Tim’s own research is in Z21′s Nano & Materials Science Group, and focuses on surface/interface technologies and their relevance to a broad range of chem/bio agent and biotoxin defensive capabilities.  Z21′s overall mission is to develop and transition warfighter, fleet, and national chemical, biological, and radiological defensive capabilities through research, development, testing, and evaluation of technologies to defend against chemical, biological, and radiological attacks.

This topic is especially timely in view of the recent Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, specifying V&V requirements for all new DoD autonomous systems.  ASU’s Security & Defense Systems Initiative focuses on seven research thrust areas, one of which is in “Autonomous Systems and Processes”, where ASU has distinctive capabilities that make it a performer-of-choice at the national level.

The Aerospace Sciences Meeting draws over 2400 participants each year and is the largest single meeting held by the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA).  It brings together participants from industry, government, and academia to address key research, development, test and evaluation issues facing the broad aerospace engineering community.

Future Tense is a partnership between Slate Magazine, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University that focuses on emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy.  Central to this partnership is the Future Tense Event Series, of which this was a part, which brings together issue experts and provocative thinkers from all disciplines to look beyond today’s headlines.

The new Military/Defense/Veterans (MDV) program will be a free program run in the evenings at ASU SkySong. The Rapid Startup School MDV will last for 2 months with approximately two evening classes a week. At the conclusion of the program, ASU Venture Catalyst will launch a new monthly networking event, called
“Military Mondays,” that will help bring together founders and potential co-founders, startups and corporates, entrepreneurs and service providers.

ASU also recently announced AZ Furnace, another startup initiative that would be of
interest to people with a military or defense background. AZ Furnace is a
startup accelerator that allows access to intellectual property from a number of
sources, including Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the
Dignity Health group. AZ Furnace will offer high-potential startup ventures a
package worth more than $50,000 in cash and services.

“Arizona has the potential to create the next generation of great military and security
technology companies by leveraging all the assets that this state has to offer”,
said Gordon McConnell, ASU assistant vice president of Innovation,
Entrepreneurship and Venture Acceleration.

Read the full article by ASU’s Megan Garrett.

The Human Effectiveness Directorate provides science and leading-edge technology to define human capabilities, vulnerabilities and effectiveness; train warfighters; integrate operators and weapon systems; protect Air Force personnel; and sustain aerospace operations. The directorate is the heart of human-centered science and technology for the Air Force and plays a vital role in protecting our warfighters – not only from the traditional stressors of battle such as fatigue and impact, but also from 21st-century biological and chemical warfare threats. In addition, advances in biotechnology, biobehavior, and neuroscience are used to enhance and extend the human performance of our Airmen. This meeting was critical to the success of future DoD research in this area.

By Dr. Werner J.A. Dahm

There’s been a lot written lately about a future in which our military might use autonomous “killer drones” to hunt, identify, and kill human targets. We owe it to a public made uneasy by this -rightly so- to point out that such stories make intriguing science fiction, but that autonomous lethal military strikes are unlikely to occur for a very long time, if ever.

I should know.  As the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force, I led a major 2010 study called “Technology Horizons” on the technology-enabled capabilities that we will need to meet the challenges we face in the next 10-20 years.  The first volume of that report is publicly available.

It describes the growing role of autonomous systems in reducing the Air Force’s manpower costs, increasing its capabilities, and meeting the demands of modern warfare.  Crucially, though, the report documented why we will continue to keep humans “in the loop” even as we move toward such increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems.

First, it’s not technology that has held us back from fully autonomous military strikes – from a purely technical perspective it has been possible for some time to conduct them.  Nor are the restraints merely legal and ethical.  Instead, there is a less obvious technical reason why the military is unlikely to employ fully autonomous lethal strikes.

The key is to understand that regardless of whether a military strike is conducted autonomously or with human involvement, it is not an isolated act.  The actual launching of a weapon onto a target is just one step in a sequential process that the military refers to as the “find-fix-track-target-engage-assess” chain.

Each step in this chain is essential to enabling the following one, and each step takes time to complete.  The entire chain takes substantial time, and that is why we look for ways to shorten these steps.  Autonomy can reduce the total time needed to complete the chain, but let’s look more closely to see where autonomy provides significant warfighting benefits.

The longest times in the chain come from the “find, fix, and track” steps, together with the “assess” and, to a lesser extent, the “target” steps.  By comparison, the “engage” step – in which the decision is made to actually commit the weapon onto the target – is relatively short.  As a consequence, shortening the “engage” step even further by making it autonomous does almost nothing to shorten the overall chain.

For that simple reason, there is essentially no disadvantage to keeping humans involved in at least the “engage” step.  And that is why there has been essentially no demand from warfighters to autonomize that critical step.

Simply put, until the “engage” step becomes the longest single part of the chain, there is no benefit to making it fully autonomous and nothing lost by maintaining human supervisory intervention at that step.  Thus it’s not technology that prevents fully autonomous strike, nor is it our cultural resistance or even the fact that we don’t have the legal or policy tools to permit fully autonomous strike.  Instead, it is the simple fact that we don’t gain anything from it.

Enjoy the science fiction, but expect to see humans “in the loop” for a long, long time to come.

Dr. Dahm is the Director, Security and Defense Systems Initiative at Arizona State University and the former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force.