209. Takeaways from the Mad Scientist Global Perspectives in the Operational Environment Virtual Conference

[Editor’s Note: Mad Scientist would like to thank everyone who participated in the Mad Scientist Global Perspectives in the Operational Environment Virtual Conference on 29 January 2020 — from our co-hosts at the Army Futures Command (AFC) and the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) International Army Programs Directorate (IAPD); to TRADOC’s Foreign Liaison Officer community and the U.S. Army liaison officers overseas who helped us identify and coordinate with international subject matter experts; to each of the briefers who presented their respective nations’ insightful perspectives on a diverse array of topics affecting the Operational Environment (OE); to our audience who attended virtually via the TRADOC Watch page’s interactive chat room and asked penetrating questions that significantly helped broaden our aperture on the OE and the changing character of warfare. Today’s post documents the key takeaways Mad Scientist captured from the conference — Enjoy!]

Our first Mad Scientist Virtual Conference focused on global perspectives of the operational environment. While our presenters represented only a small part of the globe, these countries do account for a significant percentage of global defense expenditures and have international defense related engagements and responsibilities.

As expected, we heard many similarities between the Operational Environment described by the United States Army and the presenters from France, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Canada, and our NATO Panel. We also identified some interesting nuances in how potential challenges and threats are described and which ones are emphasized.

Here are a few takeaways from the conference — if they pique your interest, check out this conference’s Mad Scientist APAN (All Partners Access Network) page for the associated slides and video presentations (to be posted)!

1) Interoperability is key but increasingly difficult with uneven modernization and different policies for emerging technologies. Each country emphasized the future of coalition operations, but they also described interoperability in different ways. This ranged from the classic definition of interoperability of radios, firing data, and common operating pictures to tactical integration with a country’s units inside another country’s formations. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) add another level of difficulty to interoperability. Each country will develop their own AI policies outlining legal levels of autonomy and coding standards for identifying biases and ensuring transparency. How these different AI capabilities will interact in fast pace machine-to-machine collaboration is not clear.

2) Asymmetry of Ethics is a Pink Flamingo (known challenge without program to address it) Each country mentioned the developing and differing standards for AI. It was commonly understood that competition and conflict is speeding up but there is no clear consensus on what the tactical and operational advantages could be for an adversary that chooses to integrate AI in a more permissive manner than accepted by western armed forces. Also, lagging policy, regulations, and laws in the West create a possibility for overmatch by these potential adversaries. This is an area where experimentation with differing AI policies and approaches might identify the risks of strategic and technological surprise.

3) Weaponization of information to attack societies and their armed forces is the #1 described threat and it wasn’t even close. This is understandable as our European allies are closer geographically to the persistent Russian competition activities. The emphasis of this threat differs from the United States Army where we have focused and experimented around the idea of a return to high intensity conflict with a near–peer competitor. While each presenter discussed ongoing organizational, doctrinal, and capability changes to address the information environment, it was widely understood that this is a military problem without a military solution.

4) Climate change and mass migration are the conflict drivers of most concern. Human migration as a consequence of climate change will create new security concerns for impacted countries as well as neighboring regions and, due to European geography, seemed to be of greater concern than our focus on great power conflict.

5) Virtual training is increasingly important for Armies with decreasing defense budgets and the demand to improve training proficiencies. As realistic synthetic training becomes a reality, we can more readily transition troops trained for a host of contingencies in the virtual world to the rigors of diverse operations in the physical world. This Synthetic Training Environment may also facilitate Joint and inter-coalition training of geographically-disparate assets and formations, with the concomitant issue of interoperability to conduct combined training events in the future.

6) As society evolves and changes, so does warfare. Our presenters described several pressures on their societies that are not part of or are only tangentially mentioned in the U.S. Army’s operational narrative:

    • Declining demographics in western nations pose potential recruitment and reconstitution challenges.
    • Nationalism is rising and could result in an erosion of rules-based international order. If these systems break down, smaller nations will be challenged.
    • Authoritarian systems are rising and exporting technology to support other authoritarian governments. At the same time democratic systems are weakening.
    • Aging populations and slow growth economies are seeing a global shift of economic strength from the West to the East.

In the future, we will host another global perspectives conference that will include presenters from Asia and South America to further broaden our perspectives and identify potential blind spots from these regions. For now, we encourage the international community to continue to share their ideas by taking our Global Perspectives Survey. Preliminary findings were presented at this conference. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory as we will publish the results of this survey in a series of assessments, starting in March…

… don’t forget to enter The Operational Environment in 2035 Mad Scientist Writing Contest and share your unique insights on the future of warfighting — click here to learn more (deadline for submission is 1 March 2020!)…

… and a quick reminder that the U.S. Army Mission Command Battle Lab Futures Branch is also conducting its Command Post of the Future – 2040-2050 Writing Contest. Click here to learn more about suggested contest writing prompts, rules, and how to submit your entry — deadline for their writing contest is also 1 March 2020!

190. Weaponized Information: One Possible Vignette

[Editor’s Note:  The Information Environment (IE) is the point of departure for all events across the Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) spectrum. It’s a unique space that demands our understanding, as the Internet of Things (IoT) and hyper-connectivity have democratized accessibility, extended global reach, and amplified the effects of weaponized information. Our strategic competitors and adversaries have been quick to grasp and employ it to challenge our traditional advantages and exploit our weaknesses.

    • Our near-peers confront us globally, converging IE capabilities with hybrid strategies to expand the battlefield across all domains and create hemispheric threats challenging us from home station installations (i.e., the Strategic Support Area) to the Close Area fight.
    • Democratization of weaponized information empowers regional hegemons and non-state actors, enabling them to target the U.S. and our allies and achieve effects at a fraction of the cost of conventional weapons, without risking armed conflict.
    • The IE enables our adversaries to frame the conditions of future competition and/or escalation to armed conflict on their own terms.

Today’s post imagines one such vignette, with Russia exploiting the IE to successfully out-compete us and accomplish their political objectives, without expending a single bullet!]

Ethnic Russian minorities’ agitation against their respective governments in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia spike. Simultaneously, the Russian Government ratchets up tensions, with inflammatory statements of support for these ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltic States; coordinated movements and exercises by Russian ground, naval, and air forces adjacent to the region; and clandestine support to ethnic Russians in these States. The Russian Government started a covert campaign to shape people’s views about the threats against the Russian diaspora. More than 200,000 twitter accounts send 3.6 million tweets trending #protectRussianseverywhere. This sprawling Russian disinformation campaign is focused on building internal support for the Russian President and a possible military action. The U.S. and NATO respond…

The 2nd Cav Regt is placed on alert; as it prepares to roll out of garrison for Poland, several videos surface across social media, purportedly showing the sexual assault of several underage German nationals by U.S. personnel. These disturbingly graphic deepfakes appear to implicate key Leaders within the Regiment. German political and legal authorities call for an investigation and host nation protests erupt outside the gates of Rose Barracks, Vilseck, disrupting the unit’s deployment.

Simultaneously, in units comprising the initial Force Package earmarked to deploy to Europe, key personnel (and their dependents) are targeted, distracting troops from their deployment preparations and disrupting unit cohesion:

    • Social media accounts are hacked/hijacked, with false threats by dependents to execute mass/school shootings, accusations of sexual abuse, hate speech posts by Leaders about their minority troops, and revelations of adulterous affairs between unit spouses.
    • Bank accounts are hacked: some are credited with excessive amounts of cash followed by faux “See Something, Say Something” hotline accusations being made about criminal and espionage activities; while others are zeroed out, disrupting families’ abilities to pay bills.

Russia’s GRU (Military Intelligence) employs AI Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create fake persona injects that mimic select U.S. Active Army, ARNG, and USAR commanders making disparaging statements about their confidence in our allies’ forces, the legitimacy of the mission, and their faith in our political leadership. Sowing these injects across unit social media accounts, Russian Information Warfare specialists seed doubt and erode trust in the chain of command amongst a percentage of susceptible Soldiers, creating further friction in deployment preparations.

As these units load at railheads or begin their road march towards their respective ports of embarkation, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) attacks are launched on critical rail, road, port, and airfield infrastructures, snarling rail lines, switching yards, and crossings; creating bottlenecks at key traffic intersections; and spoofing navigation systems to cause sealift asset collisions and groundings at key maritime chokepoints. The fly-by-wire avionics are hacked on a departing C-17, causing a crash with the loss of all 134 Soldiers onboard. All C-17s are grounded, pending an investigation.

Salvos of personalized, “direct inject” psychological warfare attacks are launched against Soldiers via immersive media (Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality; 360o Video/Gaming), targeting them while they await deployment and are in-transit to Theater. Similarly, attacks are vectored at spouses, parents, and dependents, with horrifying imagery of their loved ones’ torn and maimed bodies on Artificial Intelligence-generated battlefields (based on scraped facial imagery from social media accounts).

Multi-Domain Operations has improved Jointness, but exacerbated problems with “the communications requirements that constitute the nation’s warfighting Achilles heel.” As units arrive in Theater, seams within and between these U.S. and NATO Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance; Fires; Sustainment; and Command and Control inter-connected and federated tactical networks that facilitate partner-to-partner data exchanges are exploited with specifically targeted false injects, sowing doubt and distrust across the alliance for the Multi-Domain Common Operating Picture. Spoofing of these systems leads to accidental air defense engagements, resulting in Blue-on-Blue fratricide or the downing of a commercial airliner, with additional civilian deaths on the ground from spent ordnance, providing more opportunities for Russian Information Operations to spread acrimony within the alliance and create dissent in public opinion back home.

With the flow of U.S. forces into the Baltic Nations, real instances of ethnic Russians’ livelihoods being disrupted (e.g., accidental destruction of livestock and crops, the choking off of main routes to market, and damage to essential services [water, electricity, sewerage]) by maneuver units on exercise are captured on video and enhanced digitally to exacerbate their cumulative effects. Proliferated across the net via bots, these instances further stoke anti-Baltic / anti-U.S. opinion amongst Russian-sympathetic and non-aligned populations alike.

Following years of scraping global social media accounts and building profiles across the full political spectrum, artificial influencers are unleashed on-line that effectively target each of these profiles within the U.S. and allied civilian populations. Ostensibly engaging populations via key “knee-jerk” on-line affinities (e.g., pro-gun, pro-choice, etc.), these artificial influencers, ever so subtly, begin to shift public opinion to embrace a sympathetic position on the rights of the Russian diaspora to greater autonomy in the Baltic States.

The release of deepfake videos showing Baltic security forces massacring ethnic Russians creates further division and causes some NATO partners to hesitate, question, and withhold their support, as required under Article 5. The alliance is rent asunder — Checkmate!

Many of the aforementioned capabilities described in this vignette are available now. Threats in the IE space will only increase in verisimilitude with augmented reality and multisensory content interaction. Envisioning what this Bot 2.0 Competition will look like is essential in building whole-of-government countermeasures and instilling resiliency in our population and military formations.

The Mad Scientist Initiative will continue to explore the significance of the IE to Competition and Conflict and information weaponization throughout our FY20 events — stay tuned to the MadSci Laboratory for more information. In anticipation of this, we have published The Information Environment:  Competition and Conflict anthology, a collection of previously published blog posts that serves as a primer on this topic and examines the convergence of technologies that facilitates information weaponization — Enjoy!

28. My City is Smarter than Yours!

(Editor’s Note: The Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to present the following post by returning guest blogger Mr. Pat Filbert)

Megacities will cause far more issues with conflict resolution than is currently understood and should be approached from a more holistic understanding when it comes to planning for urban fighting.

The “collateral damage” aspect of leveling city blocks adds to the burden of rebuilding a smart megacity to provide a measure of security and resumption of the “way of life” to which its citizens have grown accustomed. The assumption of instant information at one’s fingertips specifies, and implies, that there is something feeding that information flow to whatever the user is accessing; specifically, embedded fiber optic networks moving information drawn from a variety of sensors built into the city structure that provide not just citizens, but also local and city leaders, the statuses they “can’t do without.”

Friendly forces will have to ensure their operations in megacities consider advanced city infrastructure attributes in their Intelligence Preparation of the Urban Battlespace.

• Preservation of fiber optic networks and repair requirements after kinetic or non-kinetic attacks, including use by attacking and defending forces and insurgents

• Active broadband infrastructure to support information flow to friendly forces from locals; also when to interrupt it while supporting open source teams to combat “fake news” while locals tweet information and requests for help

• Defeating enemy hackers infiltrating friendly networks via megacity infrastructure

The decision point to take down a megacity’s information network must consider what is there that friendly forces can use to support their efforts and how the health and welfare of the citizens will be affected. Cities are now experimenting with smart community technology that enables law enforcement to pinpoint and identify where gunshots are coming from using audio technology, similar to what is being used in the military, along with wireless power broadcasting providing citizens with ever-increasing levels of comfort and necessity that a conflict will interrupt (no food storage or refrigeration or fast medical response equals how will friendly forces fix this?).

Other attributes for consideration are the use by the adversary, as well as insurgent forces, of existing unmanned ground systems in a megacity that were being used to support mass transit. Is that automated shuttle coming at you full of explosives or citizens fleeing the fight? How do you get it to stop if there isn’t a driver on board, only scared families who can’t stop the vehicle? Current procedures have troops demanding the vehicle stop or they will open fire—without a driver, then what?

When ground troops move forward, they must understand it’s not just Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) that could be transmitting data and information to an adversary.

• Smart crosswalk sensors that used to provide data to traffic centers to decrease accidents and now provide the adversary with in-place, unattended ground sensors

• GPS systems that once reported real-time accidents co-opted to integrate adversary tracking of friendly force heavy vehicles

• Data systems providing predictions of situations where traffic jams and accidents might occur being used to predict where friendly forces can be ambushed

• Adversaries turning on the lights (i.e., illuminating not just with streetlights but in-place multi-spectral systems) to put friendly forces “on the spot” has to be considered and countered

Being able to compromise those systems, like the “loop a security camera” trick spies do in the movies, without the adversary noticing is counter-detection technology friendly forces must have; preferably without such technology being known before conflict.

Once the battle is won, how will our forces get things back on-line? Future generations will demand a return to their “way of life before we showed up” — fast and incessantly.

Lack of support to keep what wasn’t destroyed safe for use while not enabling enemy propaganda

• Repair of power supply technology from solar, wind, nuclear production and supporting power lines to the wireless power broadcasting infrastructure

• Civilians not hearing “that’s not my job” for conflict caused damages and military not being under-resourced due to a lack of planning and upper echelon military/political leadership failure to resource pre- and post-conflict requirements before initiating a conflict

See Smart city technology aims to make communities more secure, but does it encroach on privacy? for background information on smart community technology integration in Las Vegas. For additional information on wireless power transmission, see Wireless Power.


Mad Scientist co-sponsored the Megacities and Dense Urban Areas in 2025 and Beyond Conference with Arizona State University on 21-22 April 2016. For more information on the ramifications of Future Warfare in Megacities see:

Mad Scientist: Megacities and Dense Urban Areas in 2025 and Beyond Final Report

YouTube Playlist — Mad Scientist: Megacities and Dense Urban Areas in 2025 and Beyond

The Future Urban Battlefield with Dr. Russell Glenn podcast, hosted by the Modern War Institute

If you were intrigued by this post, please note that Mad Scientist is currently sponsoring a Call for Ideas writing contest. Contributors are asked to consider how future Army installations will operate and project force in the Operational Environment (OE) of 2050, and submit either a Research Topic or A Soldier’s Letter Home from Garrison. Suspense for submissions is 15 March 2018.

Pat Filbert is retired Army (24 years, Armor/MI); now a contractor with the Digital Integration for Combat Engagement (DICE) effort developing training for USAF DCGS personnel. He has experience with UAS/ISR, Joint Testing, Intelligence analysis/planning, and JCIDS. He has previously posted on robotics at the Mad Scientist Laboratory.