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The STEM Faculty Experience at West Point
Get PDFAt conferences or meetings, West Point faculty are often asked, “What’s it like to teach at West Point?” Previously, we reported on this question within the context of the cadet’s West Point experience and how STEM courses and opportunities are integrated. Now we turn our focus to the West Point faculty and their unique position of both educating cadets in a traditional sense and helping with the cadets’ character development. In this article, we discuss who the West Point faculty are; what is expected of each faculty member; and how faculty members within chemistry, physics, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering educate and develop future leaders of character for the U.S. Army
Russia Won’t Play the Cyber Card, Yet
No full textRussia has three means to bolster its international image and project strength —conventional forces, cyber, and nuclear weapons. Only one has been used far and for a good reason. Across the political landscape and in the media, both in North America and Europe, there is a recently established assumption that Russia is poised to unleash its full range of cyberattacks in the Russian-Ukrainian war as retribution for Western support of Ukraine. According to these commentaries, digitalized Russian fury could easily spill over to Western countries and provide us with a hint of a cyber crescendo. But the predictions of Russian cyber doomsday don’t add up
Sweden Eyes NATO Security Blanket
No full textSweden’s prime minister and her Finnish counterpart are now strongly hinting that the two countries will join the alliance and soon. So, what’s changed? The war in Ukraine has challenged the basic assumptions of Swedish geopolitics. Since the late 1940s, Sweden had believed that any war in Europe would be a war between Russia/USSR and NATO. In which case, Sweden could abstain from joining the fight, avoiding the horrors of war, by remaining neutral (unless attacked.) The war in Ukraine has changed the assumptions upon which Swedish security policies have be founded
The West Has Forgotten How to Keep Secrets
No full textOpen Source Intelligence (OSINT) has had an extraordinary moment in the spotlight thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Viewers have been able to see the effects of antitank weapons and the dreadful realities of war in close to real-time.
But OSINT, like all other intelligence, cuts both ways — we look at the Russians, and the Russians look at us. But their interest is almost certainly in freely available material that’s far from televisual — the information a Russian war planner can now use from European Union (EU) states goes far, far beyond what Europe’s well-motivated but slightly innocent data-producing agencies likely realize.
Seen alone, the data from environmental and building permits, road maintenance, forestry data on terrain obstacles, and agricultural data on ground water saturation are innocent. But when combined as aggregated intelligence, it is powerful and can be deeply damaging to Western countries.
Democracy dies in the dark, and transparency supports democratic governance. The EU and its member states have legally binding comprehensive initiatives to release data and information from all levels of government in pursuit of democratic accountability. This increasing European release of data — and the subsequent addition to piles of open-source intelligence — is becoming a real concern.
I firmly believe we underestimate the significance of the available information — which our enemies recognize — and that a potential adversary can easily acquire
Open-Source Data is Everywhere—Except The Army’s Concept of Information Advantage
No full textThe conflict in Ukraine showed that information environment is becoming a key domain during global competition and conflict. In this article we evaluate the state of the United States Army’s efforts to develop its information advantage doctrine to address the emergent risks in the information environment. We conclude that the current doctrine does not address the vast collection and weaponization of open-source data on individuals which has the potential to harm the ability of modern militaries like the United States Army to fulfill its national security mission. To address this challenge, we argue that the Army must develop a dedicated data risk management framework to enable commanders to understand the operational risks created by open-source data to succeed in modern Multi-Domain Operations
Russia’s Military — Losing the Will to Fight
Get PDFNews commentaries, opinion pieces, and editorials tend to focus on the bigger picture. These outlets discuss the clash between political systems, the force ratio, and differences in macroeconomics, and seek to understand the leader’s intent. But the soldier’s view is much more personal —seeing a continuous stream of fellow soldiers die or suffer wounds for months on end; ordered to launch futile attacks the Ukrainians repel; suffering strikes from modern Western weapons with unprecedented effects when you least expect it; daily witnessing spirals of smoke from knocked out tanks, vehicles; barely any company commanders left alive along the front, while more senior officers worrying about HIMARS attacks hide in shelters far from the front; intermittent starvation due to a failed logistic chain; and on top of all this, a national leader in denial. These developments compound one another. A significant number of Russian units have now lost the will to fight (as on the Kharkiv front), placing greater pressure on those with a continuing esprit de corps, and ultimately paving the way for Russian defeat. It doesn’t matter whether Russia has lost 1,500 or 500 tanks; what matters is when Russian troops lose the will to fight. As units start to disintegrate, their casualties soar; Nazi Germany’s casualties on the Eastern front skyrocketed after the fall of 1943, when they lost the initiative and beaten units with intermittent supply and coordination straggled back towards the River Oder and Berlin. Ukraine’s current dual counteroffensive matters because it once again signals to Russian soldiers that their cause is lost, that there is no successful endgame, and that there is only pain and death in front of them. Putin’s grip over Russia is sliding away in slow motion, a drip-drip of authority that increases with every tank turret blasted into the Ukrainian sky. For an authoritarian regime, this is a disaster, and brings nearer the day when the military loses its fear of ignoring or disobeying orders, ceases to fight, and instead trains its disillusioned eyes on the man in the Kremlin who made this mess
A Celebration of West Point Authors, July - December 2021
Get PDFThis program for the Celebration of West Point Authors event recognizes more than 300 works of scholarship produced at the Academy between July and December 2021. The program features speakers whose work centered around their experiences being educators.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/books/1061/thumbnail.jp
Designing and Analyzing an Underbody Plate for an Armored Vehicle Subjected to Blast
No full textThe purpose of this project was to design the next generation of additive underbody blast protection plates for military combat vehicles. Buried improvised explosive devices (IEDs) pose a serious threat to armored vehicles causing significant deflection to the underbody. Such deflections can result in potential lifelong and life-threatening injuries. The proposed plate is designed to be modular and easily replaceable. The structural design aimed to minimize areal density and depth of the panel, thereby reducing the weight and increasing the ground clearance of the vehicle. Prototypes of the panel designs were additively manufactured from sintered Ti6Al4V, a high strength titanium alloy. The designs were experimentally tested at the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland under a small-scale buried blast event. Numerical finite element models were created in LS-DYNA to analyze each potential design. The designs used a sacrificial sandwich structure between two monolithic plates. The sandwiched structure was designed to provide optimal stiffness and energy absorption. The final panel design decreased the areal density and thickness of the panel by 14% and 9%, respectively. The experimental results were validated by an LS-Dyna numerical model, which projected a maximum deflection of 7.4 mm within 20.7% of the experimental deflection
The Future of Cyber Enabled Financial Crime: New Crimes, New Criminals, and Economic Warfare
Get PDFWhat will the future of cyber-enabled financial crime, perpetrated by either criminals or nation states, look like 10 years from now? In the coming decade, those who engage in cyber-enabled financial crimes (CEFC) will take advantage of a collection of technologies and adjacent practices -- creating new classes of crimes, conditions, and adversary vectors. There are numerous technologies at the forefront of societal evolution, including cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, 5G, physical and digital autonomous systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, biometric identity, space-based systems, and quantum computing. The combination of changes in these technologies and in society are likely to also include an over-reliance on digital devices, digital payments, monopolized smart systems, and broader technology dependencies. In addition, the nature of financial crimes is expected to change in that they will initially target vulnerable communities, consumers, companies, and cyber computer systems. Furthermore, financial crimes will increasingly be used to enable more advanced and egregious economic warfare opportunities for adversarial nations and nation-state proxies
Autonomous Quadrotor Landing on Inclined Surfaces in High Particle Environments Using Radar Sensor Perception
No full textThis paper presents an autonomous approach for landing a quadrotor on inclined surfaces up to 40 degrees using radar perception in a high particle environment, such as dust, rain, or fog. This system uses five radar sensors to determine the direction, angle, and smoothness of a slope through eigenvalue decomposition of a point cloud covariance matrix. The point cloud itself is generated using a FIFO queue with the radar sensors after their points are transformed to a common frame. Then, two asymmetric landing skids of different lengths actively conform to a slope in order to maintain level body attitude upon landing. For perception error tolerance, a study to understand the distance between the propeller and slope surface with respect to slope angles was developed. We evaluate the accuracy and consistency of radar sensors in accomplishing these tasks, to include a comparison of the results with a depth camera while in a high particle environment. Finally, the experimental result shows that the detected slope angle and direction were within 2.2 and 2.4 degrees of ground, and the proposed system is viable and robust for use in real-world applications