Army Futures and Concepts Center’s Multi-Domain Operations video and Modernizing for a Multi-Domain Army handout…

… and see the following insightful Mad Scientist blog posts addressing future warfare:

– Ground Warfare in 2050: How It Might Look, by proclaimed Mad Scientist and previous “Maddest” Guest Blogger Dr. Alexander Kott (whose day job is Chief Scientist, Army Research Lab)

– Blurring Lines Between Competition and Conflict

If you enjoy storytelling as a tool to envision the future, read Omega, by Mr. August Cole and Mr. Amir Husain.

Mr. Robert Hranek began his professional career serving in the USAF as a computer programmer for five years, followed by 29 years as a civilian intelligence analyst, systems engineer, and program analyst. He is a vocal Space Exploitation Advocate, reads lots of Science Fiction, gives blood 5 times a year (197 pints & counting!), judges several Science Fairs every year, and runs and drinks with Hash House Harrier groups whenever he can.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are Mr. Hranek’s alone and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the Army Futures Command, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.  This piece is a work of speculative fiction, meant to be thought-provoking, and does not reflect the current position of the U.S. Army.

[Editor’s Note: Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to present our latest edition of “The Queue” – a monthly post listing the most compelling articles, books, podcasts, videos, and/or movies that the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist Initiative has come across during the previous month. In this anthology, we address how each of these works either informs or challenges our understanding of the Operational Environment (OE). We hope that you will add “The Queue” to your essential reading, listening, or watching each month!]

1. “A brain-controlled exoskeleton has let a paralyzed man walk in the lab,” by Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review, 4 October 2019.

“Amputees merge with their bionic leg,” in ScienceDaily, 2 October 2019.

“Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can now do an impressive gymnastics routine,” by Jon Porter, The Verge, 24 September 2019.

So what is the OE nexus for a new experimental capability that restores mobility to a quadriplegic man, prosthetics that provide realistic sensory feedback, and a bipedal robot that can split kick better than David Lee Roth in his Van Halen heyday? Scientists from Swiss universities ETH Zürich and EPFL and the latter’s spin-off SensArs Neuroprosthetics have fitted three amputees with prosthetic legs that provide sensory feedback, enabling subjects to feel the device. “Thanks to detailed sensations from [the] sole of the artificial foot and from the artificial knee, all three patients could maneuver through obstacles without the burden of looking at their artificial limb as they walked. They could stumble over objects yet mitigate falling. Most importantly, brain imaging and psychophysical tests confirmed that the brain is less solicited with the bionic leg, leaving more mental capacity available to successfully complete the various tasks.” Meanwhile, researchers at Grenoble University Hospital and Clinatec in France implanted an epidural wireless brain-machine interface into a paralyzed subject, enabling him to walk again via a four-limb neuroprosthetic exoskeleton in a laboratory proof-of-concept demonstration. Per MIT Technology Review, “researchers need to find a way to get the suit to safely balance itself before it can be used outside the laboratory.” Here’s where Boston Dynamic’s Atlas comes in — its “model predictive controller” allows the robot to anticipate forward momentum to “blend… one maneuver to the next,” without losing balance.

These three weak signals presage the potential for a dismounted Manned Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) capability on a not-so-distant future battlefield, with Soldiers in the rear area (or even the Strategic Support Area!) controlling via cerebral interfaces whole platoons of agile fighting systems at what was once the bleeding edge of combat. This potential for a nimble, semi-autonomous close quarters combat fighting capability could keep future Warfighters out of harm’s way on particularly hazardous, “forlorn hope”-type assaults against heavily defended positions, while simultaneously maintaining humans-in-the-loop in future conflicts.

2. “Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill,” by Zachary Fryer-Biggs, The Atlantic, 3 September 2019.

This detailed but engrossing piece by defense and technology reporter Zachary Fryer-Biggs provides an in-depth look at work on robotics being conducted across the Department of Defense but also helps to visualize and contextualize what a battlefield of the future looks like. This article shows the distinction between what is being explored, built, and tested by the DoD and the dystopian nightmare often portrayed in movies like The Terminator. The article addresses a number of current technologies – the U.S. Navy’s Phalanx Close-in Weapon System (CIWS) and Sea Hunter autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and Israel’s Harpy autonomous anti-radiation loitering munition – that are on the pathway to autonomy already.

Several prominent figures in the DoD Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation space, such as Mr. Bob Work (former Deputy Secretary of Defense and Dr. Bill Roper (former Director of Strategic Capabilities Office). Mr. Work is quoted as saying, “AI will make weapons more discriminant and better, less likely to violate the laws of war, less likely to kill civilians, less likely to cause collateral damage.” In a similar vein, Dr. Roper stated that the country that integrates AI into its arsenal first might have “an advantage forever.”

One of the biggest implications from this article is the following question — at what point does autonomy become completely self-deciding? Many of the technologies featured are still struggling with contextual understanding and complex cognitive processes that humans can frankly breeze through right now. The current challenge is not intelligent machines capable of eliminating humans – it’s that the machines aren’t smart enough or capable of complex decision-making. As Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, noted “human vision is enormously complex and includes capabilities such as reading facial movements and other subtle cues.” But visual, facial, and object recognition in AI is improving rapidly in a short amount of time; we could see more autonomous systems on the battlefield faster than anticipated. Senior military leadership will be challenged with what approach must be taken: human-in-the-loop, human-out-of-the-loop, or human-starts-the-loop. Additionally, how much must be divested from manned or optionally-manned systems and invested into autonomous and optionally-teleoperated systems?

 

3. “China’s AI Talent Base Is Growing, and then Leaving,” by Joy Dantong Ma, MacroPolo.org, 30 July 2019.

MacroPolo is the in-house think tank of the Paulson Institute in Chicago that focuses on the U.S.-China economic relationship. China’s initiative to become a global leader in Artificial Intelligence is excelling at producing talent, but failing at retaining it. The author uses invitation data from the NeurIPS conference, one of the premier events that gathers researchers exploring artificial neural networks. Prospective attendees submit related research papers for consideration to be invited to the event. Analysis of the data shows that there were 2,800 Chinese scientists accepted over the past ten years. Of those, more than 2,000 were working outside of China and 85% of them were working in the U.S. So while China has made great strides and invested heavily in creating a population of AI researchers, scientists, and engineers, they haven’t been able to insulate themselves from the competition for AI talent raging outside their borders. In 2017, they took steps to curb this exodus by offering incentives and better compensation but it remains to be seen if that is enough to compete with some of the most innovative and sought after companies in the world, like Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

For the Army, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. As the Army increasingly develops and integrates AI into formations, the need for the highest quality technical personnel will follow. A larger pool of experts available to the Army will allow for quicker and better solutions to problems Soldiers face on the battlefield. However, the Army will still be in competition with the same industry that China is losing to, while simultaneously challenged by the prospect of Chinese intellectual property theft and industrial espionage. How can the Army and the United States at large best take advantage of and retain this resource? What are the potential security implications? Even if the experts are here, can the U.S. compete with the tech industry to recruit the best and brightest AI talent?

4. “Tree Planting Drones are Firing ‘Seed Missiles’ Into the Ground,” by Leo Shvedsky, Good, 17 April 2019.

In an effort to combat climate change, tech company BioCarbon Engineering has outfitted commercial drones with pre-germinated seed pods that they disperse and plant by firing them into the ground. This method is cheaper and exponentially faster than planting by hand. From a dual-use perspective, one can see many nefarious possibilities. Just as a drone can spread seeds waiting to sprout, it could just as easily spread a biological or chemical agent. The light payload of seeds used today could be replaced with a payload of powder or liquid that could infect humans, livestock, crops, or waterways. Further, this method, when employed judiciously, could be almost undetectable. Generally, when we think of weapons, we think of devices designed to destroy or kill, but with so many commercial products offering advanced capabilities and access, it’s becoming easier to achieve the same effects with none of the footprint.

5. “Netflix’s ‘Unnatural Selection’ Trailer Makes Crispr Personal,” by Megan Molteni, WIRED, 04 October 2019.

Netflix’s new four-part docuseries, which debuted last week (18 October 2019), explores the democratization of genomic engineering — “Using the bacterial quirk that is CRISPR, scientists have essentially given anyone with a micropipette and an internet connection the power to manipulate the genetic code of any living thing.” This scientific revolution raises a host of new political, legal, and moral concerns that public policy, laws, and opinion are only now beginning to address. As research using this game changing technology becomes an ever-more international enterprise, distinctions in cultural norms, mores, and practices will be challenged. Within the brave new world of genetic engineering facilitated by CRISPER, all of the bright possibilities of revolutionary new treatments and cures for disease are tempered by equally dark prospects when coupled with nefarious intent.

Calls to control open source research and counter the potential use of gene-editing to produce biological weapons and/or affect global health may not be encompassing or sufficient enough. As Mad Scientist has previously explored, a growing community of individual biohackers and DIYers are pushing the boundaries of DNA editing, implants, embedded technologies, and unapproved chemical and biological injections. Not limited to the DIY community, China has announced their intent to become a global superpower and gene editing is one area where they seek to leap ahead of the United States. Their commitment to this objective is evidenced in their gene editing of 86 individuals and the births of “CRISPR babies.” In comparison, the United States is just now approaching human genomic trials (in a well-regulated environment).

Ethical principles are not standardized across cultures. State and non-state actors alike are now able to weaponize biotechnology with relative ease. The decisions we make today are crucial as we articulate, implement, and enforce public policy and international laws governing genetic engineering. These decisions will affect Soldiers and civilians alike, who face the threat of non-kinetic, genetically engineered capabilities on both the battlefield and in our Homeland.

If you read, watch, or listen to something this month that you think has the potential to inform or challenge our understanding of the Operational Environment, please forward it (along with a brief description of why its potential ramifications are noteworthy to the greater Mad Scientist Community of Action) to our attention at: usarmy.jble.tradoc.mbx.army-mad-scientist@mail.mil — we may select it for inclusion in our next edition of “The Queue”!