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 Winning
in a complex world, the multidomain battlespace: These are
extraordinarily complex concepts. How will the Army operate
in an area that a peer or near-peer adversary has worked
very diligently to make sure that the Army cannot operate
in? How will the Army counter swarms of networked, unmanned
systems?
For Dr. Thomas P. Russell, the deputy assistant secretary of the
Army for research and technology (DASA(R&T)), envisioning and
developing the capabilities and the technologies that the Army will
need in five years or 30 years is not a job that includes crystal
balls or tea leaves. It’s science, and lots of it, done by
scientists, and lots of them.
Science, he said in an October
27, 2017 interview with Army AL&T, is a process of discovering and
understanding the world we live in. “As we discover more and more
about the world we live in, and we understand those fundamental
principles, eventually we start thinking about how we can use that
knowledge we’ve developed to start solving problems.”
Right
now, Army science and technology (S&T) is working to solve a lot of
problems. “We’re developing new capabilities or technologies that
could serve to either help the military or help the commercial
market space.”
Those capabilities, of course, are intended first for the
military. And the problems to be solved are specific:
-
Precision fires and air and missile defense.
- Next Generation
Combat Vehicle.
- Future Vertical Lift (FVL).
- The network
and command, control, communications and intelligence.
- Soldier
lethality.
In addition, there are the people and the
laboratories that make those things possible, which includes the
Army’s S&T laboratory enterprise network, S&T workforce development,
Army collaboration with the other services, international partners
and industry. Finally, there’s the issue of transitioning
technology, or getting needed capabilities into the hands of
Soldiers.
A REBALANCING ACT
Russell earned his doctorate in chemistry in
energetic materials, which are substances that contain lots of
energy and release it rapidly to “do work,” in the physics sense of
the term—moving energy from one place or form to another. When he
went to work for the U.S. military in 1990, Russell didn’t think it
would become his career. However, like a lot of those in the
acquisition, logistics and technology fields, he found the research
meaningful, a way to be a part of something greater than himself.
Plus, he found the hard problems DOD was trying to solve to be
deeply engaging.
He started his career with DOD working as a
research scientist with the Navy, spent several years working with
the Air Force and came to the Army in 2013 as the director of the
U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
It was, in fact, Russell who
suggested the science and technology theme of this edition of Army
AL&T, and he backed up the suggestion with more than two dozen
articles in this special section on rebalancing the Army’s S&T
portfolio.
Rebalancing the portfolio is a process, he said,
of “looking at the potential threats in the future from our
adversaries. What I mean by that is, we’ve been operating at war for
probably a decade and a half or more. And our adversaries have been
watching the way we operate. They’ve been building capabilities to
offset or attempt to offset those strategic advantages we have
today.” And that presents the possibility that, in the future, those
“threats may put us in a situation where we’ll be overmatched by our
adversaries. So rebalancing is about how we strategically align the
S&T portfolio to address those emerging or evolving threats that our
adversaries will present to us.”
The emphasis is on the
evolutionary nature of the threats. “That’s not just now in the near
term. … We’re not focused on just where the puck is today, but where
the puck will be in the future,” he said, paraphrasing hockey great
Wayne Gretzky.
Rebalancing, he continued, “is aligning
ourselves to more effectively address the potential future threats
and beginning to look at what technologies we need to create to
evolve our capabilities. It’s also about ensuring we have a more
balanced investment portfolio for the future of the Army.”
Modernization, Russell said, can and should encompass both the near
and long term. “There are very specific things we’re doing today in
the Army to address near-term shortfalls, or to modernize our
equipment to ensure that we have the capability that we need today.
But there are also, in the S&T investments, things that we’re doing
that I would say would potentially modernize our force in 2030. It’s
all part of modernization.” And all part of the same evolutionary
process.
PRECISION FIRES, AIR AND MISSILE DEFENSE
Precision fires and air and missile defense are top priorities in
Army S&T research. The former is about more accurate artillery and
surface-to-surface missiles, which the Army calls kinetic
capabilities. Those capabilities will be more accurate, smarter and
with longer range. Or, the future could be artillery- or
missile-like capabilities in an environment where artillery or
missiles could not be used. Missile defense will include nonkinetic
capabilities, such as directed-energy weapons.
The future—and
the midterm—will include precision missiles with a 35-kilometer
range that can loiter, provide operators with a full-motion video
view-on-target on a linked tablet, and eliminate tanks or other
high-value targets. The portfolio of capabilities also includes the
ability to defeat collaborative or swarming threats. In the
successful proof-of-principle phase, the goal was for a single
operator to be able to fire and guide six missiles against four
static and two moving targets.
For other means of air and
missile defense, directed-energy weapons, specifically high-energy
lasers, offer a lot of promise as part of a layered defense, said
Russell. While they may not be the ultimate weapon, they will have a
use on the battlefield of the future. “It’s going to be a
partnership between kinetic capabilities and directed-energy
capabilities, including lasers, because lasers and directed-energy
capabilities aren’t going to be able to provide a single solution to
every challenge we face from an air missile defense perspective.” In
the nearer term, Russell said, one of the benefits will be the lower
overall cost of laser defenses.
An example of the utility of
directed-energy weapons is defense against the increasing use of
small unmanned aerial systems (UASs), either as intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance platforms or as mules for
explosives. “At least in the near term, its benefit is based on the
cost equation,” he said. While “it does cost quite a bit to build a
laser system,” after that initial outlay, lasers are a great deal
cheaper to use. The real issue is “how much it costs me for the
stored energy to be able to provide a laser pulse that will take
down a target.”
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The Joint Tactical Autonomous Resupply System (JTARS) is designed to
move materials from the rear of the battlefield to the front line,
without requiring a manned convoy operation. Improving Soldier
lethality involves more than just improving weapons: It also
involves providing the kinds of technology, like JTARS, that will
make Soldiers more resilient and responsive. (U.S. Army photo by C.
Todd Lopez, Army News Service - April 2017)
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In the case of small UASs and “other lower-cost targets,
you don’t necessarily want to spend lots of money with
missile systems to take out a counter-UAS,” which would not
only be expensive but could be far less accurate, like using
a shotgun to take out a fly.
While lasers have been
around since the 1960s and commercial lasers are everywhere,
Russell noted that “we haven’t really gotten to the point
where we’ve been able to operationalize lasers at the
cost-effective size, weight and power necessary to make them
operationally relevant. I think we’re on the verge of being
able to do that. I think, in this evolving modernization
process, you’ll see laser systems coming online over the
next 10 years that provide defensive capabilities for both
mounted and unmounted units.” Those capabilities will
continue to evolve and will become another “tool in the
toolbox. It won’t be the only tool in the toolbox. … But
it’s very exciting.”
NEXT
GENERATION COMBAT VEHICLE
When Russell talks of the Next
Generation Combat Vehicle, it’s about a host of possible concepts
and platforms. So, while the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) “is
where we’re at today,” it’s a long way from what the Army may need
in the future. For example, Russell said, autonomy, whether in the
air or on the ground, is a big part of where the Army sees its
vehicular strategy going. The S&T programs are looking at autonomy
and teaming, meaning that both air and ground unmanned vehicles will
be able to operate and navigate by themselves as part of a
collaborative, man-unmanned team, without a pilot actively guiding
the vehicle. The man-unmanned teaming approach launched in 2009, and
has already shown great promise. The future, however, will see a
great deal more collaboration between platforms.
S&T programs are looking to answer difficult questions about
where vehicle autonomy can go, aided by artificial intelligence and
advanced sensors. “Can we enhance the mobility, and can we increase
the speed, the speed-to-contact, maneuver-to-contact?” Russell said.
Or, how can a manned ground vehicle teamed with unmanned air or
ground vehicles find, engage and defeat an adversary that’s
entrenched and well-protected, before the enemy detects a potential
attack?
“If I look out 10 years from now, there may be other
ground-vehicle capabilities that we need that would be the next
generation. And again, it’s not just JLTV we’re talking [about],”
Russell said. “Are we going to have Abrams [tanks] for the next 50
years, or are we going to develop something that would be different
from a tank? Or do we really even need a tank? Could we develop a
different concept of operations, based on new ground vehicle
capabilities that emerge from technologies” the Army is developing
or looking to develop now?
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Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs) perform demonstration runs around Marine Corps Base Quantico,
Virginia, in June 2017. Army S&T programs are exploring ways to improve
vehicle platforms by leveraging developments in artificial
intelligence and advanced sensors to improve vehicle autonomy. (U.S.
Army photo by David Vergun)
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Part of that next generation vehicle strategy is the
Robotic Wingman program. The potential there is huge, not
just for applying more force, but also for using those
vehicles for sensing, for scouting and providing highly
accurate situational awareness. “When I say a Soldier is
operating three wingmen, it could be one air vehicle and two
ground vehicles,” Russell said.
As to the probability
that a potential future adversary could be working on
similar technology, Russell said, it’s not just about the
machines, it’s also about the people, and that’s where he
thinks the United States has the advantage. It’s about
“humans and how you train, and the rest of the DOTMLPF
[doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and
education, personnel and facilities],” he said.
“In the end, I think one of the things that is to our strategic
advantage over a lot of our adversaries is our DOTMLPF process. And
that’s how we integrate material and technological solutions and how
we use them to our advantage based on the overall process.”
FUTURE VERTICAL LIFT
The current Army fleet of rotary-wing
aircraft are Cold War-era relics. They’ve been upgraded and enhanced
over the years again and again, but, according to Russell, the basic
platforms have reached the limits of their potential. “The three
major things we’re trying to overcome today are speed, range and
‘maneuverability at the X’,” he said. The X is where the craft is
going to land. “That’s been a lot of the focus today. Right now,
rotorcraft aircraft have limitations—what their speed is, which
relates to range, and then of course there’s maneuverability.” So
the issue with vertical lift is much like the issue with combat
vehicles: It’s all about mobility. That, Russell continued, is “part
of this integrated multidomain battle problem.”
Currently in
S&T, Russell said, “we’re looking to see if we can move beyond” the
limits of available technology as it has been applied to current
vehicles. “Are there ways that we can actually change that, or can
we design different kinds of vehicles and structures that would take
us to the next level of range, speed, maneuverability, which
includes a lift-of-weight capability?”
The Joint Multi-Role
(JMR) demonstrator is the next step, he said. JMR is an ongoing
technology demonstration process, which is a program of record to
further FVL (see “Science and Technology Supporting Future Army
Aviation” on Page 96). “JMR is a technology demonstrator. There are
currently two companies [Sikorsky Aircraft with Boeing, and Bell
Helicopter] that are technology demonstrators, one of which is
rotary-wing capability [Sikorsky-Boeing], and the other one [Bell]
is a tilt-rotor.” Sikorsky-Boeing’s prototype has counter-rotating
rotors, which provide more stability than conventional single-rotor
aircraft, plus greater efficiency and lift capacity.
FUTURE
NETWORK
Another major focus of this rebalancing act is the
network. “In the S&T world today, we’re looking at a variety of
different programs that will help us understand what the network of
the future will look like. There’s nothing wrong with the network
that we’re developing today. It’s a good capability.” Still, it’s
today’s capability.
In the future, multidomain battle will
“require something that’s probably much more robust, much more
interoperable. It may be highly heterogeneous, and what I mean by
that is that a dismounted group may need a network that’s different
than a mounted group of Soldiers, but those networks need to be
interoperable so that they can communicate,” the way that cellphones
move seamlessly between networks. There is also the coalition
environment to consider, he said. “How do I do that exact same thing
with my coalition partners? How do I know what information I can and
can’t share?”
And then there’s mobility, which is a major
thrust. “In the future, I don’t want to have a network guy, I don’t
want to sit and wait for a bunch of signal Soldiers that are going
to be setting up the network.” That future network would come into
whatever environment and it would “basically set up itself, sort of
like what happens with your cellphone. I get off a plane in another
country and it detects the network, and [based on my plan] it
connects me to that network.” Unlike with a cellular network, its
infrastructure would follow it.
Today’s networks are robust,
but not nearly as mobile and self-contained as they will need to be
in the future, Russell said. “When we talk about all these
technologies, they become highly dependent upon our connectivity and
having this robust, heterogeneous, highly dynamic network that is
going to evolve as partners and as different capabilities come and
go within that operational space.” It’s the military’s own internet
of things that “drives different technologies and capabilities that
we, militarily, will need.”
SOLDIER LETHALITY
Increasing
a Soldier’s capacity to be more lethal is only partly about weapons.
It can also mean seeing the battlespace more clearly than the enemy,
as well as gaining a better understanding of Soldiers to help them
be more resilient and make decisions more quickly—and providing the
kinds of technology that will enable that.
Continuously
improving Soldiers’ situational understanding is a major part of
this. That means, Russell said, ensuring “that they get information
that’s required for them to execute the mission … without
overloading them to the point that they’re not able to execute.”
There could be a variety of new ways to keep the Soldier aware,
using different mechanisms to help update information. That could
include augmented reality that overlays information on the Soldier’s
field of view, haptic feedback (the most common haptic feedback
mechanism is phone vibration) that tells the Soldier to duck, turn
left or turn right, or even audio feedback.
“We’re not there
yet,” Russell said, but there are “technologies currently—it’s in
some of the laboratories—where I can actually fuse [situational
awareness] information through” a heads-up display so that “it’s
projecting the environment, the sensory environment, the information
[networked sensors are getting] onto the Soldier’s field of view.”
That technology is not a reality, yet, but “it’s a major focus in
Soldier lethality.”
“It’s really the integration of all these
things to enhance situational awareness,” Russell continued. “One of
the things you have to be careful about is not overloading the
human. That’s why there’s a focus on technologies that help to
reduce the Soldier’s cognitive load. On a future battlefield, the
difference between us and them could come down to whose warfighters
are less burdened by needless information.
“A real challenge
to this is not the materiel piece,” Russell said. “It’s really
understanding how the human can receive and process information so
that we can actually optimize their ability to make those decisions
with these decision aids.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The
future of autonomy, software-intensive weapon systems, advanced
networking and lots of sensing technologies will not be possible
without decision-support capabilities to help Soldiers not get
instantly overloaded with information. That’s where artificial
intelligence (AI) comes in. While we encounter AI on a daily, even
hourly basis, from personal assistance technologies like Amazon’s
Alexa and Apple’s Siri to Microsoft Word’s grammar-check function,
there’s a big difference between the home or office and the
battlefield.
To make the best use of AI and all of the other
software that the Army will employ, Russell said, the Army will have
to code and update code much faster than it does today. The auto
industry, he said, is doing interesting things with software updates
and patches. The “vehicle itself actually updates on a regular
basis. … They download software to update the algorithms.”
That could make a big difference in the Army’s next generation
combat vehicles. If “I can update the algorithms for efficiencies in
the engines, if I can put sensors on and change how the sensors
actually behave and the way they detect and so on, based on software
updates,” Russell said, it increases the capabilities available to
the Soldier. “We have to start thinking about the different clock
cycles of updating and modernization of the force. The software
piece is going to probably occur at a much faster time scale than
the hardware piece.”
The other part of that equation, Russell
said, is that, with more recent weapon platforms being more
software-based, “they have to be updated on a much faster timeline,”
and to do that “we need to do the science and engineering to look at
how you validate software that’s being developed. How do you ensure
you have protected environments where, in a developmental process,”
the software doesn’t inadvertently provide a way in for people who
should not have access to the software? “There is a lot to do in a
software-based” future, and that’s why “you really need to move to
more of an open architecture so that we can actually take advantage
of this multiple time scale for modernization.”
CONCLUSION
The United States has a lot of catching up to do after a decade and
a half at war in Iraq and Afghanistan—a particular kind of war that
global rivals and potential adversaries have observed intently.
Russell has no doubt that the Army’s capabilities will be up to the
task if called upon to confront and defeat a near-peer adversary.
For Russell, the key to all of Army S&T is the S&T
workforce. Indeed, he refers to the personnel of the Army S&T
enterprise as “the crown jewel of the laboratory community.”
Maintaining that workforce is “about being able to recruit and
retain the best and brightest people that are interested in solving
challenging problems that have tremendous purpose, and that purpose
is protecting Soldiers on a daily basis—and national security. And
there are a lot of us that are more interested in serving in this
way, than [in] money,” he said.
“There’s a significant
portion of our population in the science and engineering field that
are really interested in serving,” he continued. Maybe that’s not in
uniform, but by contributing—as Russell himself has done—to national
security, to what the Soldier needs every day. “The laboratory
system actually provides that unique opportunity if you’re coming
out of graduate school and you want to be a scientist or engineer
but you want to serve your country in a way that will protect its
security,” you can.
It’s an attractive proposition, because
for budding scientists and engineers, the Army has “a bunch of very
interesting problems,” Plus, he said, “There’s a purpose to what we
do. It’s not just science for science’s sake. It’s not just
engineering for engineering’s sake. There’s an outcome, and I think
that’s a tremendously satisfying experience as a scientist or
engineer.”
The biggest issue, Russell said, has been getting
the word out to future Army scientists and engineers about “what
happens in our laboratory systems so that they can decide whether
they want to work in the commercial world or in the government
world.” That’s changing, he said, because “we’re now beginning to do
a much broader outreach across the country in trying to get exposure
of what we really work on in the laboratories.” Internships are
particularly effective because future workforce members think, “ ‘I
just had no idea what you guys really did here. This is fabulous,
how do I get a job?’ At that point, it’s no longer about could I
make an extra $10,000-20,000 a year. It’s about, ‘These are really
interesting problems.’ ”
That’s not too different from how
DOD snagged Russell. “Speaking for myself,” he said, “coming to the
government to work in the laboratory,” he’d figured he would maybe
work three to five years in a government lab. “Here I am, 28 years
later, still serving as a civilian but serving at the Department of
Defense as a scientist and engineer to ensure that we can maintain
our principles as a nation.”
By Steve Stark, Army AL&T Magazine
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2018
Author Bio... Steve Stark is senior editor of Army AL&T Magazine.
He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a
B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more
than two decades of editing and writing about the military and S&T,
he is the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer-health
oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
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