The Convergence - The Army's Mad Scientist Podcast

[Editor’s Note: Army Mad Scientist is pleased to present our latest episode of The Convergence podcast, featuring our interview with proclaimed Mad Scientist Jason Sherwin, CEO and Co-Founder of deCervo, discussing the science of quick decision making, how deCervo blends gaming with science to help individuals make the best decisions in high stakes and complex environments, how these technologies have enhanced professional athletes’ performance, and these technologies’ potential for enhancing Soldiers’ performance — Enjoy!] Jason Sherwin, Ph.D., is a founder and currently serves as CEO of deCervo, a neuroscience tech company he founded with his research partner, Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D. Since starting in 2014, deCervo has provided cognitive training programs using neuroimaging and customized phone apps to over 15 Major League Baseball organizations, over 60,000 baseball and softball players worldwide, the umpires of the Major Leagues, and the officials of the National Hockey League. deCervo has been an Army research grant recipient since 2017 and Sherwin himself has done contract research for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory going back to 2011. Continuing to apply its novel approach to decision training, deCervo is currently launching apps in law enforcement and tennis training to complement its suite of five other apps for decision training. Analyzing quick decision-making is done by providing simple stimuli to people, imaging their response and its speed, and identifying how their brain reacts to different inputs. This can be accomplished by having a subject listen to a song with an unexpected, abrupt key change; not only do brains show a reaction to that unexpected change, but trained musicians’ brains produce a stronger response, as captured via electro-encephalogram (EEG), than a non-musician’s brain. deCervo’s apps for baseball players use accuracy measurements to estimate how well the user discriminates between different kinds of pitches. This approach is an evolution from using EEGs, and shows that non-invasive methods can be just as effective in measuring responses. Improving athletic prowess on the playing field has direct implications for improving warfighting prowesson the modern battlefield. Emotion impacts all decision making, but deliberate decisions are more susceptible to influence from emotionand often require simulations generated by video or AI to produce environments that are closer to real life. For Soldiers, decisions often need to be deliberate while dealing with fear and strong emotion in dynamic, austere, and potentially lethal environments; training for this kind of decision making requires teaching people how to respond quickly and correctly, despite emotional impacts or inhibition. Military decision making can involve simple decisions like target detection, but more often requires the ability to make complex, deliberate decisions. Using effective human teaming and social sensing can help train for visual search type decisions where Soldiers analyze their own placement and their teammates’ placements and ...

The Army Mad Scientist Initiative is hosting our Back to the Future: Using History to Forecast conference, November 8th and 9th, at the National Museum of the United States Army. It is our first in-person conference since 2019! The conference will feature world renowned historians, thinkers, innovators, futurists, and industry leaders. We’ll use history to set the foundation for our look into the future to determine what the Operational Environment might look like, what new and unique conditions a Soldier might encounter, and what capabilities they might need — Check out our exciting conference agenda hereand presenter and panelist biographies here ! You can still attend the event in-person by registering here through Eventbrite — Hurry, space is limited! You must be registered with Eventbrite in order to gain access to the conference. Museum security will have a list of all individuals registered and will check your name upon entry. You can also attend the conference virtually! Everything will be live-streamed through Zoom— you can connect and engage in real time remotely here, beginning at 7:45 am Eastern, Tuesday, 08 November 2022! Whether in person or virtually, please plan on joining Army Mad Scientist at our Back to the Future: Using History to Forecast conference — you’ll be glad you did! Check out content from previous Army Mad Scientist events on our All Partners Access Network (APAN) Conference page (just click on an event to drill down to explore event agendas, presenter bio’s, presentations, and notes) and YouTube Channel Video Playlists — content from next week’s conference will be similarly archived for future reference! Back to the Future Writing Contest: Crowdsourcing is an effective tool for harvesting ideas, thoughts, and concepts from a wide variety of interested individuals, helping to diversify thought and challenge conventional assumptions. Army Mad Scientist seeks to crowdsource the intellect of the Nation (i.e., you — our community of action!) with our Back to the Future Writing Contest. Entries should address one of the topics’ writing prompts listed here. Entries will be accepted in two formats: A written essay(no more than 1500 words, please!) A tweet @ArmyMadSci using #MadSciBacktotheFuture We will pick a winner from each of these two formats! Contest Winners will be proclaimed official Mad...

Inderpal Bhandari rejoined IBM as Global Chief Data Officer in December 2015. In this newly created role, he has leveraged his extensive experience to lead the development of IBM’s data strategy and drive IBM’s internal cognitive enterprise transformation. The work has culminated in the AI Enterprise Blueprint; a roadmap for IBM’s clients on their own journeys to AI. Inderpal is an expert in transforming data into business value and improved customer experiences by delivering strategic, innovative capabilities that use analytic insights to enable growth and productivity. In 2017, he was named U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year by the CDO Club, and has been featured as an industry expert by Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, US News & World Report, CNN, and FOX. Inderpal earned his Master of Science Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Learn more about Inderpal’s insights on harnessing the power of data and accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementation at IBM’s Journey to AI and Think blogs. In today’s podcast, we talk with Inderpal about data as a strategic asset, the challenge in ensuring new technologies are intuitive to engender user trust, and how Soldiers can be empowered to transform the Army into a data-centric culture. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Describing “data” as a field of study is like the “blind men describing an elephant,” each one will have a different, limited aspect of it, and thus, a different description. Data is now being recognized as more than just a record, as it can illuminate patterns and insights that can re-shape or invent new businesses and products. It is a strategic asset that is being referred to as the new oil, because it is “the fuel that drives the engine.” Scaling is the goal of any chief data officer of a large company with a global footprint. The first key step is to understand what the company is trying to do, or for a commercial company, how they are trying to make money, and using the data strategy to enable that goal. For a large enterprise like the Army,the question will be how data can enable the Army to accomplish its various mission sets of deploying, fighting, and winning our Nation’s wars. Culture change can occur in three ways: Top-down as a strategy, laterally, and bottom-up/ grassroots. Bottom-up makes up the most significant portion of successful culture change in a system. Organizations need to make sure the users are prepared, and the technology interfaces are adapted to the change being sought. You can’t make every employee or Soldier into a data scientist. It’s crucial to design systems or technology in a way that brings people along in a way that allows them to intuitively use them. Trust is a significant portion of...

Amy Webb advises Chief eXperience Officers (CXOs) of the world’s most-admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations. Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures, Amy pioneered a data-driven, technology-led foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations. Forbes called Amy “one of the five women changing the world.” She was honored as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020 and is ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the 50 most influential management thinkers globally. Amy is the best-selling author of several books. Her latest book, The Genesis Machine (PublicAffairs / Hachette 2022) examines the futures of gene editing, biotech, and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is the promising and controversial technology platform that combines biology and artificial intelligence, opening up the potential to program biological systems much as we program computers. In today’s podcast, we talk with Amy about strategic foresight, emerging technologies like synthetic biology, and what she sees as vital implications for the U.S. Army. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: There are always three stages of work, whether in government or private sector, when it comes to foresight: Inputs (forces, signals, and trends), outcomes (scenarios describing plausible futures), and some form of action or backcasting (reverse engineering a preferred future). Synthetic or engineered biology consists of modifying or manipulating biological code to give it new or enhanced purposes.In the “read, edit, write” analogy, synthetic biology gives the user the “write” function to make sweeping changes with more control. This is not limited to human biology as it can be applied to plants, viruses, and any other biological material. Access to synthetic or designer biology may create a new class of genetic haves and have-nots. Wealth will be a restricting factor, but religious beliefs may also prove to be less tolerant of these manipulations and changes, thus hard-coding specific social values into the DNA of the future Policy and regulation do not adequately address the synthetic biology issue in a cohesive way. In some countries, genetic screening for certain types of diseases is employed, but it is generally unfavorable to screen for attributes that correlate to higher intelligence. However, in some countries it is not illegal, and there are commercial entities offering to screen for cognitive ability. There are many implications borne out of a democratization of synthetic biology technology that will affect the U.S. Army in the future. Researchers are developing a device similar in size to a mobile phone that, in a battlefield environment, could screen for and sequence a novel pathogen. This will allow Soldiers to identify which genetic material and re-agents to use as an antidote or mix for a vaccine in the field.This could potentially increase battlefield readiness. <...

Karen Kaya specializes in Middle Eastern affairs with a particular focus on Turkey for the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) within the TRADOC G-2. She has worked on numerous projects in national security as a defense and security policy analyst. Ms. Kaya has a BA from Boğaziçi University (in Istanbul, Turkey), and an MA from Brandeis University. In today’s podcast, we talk with Ms. Kaya about the Bayraktar TB-2 UAV, its employment in recent conflicts including Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia-Ukraine, as well as the implications of Turkey becoming a global drone manufacturer and distributor. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: The Bayraktar TB-2 is a Turkish medium altitude, long endurance UAV capable of remotely controlled or autonomous flight operations. Because of its inexpensive price point and ease of use, it has been dubbed the “Kalashnikov of the 21st century.” The TB-2 is unique amongst combat drones in that it has a low radar cross-sectionand flight speed, thus making it difficult for air defense radar to detect. This allows the TB-2 toengage and destroy systems designed to provide short to medium range air defense. It can deliver laser guided munitions that can adjust their trajectories in mid-flight to target. Turkey has been training the Azerbaijani Armed Forces on how to effectively employ the TB-2 in combat. The Azeris used them systematically in the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh Waragainst Armenia’s Soviet and Russian-made air defense systems to breach the line of contact and take territory before the cease-fire agreement was signed. Their use and employment in Ukraine is different from that of Nagorno-Karabakh, as Ukraine is on the defensiveand has not trained with Turkey previously. However, it is important to note that this is the first time that the TB-2 has been used against Russian systems manned by Russian soldiers. In the last few years, Turkey has emerged as a drone superpower. It is one of the four leading countries in the world to produce, use, and export armed drones.The quality and relative low cost of the TB-2 has allowed Turkey to sell significant quantities to medium-sized countries without large defense budgets in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This, in turn, expands Turkey’s geopolitical influence. The other powers are watching. China is taking noteand seeing the importance of the relationship between

Zach Schonbrun is a senior editor covering business and technology at The Week. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, ESPN the Magazine, SB Nation Longform, Vice, The Athletic, and Yahoo! Sports, among other publications. Zach is the author of The Performance Cortex, which explores the neuroscience of motor skills, and was published by Dutton/Penguin Books in April 2018. Before joining The Week, Zach covered five Final Fours, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA postseason, US Open tennis and championship golf — among numerous other events — for the Times, as well as other business and sports features. Six of his articles have appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Zach received a B.A. in Economics from Syracuse in 2009 and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia in 2011. In today’s podcast, we talk with Zach about his book, how the brain — not the body — may be responsible for athletic prowess, and the implications for future Soldiers. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Soldiers share many characteristics with performance athletes, and researchers have identified ways to chart and measure brain activations when performing athletic tasks. Thesebrain activations provide insights into who can accomplish these tasks quicker and more accurately, helping to identify standout athletes, and possibly standout Soldiers, before they ever “take the field.” Movement is a very complicated system and it’s all controlled by the brain. Artificial Intelligence researchers have created computers that can beat humans in chess and Jeopardy, but roboticists still struggle with replicating motions and movements. Those who are adept at skilled movement, like star athletes, should be considered geniuses. They are using their brains in ways that challenge their decision-making, processing, understanding, and memory. Emerging and current technology utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets for measuring brain activations is only the starting point. More sophisticated monitoring equipment and realistic simulation software will allow more in-depth tests to be conducted and more accurate readings to be collected. Neuroplasticity— the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life — is much more active at a younger age, as the brain is much more pliable. Practice and training in these younger years is vital to adequately learning required tasks and completing them successfully. New recruits should get much of their complex training early in their careers. Accurately re-creating real world conditions — all real world conditions — in a training environment is absolutely essential to learning the desired task. Batting practice in baseball has little value to the player as the pitches are slower and have less movement than the pitches they will face in a live game — in essence, players are not practicing the skill they will need. Are our Soldiers practicing in conditions that they...

Army Mad Scientist interviewed the following world-class SMEs to explore how wargaming can enhance traditional training and education methods to help build better Leaders: Ian Sullivan serves as the Senior Advisor for Analysis and ISR to the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC G-2). This is a Tier One Defense Intelligence Senior Level (DISL) position. He is responsible for the analysis that defines and the narrative that explains the Army’s Operational Environment, which supports integration across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy. Mr. Sullivan is a career civilian intelligence officer who has served with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (USAREUR G-2); and as an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) cadre member at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Prior to assuming his position at the TRADOC G-2, Mr. Sullivan led a joint NCTC Directorate of Intelligence/Central Intelligence Agency Counterterrorism Mission Center unit responsible for Weapons of Mass Destruction terrorism issues, where he provided direct intelligence support to the White House, senior policymakers, Congress, and other senior customers throughout the Government. He was promoted into the Senior Executive ranks in June 2013 as a member of the ODNI’s Senior National Intelligence Service, and transferred to the Army as a DISL employee in January 2017. Mr. Sullivan is also a frequent and valued contributor to the Mad Scientist Laboratory. Mitchell Land has spent time in both the Navy and the Army National Guard, and has a life-long love affair with gaming war. He is the designer of GMT’s Next War games. The series currently consists of five games (two of which are 2nd Editions) and three supplements, with more on the way. In addition, Mr. Land was the developer for GMT’s Silver Bayonet: The First Team in Vietnam (25th Anniversary Edition) and Caesar: Rome vs Gaul. When not playing or working on games, you can find him cycling — most often on the Katy Trail. LTC Peter Soendergaard is an Infantry officer in the Royal Danish Army. He has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last ten years, he has worked in various force development positions, from the Danish Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence to the Army Staff. For the past four years, LTC Soendergaard has served as the Danish Army’s liaison officer to U.S. Army TRADOC. He is currently serving in the strategic development section of the Danish Defense Command. Jennifer McArdle is the Head of Research at Improbable U.S. Defense & National Security, a commercial start-up that is bringing innovative distributed simulation technology to defense. She also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Center for a New American Security’s defense program and wargaming lab and as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University. A former professor, Ms. McArdle has served on Congressman Langevin’s cyber advisory committee and as an expert member of a NATO technical group that developed cyber effects for the military alliance’s mission and campaign simula...

COL John Antal (USA, Ret.) is a lifelong student of leadership and the art of war. His purpose in life is “to develop leaders and inspire service.” Today, he is an Amazon best-selling author, a defense analyst, a military correspondent, and a galvanic speaker. John has appeared on radio, podcast, and television shows and is the author of 16 books and hundreds of magazine articles on military and leadership subjects. His latest books are Leadership Rising (July 2021); and 7 Seconds to Die, A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the Future of Warfighting (February 2022). In the past year, based on his in-depth study of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, COL Antal has made over 108 presentations on the “changing methods of warfare” to U.S. military and national security leaders. He offers these presentations to the U.S. military at no charge and as a “Soldier for Life.” His previous The Convergence podcast — Top Attack: Lessons Learned from the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh War — and its associated blog post remain Army Mad Scientist’s “best-selling” listens and reads to date! In today’s podcast, COL Antal returns to discuss the challenges facing our Army in executing continuous and uninterrupted mission command in the contemporary battlespace, ensuring command post survivability, and achieving the Joint Force’s requirement for an All Domain Common Operational Picture. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Modern conflict is increasingly transparent; it is impossible to hide on the battlefield. Consequently, it is imperative that the Army adopt and practice “masking” — a full spectrum, multi-domain effort to deceive enemy sensors and disrupt targeting. Our Joint Force must obscure its optical, thermal, electronic, acoustic, and quantum signatures — or die! Today’s centralized command posts are incredibly vulnerable to enemy fire, while “Command Posts-in-Sanctuary” — those out of reach of adversary strikes — are limited by communications capabilities. To find an appropriate middle ground, we should adopt decentralized, mobile command posts that can support command and control and mask their locations and communications. It is unlikely that the United States will initiate the first strike in a conflict. Therefore, the U.S. military must consider how it will respond to a first strike by our adversaries. We should ask what we could do to prepare for a

Army Mad Scientist interviewed the following world-class SMEs to address what we’ve learned about How Russia Fights 2.0: Ian Sullivan serves as the Senior Advisor for Analysis and ISR to the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC G-2). This is a Tier One Defense Intelligence Senior Level (DISL) position. He is responsible for the analysis that defines and the narrative that explains the Army’s Operational Environment, which supports integration across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy. Mr. Sullivan is a career civilian intelligence officer who has served with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (USAREUR G-2); and as an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) cadre member at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Prior to assuming his position at the TRADOC G-2, Mr. Sullivan led a joint NCTC Directorate of Intelligence /Central Intelligence Agency Counterterrorism Mission Center unit responsible for Weapons of Mass Destruction terrorism issues, where he provided direct intelligence support to the White House, senior policymakers, Congress, and other senior customers throughout the Government. He was promoted into the Senior Executive ranks in June 2013 as a member of the ODNI’s Senior National Intelligence Service, and transferred to the Army as a Defense Intelligence Senior Level employee in January 2017. Mr. Sullivan is also a frequent and valued contributor to the Mad Scientist Laboratory. Sam Bendett is an Adviser with CNA‘s Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Center (SP3), where he is a member of the Russia Studies Program. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. His work involves research on Russian defense and technology developments, unmanned and autonomous military systems and artificial intelligence, as well as Russian military capabilities and decision-making during crises. He is a Member of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence, and a proclaimed Mad Scientist, having contributed multiple insightful blog posts to the Mad Scientist Laboratory addressing Russian autonomous weapons and presented informative topics during a number of Army Mad Scientist webinars and conferences. He is also a Russian military autonomy and AI SME for the DoD’s Defense Systems Information Analysis Center. Katerina Sedova currently serves at the Global Engagement Center in the U.S. Department of State. Formerly a Research Fellow at the Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Ms. Sedova helps coordinate efforts at the GEC’s Russia Division to analyze, expose, and counter Russia’s disinformation, including about its war in Ukraine. Following the 2016 election, the U.S. Government greatly increased its efforts to protect future ele...

MAJ John Spencer (USA-Ret.) is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum. He served over twenty-five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry Soldier, with two combat tours in Iraq as both an Infantry Platoon Leader and Company Commander. He has also served as a Ranger Instructor with the Army’s Ranger School, a Joint Chief of Staff and Army Staff intern, fellow with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group, and Strategic Planner and Deputy Director of the Modern War Institute, where he was instrumental in the design and formation of the institute. In today’s interview, MAJ Spencer returns to discuss what we’ve learned about LSCO, urban conflict, and the changing character of warfare from the last four plus months of Russia’s “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Modern technology forces our societies, and those of our adversaries, to be more connected to the battlefield. As the Ukrainian “Tik-Tok” war demonstrates, such connectedness can allow actors outside of the war to leverage open-source intelligence to influence the conflict by providing either side with logistical support and operational advice. It is important to study wars firsthand to understand how they are evolving to the modern context; the U.S. military used to employ appointed observers for this mission. Given that the battle for Kyiv is a truly urban fight, there is much the Army can learn from the conflict. The battle for Kyiv demonstrates that, especially in an urban environment, terrain still matters. Ukrainians flooded rivers and destroyed bridges to canalize Russian invaders into chokepoints and kill zones, demonstrating an understanding of their environment unthinkable to non-natives. The Russian invasion also demonstrates the importance of civilian involvement in urban conflict, as volunteers collaborated to establish defenses in depth, targeting and ambushing their attackers. Here, too, technology played an important role. Images and messages from the Ukrainian government and their fellow citizens helped strengthen citizens’ resolve to defend their country. Today, Soldiers and their families are more connected by technology than ever, allowing them to live with a foot in each world. This feature of modern warfare is important as it prevents Soldiers from feeling isolated, but also gives civilian families a clearer understanding of the realities of warfare. What are we missing? The Army is not learning the lessons of modern war. Future conflict will happen in urban areas. ...

While Shubhi Mishra, founder and CEO of Raft, is a lawyer and data scientist by training, she’s better known as an intentional government technology (GovTech) disruptor at heart. She loves solving complex problems, even the kind that give you a headache while you’re working through them. But that process of discovery, of realization, and coming to a solution makes it all worthwhile. Her passion is working with bleeding-edge technology focused on the defense sector. Raft provides an innovation space for people who are similarly mission-focused, tackling vexing challenges with passion and enthusiasm. Ms. Mishra seeks to inspire other women in and out of the GovTech space and excite them enough to join the movement of providing better solutions and services to the defense industry through sustainable, emerging technology. In today’s interview, Ms. Mishra discusses wicked problems in national security; finding creative, mission-focused solutions; and equipping the DoD with sustainable, emerging technology. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Raft’s strategy seeks to build a data fabric, or mesh, on top of data lakes, to reduce silos and increase communication among data resources. This enables faster decision making, which ultimately benefits our warfighters. When delivering a data product, it is important to maintain a human-centered design which considers for whom you are building the product. It is critical to experiment with the project and obtain user feedback. When working with historical datasets, one must consider: [1] If the full data is present. Can other datasets be integrated to get a better picture?[2] How will we measure the success of the algorithm we are using the data to build? Will we obtain a new result, or are we simply pattern matching? [3] Who can we get comments from to ensure we have a beneficial feedback loop? Warfare data presents unique challenges, as [thankfully] there is not high repetition. However, you do not necessarily need high volumes of data to get useful information. Being cautious about what outcome is being measured, using algorithms to pattern match, and enabling different values to be introduced for fair and non-biasedoutcomes can produce beneficial and informative results. The Department of Defense (DoD), working with external partners, helps illuminate fresh perspectives and challenge assumptions, as well as pullnew talent. There is an appetite among private sector companies to work with the DoD, but many times companies are not aware of such opportunities. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of The Convergence, to be published in a fortnight on 7 July 2022. If you enjoyed this post, check out the following related content: Algorithms of Armageddon and associated

COL Stefan Banach (USA-Ret.) is a Distinguished Member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and served in that organization for nine years, culminating with command of the 3rd Ranger Battalion from 2001-2003. He led U.S. Army Rangers during a historic night combat parachute assault into Afghanistan on October 19, 2001, as the “spearhead” for the Global War on Terror. Steve subsequently led U.S. Army Rangers in a second combat parachute assault into Al Anbar Province in western Iraq in 2003. He served with distinction in the U.S. Army from 1983 to 2010. Since then, he has provided executive consulting services to a diverse range of clients at a number of prestigious institutions. Steve Banach also serves as the Director, Army Management Staff College, an element of Army University responsible for “igniting the leadership potential for every Army civilian.”In today’s interview with COL Banach, we explore non-terrestrial war, weapons of mass deception, and why we are at a pivotal point in the defense of our country. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: The United States is experiencing a new form of conflict known as “non-terrestrial warfare.” Our adversaries no longer seek to confront us on the traditional battlefield. Instead, they will use non-tangible capabilities in cyber, big data, space, and the information space to influence entire societies and create tangible results, the effects of which may remain invisible for weeks, months, or even years. It is an unbounded, global, strategic form of maneuver, performed by nation and non- state actors that is an enduring, new approach to warfare. Non-terrestrial warfare encompasses strategies like mis-and disinformation — weapons of mass deception — where social media has emerged as a tool that can influence the behavior of entire populations. Data collected on human behavior while operating in this space creates new opportunities for actors to understand, exploit, and manipulate collective behaviors. This is a pre-meditated and well-orchestrated campaign that we are seeing implemented in algorithmic warfare today, dividing populations and creating dis-equilibrium and systemic shock in our society — it is a brilliant, elegant, strategic form of maneuver that is being levied against us. It is not by accident, and it is pervasive and growing! As witnessed in the on-going conflict in Ukraine, the role of non-state actors is increasingly important.Elon Musk maneuvered Spacex satellites and provided Starlink ground stations to the Ukrainian government to ensure continued satellite internet communications in the face of Russian cyberattacks. Hackers targeted Russian communications infrastructure, while Ukrainian citizens engaged in hybrid warfare in the defense of their homeland. In non-terrestrial war, the lines between civilians and combatants will conti...

Gen. Flynn is a native of Middletown, Rhode Island and Distinguished Military Graduate from the University of Rhode Island with a BS in Business Management. General Flynn is a graduate of the Infantry Officer Basic and Advanced Courses at Fort Benning, GA. He holds two master’s degrees, one in National Security and Strategic Studies from the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI, and one in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy from the National Defense University. In today’s interview, Gen. Flynn discusses the unique pacing threat posed by China, building interoperability with partner nations, and the future of multi-domain operations in INDOPACOM. The following bullet points highlight some of the key insights from our interview: - While it is often argued that future conflicts in the Pacific will be fought in the air and at sea, the U.S. Army remains critical in securing our regional interests. The Army continues to build relationships with partners on land, and will likely be the only Service not hindered by China’s Anti-Access /Area Denial (A2/AD) system, which is not designed to find, fix, and destroy land forces. As a result, land power will serve as a counterweight to Chinese aspirations both regionally and globally. - The Army’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) integrates live, virtual, and constructive environments, enabling our forces and partners to conduct training via a mobile, regional training center in the Pacific’s Arctic, Jungle, and Archipelago conditions and environments. JPMRC enables the Army to maintain a constant presence in the region, train, and build readiness with our allies and partners. - While training with technology in the region of operation is important, relationships matter. Building strong relationships between individuals, organizations, and countries is vital for deterrence by denial. We rely on our allies and partners for their understanding of the geography and the human terrain — the cultures, the societies, and the peoples of the region. - There are three types of interoperability: human, technical, and procedural. There are also three dimensions: human, physical, and information. The crossover or intersection between interoperability and dimensions is the human. By focusing on the human dimension and investing in and building human interoperability with our allies and partners, other vital components of interoperability will follow. - There are four principles for successful network integration. First, it will require an open architecture so Joint forces and mission partners may easily plug into it. Second, there must be a better way to both grant and evaluate the risk of granting authority to operate within these frameworks. Next, the Army needs to be more data-centric. Finally, our forces need to become transport agnostic for our data. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of The Convergence podcast featuring COL Stefan Banach (USA-Ret.), Director, Army Management Staff College, returning to discuss non-terrestrial warfare, weapons of mass deception, and the future information environment. If you enjoyed this post, learn more about China as our Pacing Threat at the

Gen. Paul E. Funk II, CG, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. (U.S. Army photo) General Paul E. Funk II assumed duties as the 17th Commanding General, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), on June 21, 2019. As TRADOC commander, Gen. Funk is responsible for 32 Army schools organized under 10 Centers of Excellence that recruit, train, and educate more than 750,000 Soldiers and service members annually. Gen. Funk was born at Fort Hood and graduated from Fort Knox High School. He was commissioned an Armor Officer through ROTC upon graduation from Montana State University. Gen. Funk has commanded at every level, Company through Corps; his combat and operational experience includes six deployments in support of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Inherent Resolve. Gen. Funk holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in speech communications, from Montana State University, and a Master of Science degree in administration, from Central Michigan University. He is a graduate of the Armor Basic Officer Leaders and Advanced Courses, the Command and General Staff College, and completed his Senior Service College as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Texas at Austin. In today’s interview, Gen. Funk addresses how the Army is modernizing doctrine given the Operational Environment, what are the challenges facing our all-volunteer force, what the Army can observe and learn from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and how it is adapting to the changing character of warfare. The following bullet points highlight some of the key insights from our interview: The all-volunteer force is at risk.Demographic trends show that the population of individuals qualified for recruitment is diminishing. Finding the “Secret Sauce” that motivates people to serve and stay in the Army will be vital to ensuring the Nation’s Senior Service remains an effective and capable force. Professionalizing the U.S. military gave the United States a quarter century of global dominance. At its core, it prioritized the Soldier – a mission that should still be emphasized today. Though the character of war is changing, it remains, in essence, a human endeavor. Today, prioritizing the Soldier must be done holistically – nutrition, sleep, and education will all contribute to mission success. Education is the best tool to prepare our Soldiers, and should be prioritized at every echelon.Strong doctrine can help form successful training programs and modernize the Soldier to out-think our adversary. Such education should also teach ‘disciplined disobedience,’ enabling Soldier-Innovators to adapt creatively to ensure mission success. Soldiers and their families will continue to be targets of disinformation.As a result, it is essential to promote trust in the chain of command, and to ensure military families have a safe, secur...

To Boldy Go, edited by COL Jonathan Klug and Steven Leonard, and published by Casemate Publishers in 2021, is subtitled “Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond.” Army Mad Scientist’s The Convergence podcasters Luke Shabro and Matthew Santaspirt explore how science fiction can inform the Army about the Operational Environment and the changing character of warfare with the books co-editors and contributors:COL Jonathan Klug is a U.S. Army Strategist serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the U.S. Army War College. Commissioned as an Armor officer, he served in Haiti, Bosnia, South Korea, Egypt, and Iraq. His strategy assignments included writing U.S. Army, U.S. Joint, and NATO Joint counter-insurgency doctrine; teaching at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy; serving as V Corps Deputy Plans and Strategy Officer; and strategic planning in the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, and Operation Resolute Support Headquarters. He holds degrees from the U.S. Military Academy, Louisiana State University, and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies. He is a PhD candidate in Military and Naval History at the University of New Brunswick. COL Klug co-edited To Boldly Go and co-authored “Yours is the Superior” with Steven Leonard (below), and contributed “You Rebel Scum!” and “To Live and Die at My Command.” Steven Leonard is an award-winning faculty member at the University of Kansas, where he chairs graduate programs in Organizational Leadership and Supply Chain Management. As a former military strategist and the creative force behind the defense microblog Doctrine Man, he is a career writer and speaker with a passion for developing and mentoring the next generation of thought leaders. He is a senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point; the co-founder of the national security blog Divergent Options; co-founder and board member of the Military Writers Guild; and a member of the editorial review board of the Arthur D. Simons Center‘s Interagency Journal. He is the author, co-author, or editor of five books, numerous professional articles, countless blog posts, and is a prolific military cartoonist. Mr. Leonard co-edited To Boldly Go and co-authored “Yours is the Superior” with COL Klug (above), and contributed “Beware the Beast Man” and “The Mirror Crack’d.”Dr. Kathleen McInnis has worked in the Pentagon, the UK Parliament, and in think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic. Having earned her PhD in War Studies at K...

In today’s interview, Senior Leaders and Soldiers discuss how the Army is successfully harnessing its disruptive thinkers to cultivate innovation at the tactical level. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: The 3rd Infantry Division’s The Marne Think Tank, the 101st Airborne Division’s EAGLEWERX, and the 18th Airborne Corps’ Dragon’s Lair are leading the U.S. Army’s efforts to crowd-source innovative ideas from every echelon of the force. While innovation tends to focus on technology, these organizations also invite creative ideas on policy, process, and quality of life. These organizations provide opportunities for Soldiers to pitch their ideas to senior leaders, then collaborate with their peers to refine their ideas and create actionable solutions. Soldiers themselves lead their projects, developing leadership, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Innovation requires both time and resources — the Army must dedicate specific time to innovation, particularly outside of focused technology development efforts. This tactical-level innovation, harnessing insights from Soldiers on better ways to perform missions and duties, is often overlooked. Ideas can range from the adoption of preparedness measures for assault survivors to new methods of range scheduling, team cohesion building, and rucksack transportation. Prerequisites for innovation include a welcoming environment and platform rather than extensive incentive structure. Soldiers already want to improve the Army – providing a positive space for them to proactively engage and collaborate on problems allows disruptive seekers to find each other and excel at innovation. The Army can cultivate its tactical innovators by fostering partnerships with academia and industry. By building a network ecosystem of interested parties, Soldiers are empowered to leverage existing technologies and processes in new ways to help solve Army problems now. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of The Convergence podcast — Crossing the Valley of Death for Innovation — featuring Trish Martinelli and David Schiff, both At-Large Regional Directors with the National Security Innovation Network, discussing innovation, the value of hackathons and crowd-sourcing in harnessing the Nation’s intellect to benefit National Security, and integrating their programs in support of U.S. Army innovation. If you enjoyed this post and podcast, check out the following related content addressing Innovation: Keeping the Razor’s Edge: 4th PSYOP Group’s Innovation and Evolution Council, by the 4th Psychological Operations Group (4th POG) Innovation and Evolution Council Strategic Latency Unleashed!,

MAJ John Spencer (USA-Ret.) is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum. He served over twenty-five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry Soldier, with two combat tours in Iraq as both an Infantry Platoon Leader and Company Commander. He has also served as a Ranger Instructor with the Army’s Ranger School, a Joint Chief of Staff and Army Staff intern, fellow with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group, and Strategic Planner and Deputy Director of the Modern War Institute where he was instrumental in the design and formation of the institute. In today’s interview, MAJ John Spencer (USA-ret.) discusses the on-going war in Ukraine, urban warfare strategies employed by both Russian and Ukrainian military forces, the changing character of warfare, and what this portends for the future of conflict. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Both with respect to the current Russia/Ukraine conflict and with modern conflict in general, urban warfare strategies are critical.This is true whether the objective requires getting past urban terrain or involves an objective that is urban in nature. Despite Russia’s initial plans falling in line with traditional invasions, characterized by a large mass of forces that are then rapidly deployed in a “shock and awe” campaign, Ukraine’s combined arms approach to defense has prevented Russia from quickly gaining control of critical areas. Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) and Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) have been very effective in this conflict due to Russia trading combined arms operations for speed. Russia’s rush to seize ground objectives in convoy without effectively utilizing their air superiority has led to many of their ground assets being destroyed. It is tough to find a recent battle where an urban area was not the strategic or decisive objective.As Antony Beevor once stated, “The age of combined arms maneuver on the open plain is over.” The conflict in Ukraine is challenging the idea that urban fighting can be bypassed. The Russia/Ukraine conflict is sending a clear reminder to the U.S. and allied forces that many of the lessons we’ve learned in the past— using combined arms in urban warfare, the dangers of emitting large Electronic Warfare (EW) signatures, and the importance of Command and Control — are all still relevant on the battlefield today. Information from around the world can be received in the combat zone and directly influence on-going kinetic operations.When Mr. Spencer observed the call for Ukrainian civilians to be added to the military force structure, he wrote a series of tweets on the most basic things civilian auxiliary forces could do to help in defending their nation (i.e., installing barricades at choke points along probable axes of advance to deter/halt Russian forces). He received videos proving that Ukrainian civilians had put his advice to good use, demonstrating that the information age is changing the character of war. Ukraine is capable of winning in urban warfare, because they do not have to actually defeat the enemy’s military power. In this situation, not losing is winning.Every day the Ukrainians maintain control of key urban areas, Russia cannot achieve its strategic objectives. Every day that passes, Russia’s political will continues to be sapped. All war...

Paul Barnes is a serving Warrant Officer in the British Army, employed as a Doctrine Writer at the Land Warfare Centre. He is uniquely a Chief of the Air Staff’s Fellow, a Chief of the General Staff’s Fellow, and a former MWI fellow at West Point in 2021. In today’s interview, Warrant Officer Class 2 Paul Barnes, British Army, discusses his article Learning the Wrong Lessons: Biases, the Rejection of History, and Single-Issue Zealotry in Modern Military Thought, featured by our colleagues at Modern War Institute; learning from historical conflicts; and fighting against “neophilia” and “presentism”. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: In the aforementioned article, Paul Barnes discusses the dangers of “presentism,” in which current events are catastrophized and used to inform the future without adequate acknowledgement of historical context. This mindset creates two dangerous fallacies: 1) that the world is more dangerous than it has been before; and 2) that technology is developing more rapidly than ever before.These statements are both false and promote the idea that history cannot help us understand our operational environment. The misconceptions promoted by presentism are generally accepted due to a lack of contextual historical understanding.However, militaries also promote the ideas of presentism to secure greater budget allocations. Analysts, too, use presentism to promote the legitimacy of their ideas and engagement with their work. Leveraging historical context to avoid the bias of presentism can be challenging. Even information from on-the-ground analysts throughout history will include bias. Multiple perspectives from history should be recognized, thus creating the opportunity to ‘learn from committee’ and avoid the pitfalls of biased reporting. The age of the tank is not over, as seen in the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Modern and future warfare will continue to leverage a combination ofinformation operations and heavy combined arms maneuver. To avoid presentism, enhanced education on critical thinking,bias recognition, and military history should be incorporated in professional military education for both Soldiers and Leaders.The latter is especially important, as an understanding of the past helps provide context for comprehending the present. While we can “train for the known,” education will help the Army be better prepared for the unknown. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory

MAJ Joe Littell is a U.S. Army officer and researcher assigned to the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy. He has been an instructor in the Math and History departments, teaching statistics and intelligence history. His research includes computational propaganda, open source intelligence, narrative warfare, de-platforming, and generative media (such as deepfakes). CPT Maggie Smith, PhD, is a U.S. Army cyber officer also assigned to the Army Cyber Institute, where she is a scientific researcher, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences, and an affiliated faculty of the Modern War Institute. She is also the director of the Competition in Cyberspace Project. In our interview with MAJ Littell and CPT Smith, we discussed the impact of information operations on recruitment, retention, and overall force readiness, and how we can gain information advantage over our adversaries. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Western liberal democracies’ concept of the internet as a platform for the free exchange of ideas is not shared by Russia and China, who regularly manage the information available to their populations via their concept of “cyber sovereignty.” As a result, Russia and China have extensive experience in manipulating online information to influence both domestic and foreign populations via propaganda. The United States has not developed this skillset. While Russia and China see information operations as a critical component of every operation, the United States has yet to adopt this strategy. Consequently, the U.S. is lagging behind its peer competitors in information warfare, oftentimes considering the narrative-building component of its actions only as an afterthought. The technologies facilitating today’s social media age are not the first to impact information operations — the printing press and radio were two revolutionary technologies that have been weaponized to control public opinion. Today’s digital technologies, however, are unique in that actors can now buy data to determine what messaging will be most impactful, enabling them to precisely target groups of individuals.For example, in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election, Russia created “Blacktivist” and “Back the Badge” social media accounts to exploit and push a divisive agenda, manipulating and polarizing American citizens. Russia and China are leveraging information operation...

Elizabeth L. Chalecki is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Nebraska Omaha, a Research Fellow in the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and a Research Chair with Fulbright Canada. Her expertise lies in the areas of climate change and security, international environmental policy, and the intersection of science/technology and International Relations. Dr. Chalecki has authored groundbreaking research on geoengineering and just war, and has published over 25 books, articles, and chapters on diverse topics such as climate change and Arctic security, environmental terrorism, climate change and international law, public perceptions of environmental issues, and water in outer space. She also serves as an environmental security subject matter expert for NATO. Dr. Chalecki holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, a M.Sc. in Environmental Geography from the University of Toronto, and an M.A. from Boston University. In our interview with Dr. Chalecki, we explore the broad global security implications of climate change and manipulation; their effects on Army and DoD readiness, operations, and mission requirements; and potential approaches for mitigating and regulating these threats. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: The consequences of climate change will force countries to reconsider their definitions of security. Instead of traditional military force size and strength, the stability of the environment will reflect the security of nations. Importantly, climate change is a security threat interconnected with the actions of other countries. Temperature increases and precipitation changes caused by climate change will have incalculable second order effects. Food security, civil unrest, migration, border insecurity, and disease patterns will all be shaped by the changing environment. Climate change will alter Army operations. The Army’s focus may shift to humanitarian support and peacekeeping missions in regions destabilized by climate change. Additionally, the emergence of novel diseases in deployment regions could reduce the size of the Army’s recruitment pool due to increased social resistance to vaccinations. Humans are looking at geoengineering– specifically solar radiation management (i.e., shielding the Earth from the Sun’s rays) and carbon dioxide sequestration – to fight climate change. However, these solutions are impossible to test without consequence, necessitating their careful development and regulation via international law. Currently, there is no national policy nor international law in place regulating geoengineering. Failed attempts at geoengineering could harm the global ecosystem worse than the climate change it seeks to mitigate, with potentially destabilizing effects. As governments fail to address climate change, individuals and subnational groups may be motivated to act in

The character of warfare has consistently changed over time, with technology evolving from edged weapons, bows and arrows, gunpowder, and battlefield mechanization, to more advanced technologies today, including long-range precision weapons, robotics, and autonomy. However, warfare remains an intrinsic human endeavor, with varied and profound effects felt by Soldiers on the ground. To explore this experience with those engaged in the tactical fight, we spoke with the following combat veterans, frontline reporters, and military training experts for this episode of The Convergence: Denys Antipov is a Ukrainian war veteran who served as a platoon leader and reconnaissance drone operator with the 81st Airborne Brigade in the Ukrainian Army, defending his homeland and fighting Russian paramilitary groups and anti-government separatists in the Donbas in 2015-2016. Heydar Mirza spent 36 days on the frontline as a war reporter in Terter and Agdere during the 44-day Second Nagorno-Karabakh war during the Fall of 2020. He is currently the program author and host of the weekly RADIUS military analysis program on Azerbaijan Public Television and Radio Broadcasting Company – ICTIMAI TV and Caliber.az YouTube channel. Nolan Peterson is Senior Editor at Coffee or Die Magazine and The Daily Signal‘s Ukraine-based foreign correspondent. A former U.S. Air Force special operations pilot and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he was among the first journalists to embed with Ukrainian forces in combat in eastern Ukraine. In Iraq, he embedded with Kurdish peshmerga forces in operations around Mosul and Sinjar. He has reported from throughout Eastern Europe, France, the U.K., and was onboard the USS George H.W. Bush off the Syrian coast to cover the air war against ISIS. John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He served over twenty-five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry Soldier, with two combat tours in Iraq as both an Infantry Platoon Leader and Company Commander. He has also served as a Ranger Instructor with the Army’s Ranger School, a Joint Chief of Staff and Army Staff intern, fellow with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group, Strategic Planner and then Deputy Director of the Modern War Institute where he was instrumental in the design and formation of the institute. He has just returned from walking the battlefields of Nagorno-Karabakh, gleaning lessons learned about modern combat on complex terrain. Jim Greer (Colonel, USA-Ret.) gradua...

Over the past two decades, China has transformed its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through a holistic approach — modernizing its weaponry, force structure, and approaches to warfare, to include operations in the cyber and space domains, while improving its professional military education. Although Russia remains a near-peer threat, China has ascended to become the United States’ lone pacing threat. The PLA’s momentous progress in warfighting capabilities and concepts, coupled with its whole-of-nation approach to competition, crisis, and conflict, enables it to challenge the United States across all domains and the Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic spheres. Army Mad Scientist interviewed the seven world-class SMEs regarding our near peer threat to learn How China Fights: Ian Sullivan serves as the Senior Advisor for Analysis and ISR to the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC G2). He is responsible for the analysis that defines and the narrative that explains the Army’s Operational Environment, which supports integration across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy. Mr. Sullivan is a frequent and valued contributor to the Mad Scientist Laboratory, including the previous episode in this series, How Russia Fights. Peter Wood is a program manager and defense analyst at Blue Path Labs, a strategic advisory firm. He previously edited China Brief, a publication of the Jamestown Foundation. He has an M.A. from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies (HNC) and a B.A. in Political Science from Texas Tech University. He is proficient in Chinese. Elsa B. Kania is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at CNAS. Her research focuses on Chinese military strategy, military innovation, and emerging technologies. Her book, Fighting to Innovate, should be forthcoming with the Naval Institute Press in 2022. At CNAS, Ms. Kania has contributed to the Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Initiative and the “Securing Our 5G Future” program, while acting as a member of the Digital Freedom Forum and the research team for the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and National Security. Ms. Kania is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard University’s Department of Government. She is also a graduate of Harvard College and has received a Master of Arts in Government from Harvard University. Ms. Kania was a Boren Scholar in Beijing, China, and she maintains professional proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. She i...

Russia is a formidable adversary that is currently undergoing transformative modernization. Its combat proficient force has inculcated lessons learned from recent combat operations in Syria, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine; selectively invested in niche capabilities (e.g., autonomy, robotics, and artificial intelligence) to add precision strike to its already formidable fires, enhance decision making, augment combined arms formations and logistics support, and safeguard its Soldiers; and professionalized to a more balanced ratio of contract to conscript Soldiers. A master of information confrontation, Russia employs cyber, information operations, and disinformation to offset any conventional force asymmetries. Above all, Russia remains a persistent, vice a declining power! Army Mad Scientist interviewed the following four world-class SMEs about our near peer threat to learn How Russia Fights: Ian Sullivan serves as the Senior Advisor for Analysis and ISR to the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC G2). This is a Tier One Defense Intelligence Senior Level (DISL) position. He is responsible for the analysis that defines and the narrative that explains the Army’s Operational Environment, which supports integration across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy. Mr. Sullivan is a career civilian intelligence officer, who has served with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (USAREUR G2); and as an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) cadre member at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Prior to assuming his position at the TRADOC G2, Mr. Sullivan led a joint NCTC Directorate of Intelligence (DI)/Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Counterterrorism Mission Center (CTMC) unit responsible for WMD terrorism issues, where he provided direct intelligence support to the White House, senior policymakers, Congress, and other senior customers throughout the Government. He was promoted into the Senior Executive ranks in June 2013 as a member of the ODNI’s Senior National Intelligence Service, and transferred to the Army as a DISL in January, 2017. Mr. Sullivan is also a frequent and valued contributor to the Mad Scientist Laboratory. Katerina Sedova is a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where she works on the CyberAI Project. Most recently, she advised SEN Maggie Hassan on cybersecurity and technology policy issues and drafted key legislation as a TechCongress fellow with the Senate Ho...

Brent L. Sterling has been an adjunct lecturer at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for the past twenty years, teaching courses on security studies, military strategy, and operations. He is the author of Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning for Foreign Conflicts and Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? What History Teaches Us about Strategic Barriers and International Security. Dr. Sterling has spent the past thirty years as a defense analyst, including positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and consulting firms working for the U.S. Department of Defense. In our interview with Dr. Sterling, we discuss how militaries learn (or don’t!) from foreign conflicts, what pitfalls await those trying to learn from historical conflicts, how focusing only on “relevant” observations hampers our creativity in analyzing warfare, and what strategists can do to avoid past mistakes. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: In Other People’s Wars, Dr. Sterling provides a longitudinal evaluation spanning the 19th and 20th centuries on what the U.S. military learned from foreign conflicts. Exploring the Crimean, Russo-Japanese, Spanish Civil, and Yom Kippur Wars as use cases, Dr. Sterlingidentifies how effectively the U.S. assimilated key lessons from each of these conflicts and developed responsive capabilities across doctrine, organization, training and education, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P); drew erroneous conclusions; or failed to act altogether. Importantly, Dr. Sterling compares the success of learning from these wars across the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. Studying foreign conflicts allows the U.S. military to learn about new technologies, their applications, and novel problem sets, facilitating proactive responsesto problems before they are encountered in the field. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. Army was reconsidering the future of the bayonet. Observations from the Russo-Japanese War, where knife fighting was prevalent — especially in night assaults, given the heightened risk of friendly fire — led Army Leaders to determine that the weapon was still relevant, and should be maintained. Learning from foreign wars can be a challenging endeavor, as it frequently runs counter to deeply-rooted institutional biases.Services’ culture and bureaucratic politics can limit the implementation of lessons learned from other nations’ conflicts. Insufficient access to information can also prevent the Services from fully appreciating the important implications of remote conflicts involving less than peer adversaries. The U.S. military also needs to be mindful that other observers learn from foreign conflicts, too. For example, while the U.S. Army learned of the importance and adopted Anti-Tank (AT) g...

Jennifer McArdle is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a Product Strategist at Improbable LLC, an emerging global leader in distributed simulation technology for military planning, training, and decision support. Her research focuses on military innovation, readiness, and synthetic training. She currently serves as an expert member of a NATO technical working group that is developing cyber effects for the military alliance’s mission and campaign simulations. Her work has been featured in Real Clear World, The Cyber Defense Review, National Defense Magazine, and War on the Rocks, among others. Ms. McArdle previously served as an Assistant Professor of Cyber Defense at Salve Regina University, where she lectured on the relationship between national security and disruptive technologies. In our interview with Ms. McArdle, we discuss the future of the Synthetic Training Environment, flexibility and scalability in training systems, and the critical need for a new agile approach to training that can keep pace with the dynamic character of warfare. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: Synthetic training will be instrumental in providing the next generation of Soldiers with the tools they need to succeed in a new era of warfare. The adoption of synthetic training and simulation will empower realistic individual and collective multi-echelon and multi-domain training and mission rehearsal, advanced wargaming, and enhanced decision-making. The New American Way of Training Initiative at CNAS examines how the military will be required to train and fight in the future, using the Cold War as a model. During the Cold War, intense tension and sporadic ‘hot’ proxy conflicts spurred a series of innovations that required radical changes to military training and organization. This new CNAS initiative will help ensure that our future individual and collective training programs meet the needs of our warfighters, today and in the future. The DoD should focus on developing modular synthetic training architectures, enabling it to adapt training and simulations more readily as warfare evolves. This method differs from current synthetic simulators, which are monolithic in nature (i.e., large, complicated, and un-editable platforms). Modular training simulations will give future Soldiers ‘degradation dominance,’ or the ability to maintain high levels of performance under duress. The DoD should require modular components of training platforms in future acquisition contracts. Such contracts will also reduce cost for the DoD, as updating platforms will require less overhaul than monolithic platforms. Synthetic training is particularly important for success in multi-domai...

COL Stefan Banach (USA-Ret.) is a Distinguished Member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and served in that organization for nine years, culminating with command of the 3rd Ranger Battalion from 2001-2003. He led U.S. Army Rangers during a historic night combat parachute assault into Afghanistan on October 19, 2001, as the “spearhead” for the Global War on Terror. Steve subsequently led U.S. Army Rangers in a second combat parachute assault into Al Anbar Province in western Iraq in 2003. He served with distinction in the United States Army from 1983 to 2010. Since then, he has provided executive consulting services to a diverse range of clients at a number of prestigious institutions. Steve Banach also serves as the Director, Army Management Staff College, an element of Army University responsible for “igniting the leadership potential for every Army civilian.” In our interview with Steve Banach, we discussed global entanglement, multi-reality warfare, and the urgent need for a new paradigm and cognitive approach to warfare for the U.S. Army and larger Joint Force. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: The U.S. military needs to develop a ‘fourth Army,’ whose form and function are capable of gaining logic from disorder. This Army will be better prepared to operate in the multi-reality, technologically integrated battlespace that is already upon us. The next war will be characterized by operations within the virtual battlespace. To prepare for this phase of warfare, the U.S. Army needs to develop new mental models to understand the vulnerabilities that arise from an increasingly interconnected world. Such an effort should feature the development of a ‘virtual battlespace maneuver’ Our adversaries are working to integrate technologies from autonomous weapons systems to social media to dominate this new battlespace. Future adversaries will not always be on a physical battleground, but the impacts of their operations will be felt both by the U.S. military and civilian population as they seek to create systemic shock and paralysis. The Army should redevelop its total force design and increase its operational arc to prepare the United States for this new form of conflict. Weapons of ‘mass deception’ will be increasingly prevalent in conflict, as social media is manipulated to prevent population education and engagement with critical issues. The United States should increase awareness of this threat via programs in both civilian and military education. Asymmetric ethics in the virtual battlespace will necessitate the development and communication of

Today’s episode of “The Convergence” podcast features our conversation with Mr. Doowan Lee, CEO, VAST-OSINT and Board Advisor, Zignal Labs, originally published last October. Mr. Lee is a National Security expert in influence intelligence, disinformation analysis, data analytics, network visualization, and great power competition. Before joining Zignal Labs, Mr. Lee served as a professor and principal investigator at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he executed federally funded projects on collaborative information systems, network analysis, and disinformation analysis. His article entitled The United States Isn’t Doomed to Lose the Information Wars explores Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and was featured in Foreign Policy last fall. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with Mr. Lee: Our adversaries see disinformation as just an effective tool that provides strategic and global reach. We see it as irregular warfare when it is anything but irregular. Disinformation, or the historical term propaganda, has been around forever. COVID-19 has accentuated this threat vector or surface. The Chinese government outlined their national information operations policy in "The Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (also known as Document #9): - Nations talking about the spread of open societies are attempting to undermine the CCP. - The CCP will maintain positive control of all media. - The CCP will professionalize information operations. This policy resulted in the development of the “Great Firewall,” the “Golden Shield" project, and the PLA’s Strategic Support Forces. The CCP and the Kremlin are increasing their coordination on national security activities and, in some cases, are increasing their collaboration. This resulted in a joint statement that stated the two governments would

In this latest episode of “The Convergence,” we talk with Keith Law, Senior Baseball Writer at The Athletic, which he joined in January 2020 after spending thirteen and a half years at ESPN. Before joining ESPN.com in June 2006, Keith spent just over four years as the Special Assistant to the GM of the Toronto Blue Jays, and prior to that had written for Baseball Prospectus. Keith Law is the author of Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, published in April 2017; and The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, published in April of this year. In today’s podcast, Keith Law discusses the parallels between baseball and the Information Environment, how stats skew our thinking, and the implications of anchoring bias: The brain develops cognitive biases to manage extensive information. These biases lead information consumers to draw false conclusions and ignore conflicting data. Anchoring bias occurs when the brain latches onto the first piece of information, even if it is irrelevant to what you are working on. Creating radical change in a large, traditional organization, like the Army or a sports team, is best done through an individualized grassroots effort. Radical change, especially from people new to the organization, does not usually “win hearts and minds.” Information environments are full of persistent yet harmful beliefs. These need to be addressed, as those with these beliefs are often more aggressive about promoting their viewpoints. “Credibly foolish beliefs” benefit from a “first mover” advantage. These irrational narratives are rarely challenged by peers. Once these fallacies are adopted, they are difficult to let go. Data collection tools are becoming democratized, leading to individuals having more agency over information. To become a better writer, future analyst...

Air Force Gaming (AFG) is the official gaming program and competition hub for the United States Air Force and Space Force. Over 86% of Airmen and Guardians between the ages of 18-34 identify as gamers. AFG was started to help Airmen of all ages, ranks, and backgrounds find common ground through video games, while also promoting mental acuity, fine motor coordination, and competitive excellence. Its mission is to create an inclusive gaming community for Airmen of all ages, ranks, and backgrounds. Capt Zach “ZB” Baumann co-founded AFG, and for the better part of 2020, led the explosion of AFG's digital reach to 575K impressions and 40K profile visits (doubling its digital footprint of followers on social media and verified members on its Discord server) across five platforms, and tirelessly built the connective tissue between the Department of the Air Force, DoD at large, and the gaming industry — ultimately leading to AFG’s “acquisition” by the USAF in November of 2020. AFG is helping to bridge the gap between the DoD’s digital natives (tomorrow’s leaders) and digital immigrants (today’s leaders).Capt Oliver “OliPoppinIt” Parsons founded AFG and leads a diverse group of Airmen and Guardians all across the world. AFG strives to be the leading DoD eSports/gaming organization. In 2020, he led the AFG Space Force Call of Duty team to victory in the first ever transatlantic Armed Forces eSports bowl (CODE Bowl).MSgt Michael Sullivan co-founded AFG, launching the Department of the Air Force’s first gaming and eSports organization, with a primary focus in mental health and resiliency for service members. MSgt Sullivan led day to day operations; advised on the organization’s direction, event planning, and brand implementation; developed its “Ambassador” volunteer program, on-boarded, and trained 50+ personnel; and established the first ever USAF/USSF official eSports teams, achieving the Championship title in an international tournament.In today’s podcast, Capt Baumann, Capt Parsons, and MSgt Sullivan discuss how gaming breaks down barriers in rank, generation, and geography; identities the digital talent residing in the gaming community; and how video games can cultivate the future Senior Leaders in the military. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: AFG seeks to identify and engage gamers already ‘within the gate’ of the Air and Space Forces, providing an online platform where Airmen and Guardians can network and develop skills in teaming, organization, and strategy. AFG hopes to expose the benefits of gaming to the DoD, counteracting the outdated stereotype that gaming is a waste of resources. AFG engages service members on a massive array of games, ranging from

CAPT George Galdorisi (USN-Ret.) is a career naval aviator whose thirty years of active duty service included four command tours and five years as a carrier strike group chief of staff. He is currently the Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California. He is also a contributing blogger for the Mad Scientist Laboratory, having written Creating a Convergence of Technologies to Defeat the Deadly Fast Inshore Attack Craft Threat Before 2050 and Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Meet Warfighter Needs. CAPT Galdorisi also presented Designing Unmanned Systems For the Multi-Domain Battle (please access this video via a non-DoD network) as a Mad Scientist Speaker Series presentation on 10 January 2018. CAPT Galdorisi began his writing career in 1978 with an article in the U.S. Navy’s professional magazine, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Since then, he has written fifteen books published by mainstream publishers, including the New York Times bestseller, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor, the novelization of the Bandito Brothers/Relativity Media film, and The Kissing Sailor, which proved the identity of the two principals in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day in Times Square photograph. His latest projects include a new series of thrillers published by Braveship books, as well as a recent collaboration with St. Martin’s Press rebooting the Tom Clancy Op-Center series. His three Braveship thrillers are: The Coronado Conspiracy, For Duty and Honor, and Fire and Ice, just released in 2021. The first three books of the rebooted Tom Clancy Op-Center series, Out of the Ashes, Into the Fire, and Scorched Earth are New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly best-sellers. In today’s podcast, CAPT Galdorisi discusses leading edge technologies, man-machine teaming, and algorithms of armageddon. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview: All military services must identify the “low hanging fruit” where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be injected quickly and easily into the operational force. For example, the U.S. Army lost Soldiers on fuel and water resupply convoys during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. AI can be incorporated into logistics platforms, replacing vulnerable human drivers in order to save lives. We are still assessing who — human or machine — h...

Dr. Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. This is the first novel of the Centenal Cycle trilogy, which also includes Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018). The trilogy was a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station and the author of the short story collection …and Other Disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, Dr. Older has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development. Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at The Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) explores the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments. Dr. Older is a part-time Faculty Associate at Arizona State University‘s School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) In today’s podcast, Dr. Older discusses worldbuilding and inspirations drawn from her humanitarian work. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: In Infomocracy, Dr. Older explores an alternative to our current media environment. Instead of fragmented media environments and the concept of media neutrality, she presents an idealized information management officer – a well-intentioned single source for information. With this comes the realization that even a single actor with good intentions could hold massive influence in society. The inspiration for Infomocracy came from Dr. Older’s disaster relief work while responding to an earthquake for which the United Nations brought in a dedicated information management officer to collate all information and ensure the response team had what was fundamental to completing their work. This curated the idea of centralizing information that was then widely dispersed. Dr. Older began thinking about the role of information in our society and how it is portrayed through media. When thinking about content for science fiction writing, it is important to experience things outside your comfort zone in order to give yourself an idea of the possible, while also taking an introspective look at yourself. Experiencing diverse communities allows you to truly get a different perspective on future possibilities. Some places may vary so much from your “normal” world that they could resemble t...

Peter Warren Singer is Strategist and Senior Fellow at New America. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues, and by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List. Mr. Singer is the author of multiple best-selling, award winning books in both fiction and nonfiction. Described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment,” Mr. Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead. He has consulted for the U.S. Military, Defense Intelligence Agency, and FBI, as well as advised a range of entertainment programs, including for Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Universal, HBO, Discovery, History Channel, and the video game series Call of Duty.August Cole is an author and futurist exploring the future of conflict through fiction and other forms of storytelling. He is a non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council; he directed the Council’s Art of the Future Project, which explores creative and narrative works for insight into the future of conflict, from its inception in 2014 through 2017. Mr. Cole is a regular speaker to private sector, academic, and U.S. and allied government audiences. He also leads the Strategy team for the Warring with Machines AI ethics project at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.Messrs. Singer and Cole co-authored the best selling Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, a near-future thriller about the next world war. Foreign Policy states “Every Army officer should read it…. we need to imagine what war will look like in the future so that we are prepared to win.” Last year, Messrs. Singer and Cole co-authored Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution — our colleagues at War on the Rocks stated that this novel “will do more for defense experts’ understanding of this brave new world with literature than a thousand non-fiction assessments would have.”In today’s podcast, Messrs. Singer and Cole discuss the power of fictional intelligence; the importance of storytelling, narrative, and verisimilitude in crafting tales of future possibilities that resonate and inform; and the significance of imagination. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: FicInt, also known as fictional intelligence or ‘useful fiction,’ combines extensive research and futures forecasting with worldbuilding and narrative,...

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them, into the impossible.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 20th Century British science fiction writer, futurist, and inventor Mad Scientist is pleased to introduce a new series of The Convergence podcast interviews with writers, creators, and producers who have a wealth of knowledge and experience in envisioning the future in diverse and unique ways! Creative writing and narrative building helps us to explore how emergent technologies and other capabilities could be employed and operationalized. Today’s post highlights key points from our interview with Ronald D. Moore — award winning screenwriter and producer of the several science fiction, fantasy, and alternative history television shows — in the first of our special series of podcasts exploring the power of science fiction, the importance of storytelling, and the significance of imagination Ronald D. Moore is a multiple Emmy and Hugo award-winning screenwriter and producer for Star Trek: The Next Generation; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (for which he also won a Peabody award), the Outlander historical fantasy series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and the For All Mankind streaming series portraying an alternative history featuring an enduring American/Soviet Space Race after the Russians beat us to the Moon. In today’s podcast, Mr. Moore discusses creativity, the power of science fiction in exploring future technologies, the importance of storytelling and narrative, and the significance of imagination in formulating fresh perspectives about future possibilities. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: Thinking about the future involves both world-building and storytelling. To do this process successfully, futurists must first identify constants and relevant social elements (e.g., religion, government structure, culture) for the desired time period. Then, one can consider key changes in the time period, and think through their second and third order impacts on the society being discussed. By harnessing the powerful process of developing science fiction narratives, the U.S. military can develop and prepare for alternate futures in the operational environment. These narratives can help communicate complex and abstract ideas in concrete ways and provide Army leaders with explicit examples of problems they may encounter in the future. Sharing st...

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015), and The Daughters of Kobani (2021). Additionally, Ms. Lemmon is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rebellion Defense, and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as an expert on their Women and Foreign Policy Program, She also serves in private sector leadership roles in emerging technology and national security firms, Ms. Lemmon is a frequent speaker on national security topics, including at the Aspen Security Forum and TED forums, and has given talks at the U.S. Military Academy, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the National Infantry Museum. In today’s podcast, Ms. Lemmon discusses writing about disruptors, the emergence of female fighters and military leaders, and the future of women on the battlefield. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: In The Daughters of Kobani, Lemmon details the story of an all-female Kurdish Militia that partnered with the United States to fight ISIS in Syria. Their story demonstrates the evolving nature of women in combat, as role-breakers step forward to lead both women and men in conflict. The successful collaboration between this militia and the U.S. military provides strong justification for the formation of future counterterrorism partnerships. These efforts could include a ground partner force, a light U.S. special operations presence, and U.S. air support. While partnerships with local groups can be challenging, success in Kobani shows significant advantages to such endeavors. As the United States forms these partnerships, it will be critical for the U.S. military to consider and define U.S. responsibilities post-conflict. Partner allegiance to the United States involves significant risk, and thus the United States should be certain to support partner efforts before, during, and after conflicts. The Daughters of Kobani demonstrates the advantages for the inclusion and advancement of women in conflict operations. By harnessing all available talent and integrating women across all levels of the military, the United States can significantly advance U.S. national security interests. Importantly, this effort may involve the dismantling of structures that no longer serve U.S. interests and a reshaping of the conceptualization of power. The establishment and preservation of U.S. values will be essential in order to maintain U.S. leadership internationally. The United States is not competing against other democracies for global influence, and thus will have its policies and behavior criticized on the international stage. Commitment to high democratic standards will be critical in maintaining U.S. soft pow...

Mr. Richard G. Kidd IV, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment & Energy Resilience, provides policy and governance for programs and activities that enable resilience and cyber-secure energy for weapon systems and installations. This includes budgetary, policy, and management oversight of programs related to climate change, compliance with environmental laws, prevention of pollution, management of natural and cultural resources, and cleanup of contaminated sites, as well as energy resilience, risk, and performance. Prior to his current position, Mr. Kidd served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Strategic Integration where he led the strategy development, resource requirements, and overall business transformation processes for the Office within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment. He was responsible for developing and monitoring performance metrics for the Army’s installation management community as well as leading a strategic effort to examine options for future Army installations. In today’s podcast, Mr. Kidd addresses threats to the force from climate change, operating conditions in a worsening climate, and how the DoD can be proactive in this existential fight. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion: Climate change presents an inevitable threat to world peace, economic prosperity, and capital investment. It is likely to impact the U.S. military in three major ways: Increased Operational Requirements: Climate change will overwhelm the governing capacity of weak states, increasing conflict and extremism abroad and subsequently increasing foreign threats. Domestically, demand for the Army National Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and civil authorities will increase in responding to and preventing damage from severe weather. Increased Vulnerability of Installations: Prevalence and intensity of floods, erosion, drought, fires, wind shear, and sea level rise will grow as a result of climate change, threatening military installations. Degradation of Performance: Performance parameters of both people and equipment will be challenged as they are forced to operate in extreme temperatures. Keeping Soldiers alive in an increasingly hostile climate will challenge the U.S. Army. U.S. adversaries will craft strategic narratives to criticize U.S. action, or inaction, on climate change. China has heralded, and indeed, ‘weaponized’ its own prioritization of climate change policy and technology development, highlighting its actions in contrast to previous U.S. failures to engage in the Paris Accords. Despite this element of competition, the United States should cooperate with China on climate change policy, given the two nations’ significant impact on the environment. Through a series of executive orders, and specifically via EO14008, the Biden administration has established

COL John Antal served 30 years in the Army and has commanded combat units from platoon through regiment and served on division, corps, and multinational staffs. He also served at the National Training Center and has extensive ex­perience in Korea, serving multiple tours on the DMZ. After retiring from the Army, COL Antal was selected by Mi­crosoft Games Studio to help develop an interactive enter­tainment company in Texas. He then became the Executive Director for Gearbox Software with studios in Texas and Can­ada. He led teams to develop multiple AAA+ video games and is an innovator in the interactive gaming and learning industry. As an author, COL Antal has published 16 books and hundreds of magazine articles. He has served as Editor of the Armchair General magazine, and appeared on TV and the radio to discuss leadership, historical, and national security issues. He is a freelance correspondent for Euro-based Military Tech­nology (Mönch Publishing Group) and Mittler Report Verlag. In today’s podcast, COL Antal discusses the implications of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, the psychological effects of drone warfare, and the future of maneuver. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with him: U.S. success in future conflicts depends on our ability to analyze the trends found in conflicts today. By examining the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war, the United States can gain valuable insights on the future of warfare, and better respond to threats in future conflicts. Ten lessons learned from the Second Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are: Know Yourself, Know your Enemies. The Azeris had reviewed the underlying causes of their previous defeat at hands of the Armenian armed forces, meticulously studied their current capabilities, and adapted/incorporated new ways of warfare, enabling them to decisively win this conflict in 44 days. Better equipment, organization, training, preparation, and leadership are key. Set the Conditions for Success before you Fight. The Azeris had cultivated strategic relationships with both Turkey and Israel — providing them with access to sophisticated ISR and strike UAS and loitering munitions. They also induced hesitation with Armenia’s sponsor, Russia, causing them to equivocate whether the defense of the Nagorno-Karabakh region fell within the scope of the Armenian-Russian mutual defense agreement. Strike First. The innovative use of obsolete, remotely piloted air assets to probe and force Armenian air defense radars to “light up” enabled the Azeris to then fix, target, and destroy the Armenian layered air defenses using precision weapons, granting them first mover advantage. Dominate across all Domains. While the Mar...

Cathy Hackl is a leading tech futurist and globally recognized business leader specializing in AR, VR, and spatial computing. Ms. Hackl hosts the Future Insiders podcast and has been designated as one of LinkedIn’s Top Tech Voices. She founded and leads the Futures Intelligence Group, a futures research and consulting firm that works with clients in tech, fashion, media, government, and defense implementing innovation strategies, strategic foresight, and emerging technologies. BigThink named Cathy “one of the top 10 most influential women in tech in 2020” and she has been called the CEO’s business guide to the metaverse. She was included in the 2021 prestigious Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led. In today’s podcast, Ms. Hackl discusses forecasting, the metaverse, and women in tech. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with her: The world is approaching a pivotal moment for VR/AR/MR. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of these technologies, as they allow for an elevated sense of presence in a distanced physical world. AR/VR technologies have extremely diverse applications, from filters on social media to the treatment of PTSD and Alzheimer’s disease. Novel applications for these technologies are in constant development, particularly as wearables like “smart glasses” proliferate in the commercial sphere. Although AR/VR are frequently associated with altered visuals, other senses are increasingly incorporated into these platforms. Currently in development is AR that would allow users to focus on a single conversation amidst significant background noise. As the metaverse, a digital copy of the world available in real time, is developed, the way we engage with the physical world will change. Information available to VR/AR users in various “layers” could be manipulated or controlled by actors capable of altering the available data. In order to recruit future generations to technology development, it will be essential to “meet them where they are.” By identifying online platforms, interests, and values of youth, recruiters will be able to present opportunities to create meaningful change in an attractive manner. The federal government’s focus on artificial intelligence has de-prioritized AR/VR. However, AR/VR are innately American technologies, and increased focus on their development could allow the United States to maintain its current advantage in the field. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of “The Convergence,” featuring an interview with COL John Antal (USA-Ret.) discussing the implications for future conflict from the Second Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, the psychological effects of drone warfare, and the future of maneuver, on 1 April 2021.

COL Scott Shaw commands the Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG), whose mission is to provide global operational advisory support to U.S. Army forces to rapidly transfer current threat based observations and solutions to tactical and operational commanders in order to defeat emerging asymmetric threats and enhance multi-domain effectiveness. In today’s podcast, COL Shaw discusses the future of ground warfare and the realities of combat for tomorrow’s Soldiers. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with him: AWG was developed to promote U.S. Army understanding of asymmetric threats. Today, this effort is focused in three research areas: the operations and information environment, electronic warfare, and countering unmanned systems. The United States needs to balance focus, spending, and training among threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and violent extremist organizations (VEOs). Strategists need to remember that “the enemy gets a vote,” and thus efforts will need to remain adaptable. While the United States excels at fighting at a Brigade Combat Team-level, future success will stem from excellence in space and cyber operations, electronic warfare, air defense, information operations, and lean logistical planning. These areas are challenging and will require extensive organization and advanced exercise design. The use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for reconnaissance and targeting will increase. As these systems proliferate, they will lower the ‘entry fee’ into combined arms operations, granting even

Michael Meier is the Special Assistant to the Judge Advocate General (JAG) for Law of War Matters at Headquarters, Department of the Army. As such, Mr. Meier serves as the law of war subject matter expert for the U.S. Army JAG Corps, advising on policy issues involving the law of war. Mr. Meier also reviews all proposed new U.S. Army weapons and weapons systems to ensure they are consistent with U.S. international law obligations. Additionally, he is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, instructing courses on the Law of Armed Conflict. Mr. Meier is a retired JAG officer, having served in the U.S. Army for 23 years. Shawn Steene is the Senior Force Developer for Emerging Technologies, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where his portfolio includes Emerging Technologies and S&T, including Autonomous Weapon Systems policy and Directed Energy Weapons policy. Prior to joining OSD Strategy & Force Development, Mr. Steene worked in OSD Space Policy, where his portfolio included Space Support (launch, satellite control, orbital debris mitigation, and rendezvous and proximity operations), as well as strategic stability and all space-related issuances (Directives, Instructions, DTMs, etc.). He is a proclaimed Mad Scientist, having presented and served as a discussion panelist in our Frameworks (Ethics & Policy) for Autonomy on the Future Battlefield, the final webinar in our Mad Scientist Robotics and Autonomy series of virtual events. In today’s podcast, Messrs. Meier and Steene discuss the ground truth on regulations and directives regarding lethal autonomy and what the future of autonomy might mean in a complex threat environment. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with them: Current law and policy do not specifically prohibit or restrict the use of autonomous weapons. However, these systems will need to operate within the law of armed conflict and Department of Defense (DoD) directives. These restrictions entail that autonomous systems will need to be capable of distinguishing between appropriate targets and non-combatants, maintain proportionality in attacks, and undertake feasible precautions to reduce risk to civilians and protected objects. Ultimately, operators and human supervisors will be held responsible under laws of conflict and U.S. policy. Thus, appropriate safeguards will need to be adopted to ensure appropriate human oversight of autonomous systems. DoD directives establish guidelines for this supervision and facilitate case by case reviews of systems with autonomous capabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy are not interchangeable. While some autonomous systems use AI, this is not always the case. The United States is concerned with and making efforts to address the ethical components of autonomous systems. DoD directives...

Eli Dourado is a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity (CGO) at Utah State University. He focuses on the hard technology and innovation needed to drive large increases in economic growth — speeding up infrastructure deployment, eliminating barriers to entrepreneurs operating in the physical world, and getting the most out of federal technology research programs. He has worked on a wide range of technology policy issues, including aviation, Internet governance, and cryptocurrency. His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets. In today’s podcast, Mr. Dourado discusses technology opportunities in the next decade, the economic impact of shifting technology trends, and their impact on global security. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with him: According to economic statistics, technological growth has stagnated since 2005. While some claim that the economy has fully matured and further growth will be limited, others argue that there is still room for growth, but U.S. culture and complacency has prevented further growth. In the next two decades, geothermal energy will have the biggest impact on economic development. Cheap, unlimited geothermal energy will enable the use of more expensive materials like silicon carbide by significantly reducing the cost to create them, produce energy without carbon emissions thus mitigating the effects of climate change, and reduce food security concerns via indoor growing models. The United States is now energy independent, which could incentivize a shift away from intervention in the Middle East. Conflict in the region could still significantly impact U.S. supply chains, given Asian reliance on Middle Eastern energy flows. While genetic enhancements are still decades away, brain computer interfaces (BCI) could allow soldiers to command technology at the speed of thought in the next ten years. Related bioethical concerns, while important, may also be limiting the growth of beneficial technologies. Decreasing launch costs are facilitating both commercial and governmental expansion in space. High resolution earth sensing technology could soon enable a “live Google Earth,” in which viewers could watch scenarios unfold in real time (e.g., Uyghur camps), impacting social movements. Augmented reality will be widely adopted by the middle of the decade. However, systems will still require the development of ‘contextual awareness’ to prevent overloading users w...

David Kilcullen is Professor of Practice at the Center on the Future of War and the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, a Senior Fellow at New America, and an author, strategist, and counterinsurgency expert. He served 25 years as an officer in the Australian Army, diplomat and policy advisor for the Australian and United States Governments, in command and operational missions (including peacekeeping, counterinsurgency and foreign internal defense) across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Europe. In the United States, he was Chief Strategist in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, and served in Iraq as Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, before becoming Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of a number of influential books including The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism — based on an essay that received the Walkley Award, the Australian version of the Pulitzer Prize. His newest book is The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. In today’s podcast, Dr. Kilcullen discusses the future of conflict, changing concepts of victory, and achieving decisive advantages. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with him: Different actors (state and non-state) are converging on a set of tactics: small teams, modular, urban, use of cyber kinetics. This convergence is an adaptation to US and Western dominance in a small sub-set of warfare characterized by high tech, connected, exquisite systems of systems. We describe this as conventional or regular warfare because we are the best in the world at this type of conflict. These different actors are the Dragons (states) and Snakes (non-state actors). Dragons are back, but acting more like Snakes. Snakes are more capable due to the democratization of technology which makes them more lethal and capable of operating regionally and globally. The War on Terror is not over, but the period of large occupations has ended. Simultaneously, the possible resurgence of Great Power Conflict means the US must be capable of fighting both near peer competitors and capable non-state actors. The defining characteristics of future warfare include: Liminal Warfare – Our adversaries will seek to operate below the West’s response threshold, executing covert operations that may be detected, but whose sponsorship remains cloaked and unattributed; and ambiguous actions, where both the operation and sponsor may be suspected, but remains unproven. Tactical Concepts employing small teams, modular, swarming, empowered by advanced communications and (in the future) artificial intelligence. Blending cyber-k...

Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos is the Science and Technology subject matter expert at the U.S. Special Operations Command’s (USSOCOM’s) Joint Special Operations University where she is working on developing technology related education for the Special Operations Force Professional. Previously, she was a Strategy and Innovation Advisor conducting forecasting work on technology and the future operating environment for the J5 at USSOCOM. She has addressed the United Nations member states at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Group of Governmental Experts (CCW GGE) meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and participates in NATO Science for Peace projects. Check out her website at www.lkcyber.com and follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lkcyber. In today’s podcast, Dr. Kostopoulos discusses the future of competition and conflict and steps the Army can take in preparing for it. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with her: I think about the future from a point of tech abundancy. If you think about the availability, accessibility, and benefits of emerging technologies, you can study the flip side of this to identify the associated threats. Examples include the use of technologies by protestors or the use of drones and loitering munitions in small conflicts like Nagorno-Karabakh. There is no shared reality of what competition and conflict is or will look like. In a recent speech, LTG (R) McMaster said that we needed “more strategic empathy” and “less strategic narcissism.” This isn’t about preparing for the war we want to fight because our adversaries will probably not provide us that opportunity. You see this difference in the view of future warfare by studying the growing role of the cyber threat space. Our adversaries seek to influence and attain their objectives in the competition and crisis phases via Information Operations. They are more focused on limiting our C4ISR and less on big platform conflict. This threat to our C4ISR capabilities and the speed of the future battlefield means we will have to find ways to preserve decision space for our political and military leaders. We need to focus on gaining a competitive advantage in situational understanding and rapidly conveying this information to our leaders. Emerging technologies like

In this episode of “The Convergence,” we discuss reading and its implications on leadership and forecasting, the future of command selection, and cultivating effective communicators and thinkers in the future force with LTC Joe Byerly, an active duty armor officer in the U.S. Army who has served in both conventional military and Joint assignments. In 2013, LTC Byerly started From the Green Notebook to share this thoughts on self-development — “I’m passionate about leader development and want to help others to lead with the best version of themselves. I created this site to provide a platform for leaders to help each other by sharing lessons learned. Lessons that come from our own green notebooks.” The following bullet points highlight key insights on leadership and reading from our interview with LTC Byerly: Leaders can learn and prepare for the future by reading and understanding how we got to where we are, studying economics and the social sciences, and focusing on what the classics tell us about human behavior. Reading science fiction as part of our personal study program serves as a mental laboratory to push our thought and help us break from linear projection (now) into the future. To understand the possibilities of the future, you have to connect disparate things and bring them together. Reading broadly and connecting these dots improves strategic thinking. Ideal Soldiers in the future will love to learn, demonstrate empathy, and have the ability to fight and win. Communication is a key skill for the future to describe vision and intent. A favorite quote – “If the people can’t see your vision, then it is a hallucination.” Talking to future Soldiers, we must convince them to own their personal development. The tech that scares me the most in the future? “Altering bio and genetic engineering – really, anything that makes me wear a mask for seven hours at Disney World.” [Editor’s Note: this response is similar from those of Soldiers from the 1980s when confronted with the daunting prospect of having to fight buttoned up in MOPP IV for prolonged periods of time!] Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of “The Convergence,” featuring Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos, Science and Technology (Emergent Tech) subject matter expert at the Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Special Operations Command, on 7 January 2021! If you enjoyed this post, check out: The Convergence: The Future of Talent and Soldiers with MAJ Delaney Brown, CPT Jay Long, and 1LT Richard Kuzma and the associated podcast Fight Club Prepares Lt Col Maddie Novák for Cross-Dimension Manoeuvre, by proclaimed Mad Scientists LTC Arnel David, U.S. Army, and Major Aaron Moore, British Army; The Convergence: UK Fight Club –...

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) is the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center of Excellence that provides a critical mass of expertise to help the Department harness the game-changing power of AI. To help operationally prepare the Department for AI, the JAIC integrates technology development with the requisite policies, knowledge, processes, and relationships to ensure long term success and scalability. The mission of the JAIC is to transform the DoD by accelerating the delivery and adoption of AI to achieve mission impact at scale. The goal is to use AI to solve large and complex problem sets that span multiple services, then ensure the Services and Components have real-time access to ever-improving libraries of data sets and tools. In this episode of “The Convergence” we discuss how the JAIC is bringing AI to the Joint Force (and the associated challenges!) with the following panel members: Jacqueline Tame, Acting Deputy Director, Chief Performance Officer Alka Patel, Head of AI Ethics Policy Jane Pinelis, Chief, Testing and Evaluation, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML). The following bullet points highlight the key insights from our interview: We have not seen a reorganization of the DoD since the Goldwater–Nichols Act in 1986. AI offers a catalyst for what is next. The DoD has a temporal split in how to integrate AI. AI is now ready to start tackling Phase I objectives to alleviate redundant and repetitive work, but legacy processes and cultural barriers remain as obstacles in starting this work. Phase II objectives of integrating AI on the battlefield present additional obstacles that are measurable. Getting AI ready requires improved open mindedness at the individual level on what is possible and a willingness to accept risks, improve data readiness, modernize information technology, recruit the requisite talent, and implement the necessary policies. Phase II represents AI integration at a level that could redefine what it means to be Joint. Moving from doctrinal definitions and incredible effort to operate join...

Today’s episode of “The Convergence” podcast features a conversation with Mr. Doowan Lee, Senior Director from Zignal Labs. Mr. Lee is a National Security expert in influence intelligence, disinformation analysis, data analytics, network visualization, and great power competition. Before joining Zignal Labs, Mr. Lee served as a professor and principal investigator at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he executed federally funded projects on collaborative information systems, network analysis, and disinformation analysis. His article, entitled The United States Isn’t Doomed to Lose the Information Wars, explores Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and was featured in Foreign Policy last month. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with Mr. Lee: Our adversaries see disinformation as just an effective tool that provides strategic and global reach. We see it as irregular warfare when it is anything but irregular. Disinformation, or the historical term propaganda, has been around forever. COVID-19 has accentuated this threat vector or surface. The Chinese government outlined their national information operations policy in “The Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (also known as Document #9): – Nations talking about the spread of open societies are attempting to undermine the CCP. - The CCP will maintain positive control of all media. - The CCP will professionalize information operations. This policy resulted in the development of the “Great Firewall,” the “Golden Shield“ project, and the PLA’s Strategic Support Forces. The CCP and the Kremlin are increasing their coordination on national security activities and, in some cases, are increasing their collaboration. This resulted in a recent joint statement that stated the two governments would work together to undermine disinformation that seeks to destabilize the Russian and Chinese governments. How is our Great Competition strategy working to prevent Chinese and Russian collaboration? Slaughtering the “Golden Calf” Information Operations are not irregular DROP THE ADJECTIVE! There is nothing irregular about these operations and they are probably the most regular or everyday form of competition we face. Embrace our doctrine. We are not using our tools such as international or bilateral exercises for advantage, while our adversaries are using these exercises, oftentimes in the same contested space, to their information advantage. Stop trying to make perfect decisions. Instead, work to perfect decision making using rapid experimentation, learning, and implementation. When engaging the younger generations, we need to discu...

In today’s podcast, Major Rob Slaughter discusses Platform One (P1), an official DoD DevSecOps Enterprise Services team. P1’s vision is to create an innovative, collaborative, and unified Defense Department that delivers freedom through continuous software integration and deployments. Its mission is to guide, empower, equip, and accelerate DoD program offices and weapon systems through their DevSecOps journeys by: Helping to deploy mission code to the Warfighter quickly and securely. Accelerating deployment capabilities by providing an 85% solution to jump start coding. Providing a common code base for reusability. Creating a collaborative environment to break down silos and enable government-wide cross-functionality. The following are highlights from our interview with Major Slaughter: Platform One solves two simultaneous DoD problems, usually seen as polar opposites: – DoD systems are not secure enough. – DoD struggles to quickly deliver software capabilities. The current limitation on software is the age of our systems. The average USAF aircraft is older than our airmen. The future is “everything software,” but to realize this future, we will need new hardware. An AI beat an F-16 pilot in air-to-air combat, but that same F-16 could not incorporate that AI onboard without major hardware upgrades. The “everything software” future means every Soldier and Civilian should be able to write software wherever they are. The greatest immediate potential is with the new Space Force, as 100% of their fight will be through a console. Mobility is an enabling trend — being able to access the necessary software tools and work with agility in any environment. In this future, the #1 risk to combat systems is software. Rapid software development and accreditation, and sharing what works across the force is critical to mission success. Platform One can be the “Easy button”– using a trusted process to mitigate risk. DoD has over 100,000 software developers, which makes it one of the largest “software companies” in the world. With all of this capability, we still have the reputation of not being able to produce fast and secure products. Use of open source produced software offers a way to bring the most secure solutions to DoD. Thousands of contributors on a software solution will always beat 50 contributors on a black box project. Not all open source code is created equal. A tipping point occurs when an open source product is not well supported or is primarily supported by known adversaries. The software advantage is a future competition which will equate to battlefield advantage. We are missing a key trend — a dearth of Mandarin language proficiency could lead to an AI disadvantage for Western AI scientists who cannot keep abreast of Chinese scientific progress and breakthroughs. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next podcast with Doowan Lee of Zignal Labs, discussing disinformation, changes over time in approaches to information warfare, and revisionism and the Chinese Communist Party on 12 November 2020!

In today’s podcast, the following Army officers discuss Soldiering and talent management in the future force: MAJ Delaney Brown is a strategist with the Army Talent Management Task Force. She has deployed in a variety of roles ranging from intelligence platoon leader to regional foreign aid coordinator and served as an Assistant Professor of American Politics in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences. MAJ Delaney holds a Bachelor of Science in Comparative Politics and Systems Engineering from the United States Military Academy and a Master of International Development Policy from Georgetown University where she used quantitative methods to evaluate the efficacy of government policies. She is currently a term member at the Council of Foreign Relations and active with the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Program. CPT James “Jay” Long is an Army Reservist serving as an innovation officer at Joint Special Operations Command. Previously, he served in various infantry assignments on active duty and was a National Security Innovation Network Startup Innovation Fellow. He is based in Washington, DC. 1LT Richard Kuzma is a data scientist and technical program manager at the Army Artificial Intelligence Task Force, where he applies machine learning to Army problems and helps the Army build its digital workforce. Richard is an alum of the Defense Innovation Unit and the Harvard Kennedy School, where he wrote his thesis on structural changes needed to facilitate AI adoption within the Department of Defense. He is a member of the Military Writers Guild and writes about the DoD’s machine learning transformation in War on the Rocks, The U.S. Naval Institute, and The Strategy Bridge. The following are highlights from the Podcast’s panel discussion: At a fundamental level, the Army is still looking for the same future leaders: People who find fulfillment in service, enjoy working on hard problems, learn fast, and like to work hard. Future Soldiers need to be capable of learning fast; possess the emotional intelligence to rapidly build, lead, and be assimilated into effective mission-oriented teams; and have the curiosity to continually learn. The Army cannot focus on specific technical knowledge. We cannot predict the tech in five years, but we know which tech competencies will be important. We need to re-weight the importance of physical and intellectual skills. Culturally accepting that technical fluency might outweigh the importance of a Ranger tab is difficult. Before the Army can realize the benefits of Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T), we will need Commanders that understand networks, data, and workflows. To paraphrase Napoleon Bonaparte — Amateurs talk tactics, masters talk logistics, and the leaders of the future will need to talk ecosystems. We are facing a war for talent as the Army seeks similar technical skills as the civilian sector. The Army is not effectively communicating the value proposition of serving in uniform versus working in Silicon Valley. We are not communicating what our hard problems are and allowing the talent to serve at a level where they can solve them. Elite talent will leave the force if they cannot work on these hard problems and are not provided the tools (e.g., AI, big data, networks) available to them in the civilian sector. The Army’s force structure management and human resources policies should allow technical and cultural experts direct entry to Army service at middle management and senior leader levels. Why shouldn’t an Amazon warehouse manager be able enter the Army as a logistics Major? Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next podca...

Dr. Zalman is a global futurist who helps leaders and organizations explore the implications of critical global trends and prepare their organizations for transformative change. She is a part-time professor of Strategic Foresight at Georgetown University and the CEO of the foresight consultancy Prescient, LLC, which she founded in 2017 after over a decade of hands-on experience accelerating change in public, private, and non-profit organizations. In today’s podcast, Dr. Zalman discusses forecasting and strategic foresight, paradigm shifts in thinking, and the nature versus the character of warfare: Strategic foresight is a way of thinking to develop an effective strategy that is appropriate for the moment. How to think like a futurist — If you can tell a compelling story that engages someone else in a shared aspiration (e.g., the American Dream), then you have a higher probability of realizing that vision. The point of foresight is to avoid being surprised. The key to marrying foresight and strategy is maintaining global situational awareness – remaining constantly vigilant and attuned to trends and events occurring around the world – and then using this knowledge to shape and affect strategically advantageous decisions. Avoiding surprise is a central tenet in the Army — so why do we feel surprised after an event like COVID? Because unpredictable events with major effects are either not taken seriously or are willfully ignored; consequently, they are not factored into institutional planning. Organizational culture must be receptive to discussing strategic foresight ideas that run counter to mainstream thought. What are the Army and DoD missing regarding the future? The power of the individual. Even in Great Power Conflict, individuals are able to wield inordinate influence and shape events via their phones, cameras, drones, and global social media platforms. All institutions are involved in national security, including the relationships between companies and their people. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next podcast addressing The Future of Talent and Soldiers with CPT Jay Long, Richard Kuzma, and MAJ Delaney Brown, on 15 October 2020!

In today’s podcast, Dr. Nesic discusses how humans remain at the center of great power competition — “everything else are simply mechanisms being used to influence the human element” — and how we must understand the human domain and synchronize social science in the non-kinetic, non-lethal space if we are to successfully out-compete our adversaries: The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is far from over. In the hybrid / asymmetric space, anything can be an instrument of war. We have to be realistic and understand the human element, which we do not yet fully grasp or comprehend. We tend to look at technology as a problem, not at the people using the technology [with evil intent] as the problem. Advances in technology have allowed our adversaries to become disruptive anytime, anywhere. The so-called ‘technological disruption’ should be accepted as the new status quo, as a modus operandi, and no longer be viewed as something extraordinary. Anthropology describes, but does not explain, the cultural lenses in the way that psychology does. Understanding the “why” of how people and groups act is important for operationalizing influence. How do populations change over time? Look at the brain, the most complex organ that is still not fully understood. The brain is wired for resilience and trained for adaptation. We need to invest in the brains of our target audiences and use knowledge to build resilience against our adversaries’ bad influences.

In this latest episode of “The Convergence,” we talk with Dr. Claire Nelson, the Founder and President of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS). Per Forbes, Dr. Nelson “is a strategic thinker, change agent, keynote speaker and innovator,” and is listed among that publication’s 50 Leading Female Futurists. Dr. Nelson is also Ideation Leader of The Futures Forum and Sagient Futures LLC, which provides strategic foresight and development futures consulting. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the World Futures Review and The Journal of Futures Studies, and is an emerging voice as a Black Futurist. In today’s podcast, Dr. Nelson discusses a smart futures approach to forecasting, technologies and science in small island nations, and positive impacts on the future: Everything is a system. National challenges can be viewed from a systems approach by breaking them down to the sum of the parts and then adding them back up. You have to pick the right tool for the problem you are trying to solve. Future technology is often presented as utopian. But we need to filter that idea through the smart futures lens. What happens when the technology fails, is compromised, or hacked? There must be forethought about the legal and ethical systems and processes. All of these aspects must be part of the framework. Our brains oftentimes can’t negotiate many and varying opposing forces as mathematical equations. But if we translate engineering and mathematical concepts into a story, our minds can more readily assimilate, accept, and understand these complex concepts. Similarly, if we break complex and interconnected systems of systems down into characters in a story, we’re better able to connect with them and solve their related and intricate problems. We shouldn’t blindly gather metrics for metrics’ sake. Metrics should specifically address the nature of the problems we’re trying to solve and should be tailored to the specific system that they’re measuring. The language of the transportation system will be different from the language of the military system, and they don’t necessarily cross over or translate proportionally. Space is humanity’s common heritage, but there are very few concrete laws and policies in place. Access and awareness will be paramount to the future of sustainable development. Smaller and island nations will need to access this domain to monitor climate change, forecast weather, manage disasters, and ensure food and water security. Small island nations can serve as a laboratory or testbed for pilot projects to showcase efficient resource and infrastructure management. With indigenous populations and significant bio-diversity, small island nations offer considerable untapped knowledge, such as thousands of years of seafaring experience from Pacific island nations or access to unique flora and fauna for pharmaceutical research. Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next podcast with Dr. Aleksandra Nesic, co-founder of Valka-Mir...