Don’t think about the Terminator or Iron Man: Think about Sigourney Weaver’s power loader lifting crates in Aliens.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.DETROIT: The Artificial Intelligence the military needs most is not some kind of killer robot, the Army’s three-star senior futurist told me today. The Army really needs AI to make sense of lots of data, fast, so commanders and quartermasters can send the right forces with the right supplies to the right place on the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.With Murray’s own HQ, Army Futures Command, stood up this August in Austin, the notoriously hidebound Army is making a concerted effort to reach out beyond its comfort zone and embed its officers, scientists, and civil servants in a wider world of civilian innovation, where hoodies are more in vogue than uniforms.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.TARDEC, soon to be part of the new Army Futures Command, is exploring a wide range of Israeli robots. But IAI is already looking into the next generation: “flocks” or swarms of robotic systems that communicate with each other and collaborate to accomplish their mission.
By Arie EgoziWhile the current Army requirement is purely for transport, manufacturer HDT has carefully designed in enough horsepower and electrical power to handle a host of heavy upgrades, including the machinegun shown here.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The Army is ready for unmanned vehicles but not yet for a completely unmanned convoy. The 2020 iteration is called Expedient Leader-Follower because the Army still wants a human soldier driving the lead vehicle, with up to nine autonomous trucks following in its trail. But Oshkosh and Robotic Research told me they could take the humans out altogether, if the Army wanted.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The concepts the Warfighting Lab comes up with aren’t holy writ, but rather a baseline for young Marines to build on, “a point from which to deviate,” said Maj. J.B. Persons, a special projects officer at MCWL. “Give Marines new tools or toys, and they’ll surprise you every time.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Bill Greenwalt is sort of the Pied Piper of military acquisition policy. Where he leads, others often follow. After he wrote a series of op-eds for Breaking Defense recommending major changes to the Pentagon’s acquisition system, Sen. John McCain lured Bill back to his old job at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Greenwalt rewrote the laws, shaking up Defense Department acquisition. Bill is back, pointing to new acquisition problems, this latest one with his former employer — the Government Accountability Office. It’s a doozy, as you’ll see.
By Bill Greenwalt
In the wake of objections from employees, Google withdrew from its Project Maven contract with the Pentagon, designing software to improve the analysis of drone imagery. Worried that it might lose access to critical technology, part of the military’s response to Silicon Valley is creation of a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which includes a…
By Jonathan D. Moreno