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Invisible Force: Information Warfare and the Future of Conflict
Get PDFThe year is 2030. Large swaths of the world are destabilized. Famine is rampant due to the aftermath of the long legacy of failed globalization. Citizens from poorer countries are migrating to escape famine, war, climate change, and lack of opportunity created by failed states. Wealthier countries, worried about resource scarcity, close themselves off to the refugees.
Amid all of this, quantum computing has been achieved, resulting in infinitely faster processing of more information than ever before. Quantum technology and a fracturing of the global alliances enable global elite to exercise control over information - resulting in a segmented Internet. Nations are now ruled by technocratic elites, some who remain committed to individual liberty and privacy, and others who extract data as a raw material from the lives of individuals, with no restrictions on its use other than profit.
By 2030, the nature of information war has changed. Combined with new, ubiquitous technology and levels of individual customization from data extraction, people don’t even realize they’re being manipulated.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1023/thumbnail.jp
Comparison of Skeleton Models and Classification Accuracy forPosture-Based Threat Assessment Using Deep-Learning
No full textThis paper compares the effectiveness of two different skeletal pose models for a near real-time, multi-stage classifier. A cascaded neural-network (NN) classifier was previously developed to identify the level of threat posed by an armed person based on detected weapons and body posture. On an updated database of images containing armed individuals and groups, AlphaPose was used to calculate both MPII and COCO skeletons while OpenPose was used to calculate the COCO only. For comparison, we evaluated the importance of individual skeletal joints by systematically removing specific joints from the feature vector and retraining a reduced order network. On the database of images, the AlphaPose-COCO network was best able to correctly classify the threat presented by individuals, 83.7% on average, while AlphaPose-MPII registered 82.2% and 77.6% for OpenPose-COCO. As expected, the most important single joint in both skeleton models is the location of the pistol. As a guide for others deciding which skeleton to use for further studies, we conclude that neither skeleton significantly outperforms the other
Cyber Command Needs New Acquisition Authorities
No full textThe Department of Defense acquisitions process drives how the military builds and equips its fighting forces to achieve strategic priorities set by national leadership, and it is a central element of how the military determines planning, budgeting and procurement. The overall projected budget planning process, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), takes place in five-year intervals and is organized into 12 different MFP categories, each of which represents a combination of the personnel, forces and appropriated funding that together constitute a Defense Department program to achieve certain objectives. How the MFP categories are defined and organized, and which elements within the Pentagon manage the acquisition authorities associated with each MFP category, is important: These issues shape what kinds of capabilities the department can acquire for different missions and purposes
Why Iran would avoid a major cyberwar
No full textDemonstrations in Iran last year and signs of the regime’s demise raise a question: What would the strategic outcome be of a massive cyber engagement with a foreign country or alliance?
Authoritarian regimes traditionally put survival first. Those who do not prioritize regime survival tend to collapse. Authoritarian regimes are always vulnerable because they are illegitimate. There will always be loyalists that benefit from the system, but for a significant part of people, the regime is not legit. The regime only exists because they suppress popular will and use force against any opposition
The 2019 Magnetic Resonance Velocimetry Challenge
No full textWhile magnetic resonance velocimetry (MRV) has been used in technological flow studies for over 30 years, it has not yet reached the levels of usage as more traditional experimental techniques such as particle image velocimetry or laser Doppler anemometry. This work involves a relatively simple U-bend geometry with complex three-dimensional turbulent flow characteristics which was shared with four research groups, including a combined effort from the U.S. Military Academy/Stanford University, and teams from Hanyang University, the University of Rostock, and the Mayo Clinic. The geometry—including upstream flow development—was shipped between groups with nominally similar experimental conditions, and the acquired data are presented including both two- and three-dimensional comparisons. In addition, details on how each team conducted the MRV experiments are provided, with each team using a different set of procedures and hardware. The results are remarkably similar, with only a few variations at the flow regions with the highest in-plane velocity gradients showing differences outside the combined uncertainty of the results
An Urban Dispersion Inspired Scenario for CFD Model Validation
No full textMomentum, advection, diffusion, and turbulence are component physics relating to fire simulation tools like computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Magnetic Resonance Velocimetry and Magnetic Resonance Concentration MRV/MRC techniques can produce heretofore unrivaled detailed measurements of three-component velocity and concentration fields in turbulent flows. This study exhibits 3D flow comparisons between velocity and concentration fields obtained using MRC/MRV and SIERRA/Fuego for an urban geometry based on a section of downtown Oklahoma City. A 1:2500 scale water flow scenario provides 0.8 mm resolution data. Various techniques are employed to quantify the accuracy of the simulation results. The techniques all generally suggest a good comparison between the model and experiments throughout the compared volume. The selected metrics provide benchmark accuracy measures that can be used to indicate quantitative accuracy of the simulations, as well as for targets for future simulation improvements
Dangerous Myths, Ukraine, and the Future of Great Power Competition
No full textEditor’s note: This article introduces a full report based on a contemporary battlefield assessment conducted by the Modern War Institute. The authors of the report have led several such contemporary battlefield assessments—including to Sri Lanka (2016), the Republic of Georgia (2017), Colombia (2018), the Baltics and Ukraine (2018), and India (2019). They describe them as “research staff rides”—a combination of field research and traditional military staff ride—and have also produced a helpful guide for others who wish to plan and conduct similar research trips, A Leader’s Guide to Conducting Research Staff Rides.
Great power competition has reentered the lexicon of policymakers and military strategists with a vengeance in recent years. The 2018 National Defense Strategy affirms that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Yet great power competition—and at the extreme end of the competition continuum, great power conflict—is not likely to resemble its nineteenth- or twentieth-century antecedents. “Today’s versions of rivalry and competition,” writes Michael Mazarr, “almost always play out in the economic, political, cultural, and informational spheres—not on the battlefield.” Although the nuclear revolution makes “victorious wars of conquest” unlikely, it does not mean that great power competition cannot turn lethal, just as it did during the Cold War in places such as Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The triggers for a great power war could be China’s or Russia’s embrace of some historical claim to a disputed territory or population it once controlled. The principal cause of such a conflict—fought with modern means over age-old disputes—is what Andrew Wilson calls “Russia’s addiction to dangerous myths.” These myths are not invented but rather have deep and divisive historical roots, a perversion of the “imagined communities” political scientists invoke to describe ethnonationalist conflict.
Yet these myths animate a new type of great power conflict, one that may forego conventional military operations for other less familiar battlefields. While this embrace of so-called hybrid warfare is arguably nothing new in the annals of warfare, it may become systematized and normalized as not just an ancillary enabler to conventional means but rather as something that supplants traditional forms of warfare, whereby conventional or other types of power are ancillary to hybrid means. In this type of warfare, Russia and China hold both tactical and strategic advantages over the United States, which they lack when it comes to conventional conflict.
It is something of a truism to say that modern warfare is becoming infinitely more complex. Similar predictions are made virtually every generation. Yet in the current operational environment, with what retired Gen. Raymond Odierno famously called the “velocity of instability,” the battlefields of today and tomorrow appear to be shifting toward more urban and densely populated landscapes against an enemy that is seemingly unbound by international norms and that attempts to hide or disguise its actions via the use of third-party proxies.
This type of warfare is playing out between Russian-backed separatists and a Western-backed Ukrainian government in the Donbas, a Switzerland-sized border region in eastern Ukraine. The conflict has already claimed over ten thousand lives and displaced three million people. The war was an outgrowth of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Moscow in 2014—or what one witness described to us as Russia’s “soft occupation of Ukraine.” To boost its defenses and deterrence capabilities, Kyiv has relied on Western military and economic support as well as on legions of nationalist volunteers.
The war in Ukraine’s East has rattled nerves in the Baltic states as well. This vulnerability was made more acute after the November 2018 attack on Ukrainian vessels and seizure of two dozen Ukrainian sailors in the Sea of Azov, which also resulted in several casualties. The purpose of the provocation was to force Kyiv to cede control of the Sea of Azov to Moscow, particularly its northern shores, thus giving Russia an unfettered naval bridge between the Donbas and Crimea. With each provocation and escalation, the appetite of Russian president Vladimir Putin is not satiated but rather expands, as he feasts on increasingly larger prey.
Russia’s grand strategy, according to Eugene Rumer, is to create “a multipolar world, with Russia as one of its poles.” Angela Stent argues that Russia seeks “a seat at the table on all major international decisions,” and also believes that it deserves a zone of “privileged interests, namely that its post-Soviet colonies are neither hostile to Moscow nor puppets of the West.” The motivation for this strategy is the decline of Russian influence during the decade immediately after the end of the Cold War; the ignoring of Russia on matters related to security among former Warsaw Pact members, including the eastward expansion of NATO; and the fear of an internal revolt or a further unraveling of Moscow’s control over its disparate territories and people.
The question military strategists are grappling with is Russia’s intended means. To date, the Kremlin has relied on a peculiar mix of strategies, old and new, to achieve its objectives of restoring Moscow’s great power status. On the one hand, it has relied on a nineteenth-century norm of land grabs and annexing physical territory using military force, both conventional and unconventional—something largely abolished after World War II.
On the other hand, it has pioneered the use of new forms of hybrid warfare by committing acts of aggression that fall below the traditional threshold of war—relying on deception, subversion, misinformation, cyber, and electronic warfare as part of a calculated strategy to keep the enemy unstable and provide Moscow with plausible deniability. What Putin has studiously avoided is a direct conventional war with NATO. His embrace of this kind of warfare, as Robert Person notes, is “subtractive,” in that it seeks to offset the United States’ (or Europe’s) military superiority.
This mindset also informs Russia’s evolving military doctrine. In March 2019, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, outlined a “new” Russian military strategy beyond Russia’s borders that emphasizes the importance of high technology and modern weapons systems yet also reemphasizes precision targeting, sophisticated hypersonic weaponry, electronic warfare tools, greater centralization and automation of troops and weapons control, increased use of irregular forces and private military contractors, and enhanced integration of military and nonmilitary measures in fomenting social unrest abroad.
In this regard, Russia’s weaponization of information goes way beyond Cold War–era “active measures,” which mostly consisted of run-of-the-mill propaganda and espionage. Its actions in Ukraine provide a case of information operations not as a complement to but rather as a key component of modern warfare. After Crimea’s annexation, Russia actively supported an antigovernment separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbas region, even providing surface-to-air missiles to rebels who downed a civilian jet in July 2014, killing everyone aboard.
An essential part of its hybrid warfare also included the use of information operations in Ukraine to distort the narrative and turn public opinion against the authorities in Kyiv as well as electronic warfare to jam the Ukrainian military’s command, control, and communications capabilities. As Rod Thornton writes, “The use of jamming technologies in modern warfare can be an operational as well as strategic game-changer.”
It is not just Russia that is expanding its use of subversion, information operations, and other forms of hybrid warfare. Consider Beijing’s use of “little blue men” within its maritime militias, who are disguised as Chinese fishermen but attack ships transiting through the South China Sea. There is also evidence that other countries are imitating how Russian trolls and hackers use social media, specifically Facebook, to interfere in other countries’ politics. Pro-Beijing operatives are said to post thousands of bits of disinformation on Facebook every day. A Taiwanese official described to the Washington Post “the subtle Chinese threat, spread through social media, newspapers and television in an influence campaign that touches every business, farm and worker.”
This kind of information warfare has gone global, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, citing an Iranian-led disinformation campaign that used Facebook and Twitter to reach millions of people. Similar disinformation campaigns were tied to the governments of Venezuela and Brazil. As NATO assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges Antonio Missiroli told reporters, “Hybrid warfare is thenew normal.”
Our recent report, published by the Modern War Institute, provides a glimpse into some of the tactics that will characterize great power conflict—specifically hybrid, proxy, information, maritime/littoral, and urban warfare—at the level below a major war. It is important to understand these tactics on two accounts. First, US adversaries continue to both invest in and employ these capabilities. In order to combat them, the United States must first understand them. Second, the potential exists that a miscalculation involving one or more of the above-mentioned methods could inadvertently spark a major war, so defense professionals must consider this possibility.
Among others, the report includes the following major findings: Russia is not just in competition with the United States and the West, it is in conflict; thus, the world is in a period of great power conflict. This conflict is being fought across multiple domains; but, for the most part, this conflict is not lethal. The life cycle of a Russian-orchestrated crisis follows a similar pattern. First, Russia carries out some type of provocative activity in violation of international law as a form of intimidation. Next, it engages in subterfuge and denial, obfuscating the facts and even twisting international law to justify its original action. Then it employs information operations to change the narrative and public opinion while simultaneously escalating belligerent rhetoric, before presenting itself as a preserver of peace and honest broker, all the while having succeeded at sufficiently altering “facts” on the ground. The trigger for a great power war could be Russia’s embrace of a dangerous myth—some historical claim to a disputed territory or population it once controlled. These myths could trigger a new type of great power conflict, one that embraces hybrid warfare and may forego conventional military operations. The use of proxies by great powers is likely to increase as it is often viewed as a less risky and less costly way for a state to achieves its goals. Proxies, however, can be difficult to control, and a miscalculation could inadvertently spark a major war. State-sponsored militias and “volunteer” fighters are somewhat analogous to proxies, in that the state supports fighters that it doesn’t fully control. Yet their low cost and the uncertainty that they create for a would-be invader are making them an increasingly attractive defense capability. Given that these are part of the formal defense establishment of US allies, the United States should look for ways to more actively support the training and equipping of these forces. Over the past two decades, Russia has invested heavily in its information operations (IO) capabilities to great effect. By contrast, the United States largely divested its own IO capabilities after the end of the Cold War and is woefully behind as a result. When it comes to controlling the narrative in great power conflict, US responses in the IO space have thus far been weak, reactive, and too incremental. The United States must increase its IO capability and incorporate it better into its doctrine, training, and education. Future great power conflict will also likely be fought on the high seas or in disputed sea basins, like the Sea of Azov. Maritime crises follow a similar pattern as crises on land, insofar as countries like Russia will intimidate smaller naval powers with provocative gestures and belligerent rhetoric; they will deny any direct involvement, cite international law in their favor, and escalate before calling for cooler heads to prevail. Pitched battles in Ukrainian cities underscore the need to more systematically develop urban warfare capabilities among US units and those of its allies. Better doctrine, more robust training facilities, a real commitment by our military to train for war, and embedding urban warfare into the training of foreign militaries would go a long way toward avoiding future Donetsk-style imbroglios. Russia’s investments in the means and methods of hybrid warfare provide it some asymmetric advantages vis-à-vis the United States. The United States must increase its investment in proxy, information, cyber, and urban warfare. This investment must be both physical (equipment, training, and organization) and intellectual (doctrine, education, policy, and strategy) as capacity is irrelevant without strategy and will
Preliminary Design of a Highly Efficient VTOL System Based on Tethered Fixed-Wing Aircraft
No full textThe need for highly efficient VTOL aircraft capable of long endurance flight motivated the Vertical Flight Society, in 2016, to form their 34th Student Design Competition around designing an aircraft capable of hovering for a duration of 24 hours with a 176 lb (80 kg) payload. This paper presents the preliminary design of the Swarm, a configuration of the Electric Powered Reconfigurable Rotor (EPR2 ) concept, drafted by the joint Universite de Sherbrooke and ´ Georgia Tech team. The Swarm, comprised of a central fuselage tethered to three electrically propelled unmanned fixed-wing aircraft flying in a circular trajectory, achieves its goal through rotor reconfiguration. Throughout the flight, the fixed-wing aircraft modify their trajectory and airspeed to optimize performance and minimize fuel burn rate. A hybrid-electric powerplant in the fuselage supplies power via conductive tethers to the fixed-wing aircraft. The design and reconfiguration were optimized using a 2-step time-marching optimization. The designed system greatly exceeds the competition requirements by accomplishing 31 hours of hover flight using readily available technologies and COTS components. The Swarm, weighing a maximum of 2,700 lb (1,224 kg), requires only between 62 and 120 hp (46-89 kW) to perform hover out of ground effect. Safety, reliability and maintenance analyses were also conducted, in addition to estimating production and operational costs of the system
A Raspberry Pi Mesh Sensor Network for Portable Perimeter Security
No full textWireless sensor networks play an important role for perimeter monitoring in remote environments. While commercial wireless sensor networks for providing audio-visual monitoring exist, they are often expensive to deploy. In this paper, we describe and implement a wireless mesh network consisting of inexpensive battery-operated Raspberry Pi nodes. The choice of the Raspberry Pi enables the construction of cost-effective sensor nodes that are extendable and expendable. We conduct a series of test to illustrate the efficacy of our network in a building monitoring use case. Our nodes can be built for as little as 49.00 per node and is capable of node-to-node transmission of up to 50 feet. Custom sleep states enable battery life to last 14 hours on 4 AA batteries. Our results support our thesis that an all-Pi mesh sensor is capable of providing portable perimeter security
Using Virtual Machines to Enhance the Educational Experience in an Introductory Computing Course
No full textThis paper describes and evaluates the use of virtual machines (VMs) in an introductory computing course to simplify the installation of required software and reinforce student understanding of client-server networks and applications. The impact of VMs was assessed by tracking the change in software installation and troubleshooting time and student performance across two academic years and ten classrooms. The results indicate that the use of VMs improved classroom efficiency, increased instruction time previously lost to software installation, and sustained or improved student performance on critical events. Additionally, the students had greater success building web applications on the VMs that both they and their instructors could view both source code and the running application