Emerging Tech and Crossing "The Valley of Death" by Robert D. Atkinson

Simplicity Before Complexity: Conceptualizing Long-Term Military Competitions
By Sam Canter, Strategy Bridge: "Buzzwords impersonating military strategy are not a new phenomenon in the United States. Concepts like Flexible Response, Revolutions in Military Affairs, and Full Spectrum Dominance each failed to successfully transition from idea to policy."

Pentagon AI Efforts Disorganized: RAND
By Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense: "A congressionally mandated study warns the Defense Department's current efforts to harness artificial intelligence are “significantly challenged” by shortfalls in organization, planning, data, and talent, and testing, setting the stage for changes in the next defense policy and spending bills."

GRAHAM ALLISON ON CHINA & AI SUPREMACY

Breaking D’s 2019 Top Five: From Multi-Domain Ops To Killer Robots
Breaking D has been at the forefront in reporting the Pentagon’s shift toward a new way of war, Multi-Domain Operations, since Day 1.

Bringing Back the Punitive Expedition
By Kevin Benson, Modern War Institute: "A punitive expedition results in a measured, relatively swift, focused response. It can be of some duration but only long enough to achieve the policy ends of punishing the group that threatened U.S. interests or caused U.S. casualties. There is no regime change, no re-ordering of the existing power structure in a region."

ASIA TIMES

The Future of War Technology Whispers to Us From the Past, and We Must Listen Better by Alexander Kott

EXCLUSIVE Killing Cruise Missiles: Pentagon To Test Rival Lasers
DoD is finalizing contracts for three competing demonstrators, aiming for a 300-kilowatt weapon by 2022 and 500 kW by 2024, laser R&D director Thomas Karr told us.

Artificial Intelligence and the Adversary
​What will Beijing do with the data it stole about American military service members and others?

AI: In Defence of Uncertainty
By David Whetham & Kennneth Payne, Defence-In-Depth: "Military planners have been seeking the Holy Grail of being able to see through the fog of war that introduces so much uncertainty and doubt into military decision making. Whether this was the Revolution in Military Affairs or Network Centric Warfare, the tantalising promise of reducing friction has been extremely attractive. AI appears to offer the same thing today ..."

MDA Kickstarts New Way To Kill Hypersonic Missiles
​It looks like the military is taking a regional approach to hypersonic missile defense, while it continues to pursue a space sensor layer for homeland defense.

Best of 2019: The Technology of Defense
By Patrick Tucker, Defense One: "Here’s a look back at some of the top defense-technology-related stories of the year."

Top Stories 2019: International Operations
By Ben Werner, USNI News: "The U.S. Navy pushed its interoperability with foreign allies and partner nations in 2019 to counter increased naval activity by Russia and China."

Nanotechnology Is Shaping the Hypersonics Race
By Patrick Tucker, Defense One: "A protective coating of carbon nanotubes may help the Pentagon field warplanes and missiles that can survive the intense heat generated at five times the speed of sound."

CHINA:
China’s Achilles’ Heel When It Comes to Cyberspace
By Mark Pomerleau, Fifth Domain: "If “mutually assured cyber destruction" were to occur, one Marine Corps leader said, authoritarian nations such as China might have more to lose than the United States."

Benefits and Pitfalls of Data-Based Military Decisionmaking
By Scott S. Haraburda, Small Wars Journal: "Recently, senior Army leaders demanded visualized access to massive amounts of data to enhance their decisionmaking, which quickly morphed into an ambition project called Army Leader Dashboard."

U.S. Electronic Warfare: You’re Doing It Wrong
By Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense: "Despite rising budgets and high-level attention to electronic warfare, the Pentagon’s “efforts have been unfocused and are likely to fail,” warns a congressionally mandated study out today. What the US needs, the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments report says, is a radically new approach that can outfox Russia and China."

How Nanotech Will Help the U.S. Military Reach Mach 5
By Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics: "Materials engineered at the atomic level will enable hypersonic weapons to survive punishing heat and stress."

How to Respond to Russia’s INF Treaty Violation
By Gary Schmitt, RealClearDefense: “When The New York Times reported that Russia had likely deployed a nuclear-armed cruise missile in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.” ​

The Art of Command, The Science of AI
Future commanders will need to know how to use artificial intelligence to make decisions—including when not to trust it. But how do you decide?

ASIA TIMES:  WHY CHINA WILL WIN THE AI WAR

Modernizing U.S. Army Reconnaissance and Security for Great Power Conflict
By Nathan Jennings, Military Review: "The U.S. Army is currently grappling with a critical gap in its capability to win expeditionary wars against near-peer adversaries"

As it grapples with the advent of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO), NATO is asking industry how companies can help ensure interoperability among allied fighters, tankers and airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. – Breaking Defense

‘Bob, How Do We Bottle This?’ Making Infantry As Good As Special Ops
Our elite close combat forces are outnumbered. As a national priority we must increase the numbers of those capable of doing these hazardous jobs by transferring the skills of JSOC warriors to Army and Marine conventional infantrymen.

Incorporating Uncertainty Into the Navy's Force Structure Assessment
By Jack McKechnie, CIMSEC: "The U.S. Navy has perhaps the toughest problem among the U.S. armed services for planning long-term force structure. Navy ships and submarines are much more expensive and require far longer times to procure compared to the military equipment of the other services."

Hypersonic Weapons: Tactical Uses and Strategic Goals
By Alan Cummings, War on the Rocks: "Hypersonic flight is not new. The V-2 rocket and the vast majority of the ballistic missiles that it inspired achieved hypersonic speeds (i.e., speeds faster than the speed of sound or Mach 5+) as they fell from the sky, as did crewed aircraft like the rocket-powered X-15."

U.S. Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Weapons Dangerously Entangled
By James M. Acton & Nick Blanchette, Foreign Policy: "In October 1973, an unreliable radiation detector could have caused the end of the world."

OSD & Joint Staff Grapple With Joint All-Domain Command
The armed services agree they need to work together better — they just don’t agree on how. Now the Joint Staff is taking a hand.

By Gregory Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs.1 The sole object of power is the imposition of will. Now, finally, technologies are beginning to exist which take much of that task of “imposing will” away from physical force capabilities and into the realm of information dominance — ID — systems and doctrine. 

This very fact must transform the way national security forces think about deterrence, power projection, nation-building, and defense. ID is at the core of the entire govern-mental and social structure, and therefore determines the stability of currencies and economies. It can be used to build national cohesion, and erode it in opposing nations. 

ID warfare has its own set of technological capabilities, firmly rooted in all uses of the electronic spectrum. This has only been possible as a result of scientific advances over the past century. 

So now, for the first time in a century or more, defense procurement and acquisition strategies must account for threats and operational responsibilities which extend be-yond the conventional, kinetic defense spectrum. 

At the same time, because of sociological and population changes, alliance structures which have been in place for decades are now under extreme pressure, and in many areas may have lost their utility. When great sociological and historical upheavals occur, the threat of change creates uncertainty among populations, and this automatically trig-gers a turn away from globalist thinking toward nationalism. This has been the case throughout history. It is the case now, as we enter a period of great upheaval in the bal-ance of power. 
​
This means, as we enter a period of greater emphasis on state sovereignty (national-ism), that self-reliance in national security will become of primary importance. It does not, however, afford us the luxury of abandoning entirely old alliances, nor even of abandoning entirely the doctrine, force structures, and technological patterns on which we have relied. But we will now need to look at new frameworks which accommodate hybrid and proxy conflict in both the military and social spectra. 

Air Force ABMS: One Architecture To Rule Them All?
The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System is growing from an alternative to JSTARS to a multi-domain mega-network to connect all four services in future wars. Is this a revolution or overreach?

Israel Tests New Air-Ground Tactics Vs. Islamic Jihad
​The Israeli Air Force just wrapped up a “Blue Flag” wargame with the US & European allies and a real war with Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Mobile Nuclear Power Will Enable a Logistics Revolution for the Army by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Dan Christman

How Lockheed Martin Is Trying to Link Everything on the Battlefield
By Patrick Tucker, Defense One: "Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options."
Soldiers Conduct Call-for-Fire with Robots
By Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven: "“We had four robot vehicles conduct a tactical mission while humans were safe in defilade. We built four robots that are refurbished M113 tracked vehicles and we’ve taken two Bradleys -- gutted them -- and turned them into two control vehicles with all kinds of sensors on them.”"