Focus - Full Spectrum Rotary Wing Seapower The Dawn of Algorithmic Warfare By LT Alexander “Jarvis” Buck, USN
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The Sunrise Bag
s you walk into the dim green light of the flight deck you catch the warm breeze so characteristic of the South China Sea. You arrived in theater one week ago and every day since you’ve been on the sunrise bag with the 0230 launch. Your tasking is to sanitize a strait from reported red force submarines whose farthest on circles are now approaching your position. As you launch and seed your buoys, the littoral environment makes interpreting the sonar data challenging. With a flip of a switch, you turn on the new acoustic processing feature powered by machine learning and the displays change. Now you have markers classifying each sound you’re hearing and clustering the sources into possible contacts. The new processing mode benefits from hundreds of hours of examples recorded by aircrew like you over the past two years to compare these new sounds Marines with Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command. Original photo by Staff Sgt. Jacob Osborne, USMC. against. Suddenly a quiet cluster, otherwise hidden in the noise of fishing trawlers and merchant ships daunting for a complex task such as “detect and classify the transiting the strait, now clearly stands out with a unique acoustic target with this sonar data,” or “identify what type signature! With the sun just starting to light the eastern sky, of vessel this is with this radar data." The field of machine you key the mic to call Zulu with your contact report… learning, specifically deep learning, offers a different avenue. Instead of codifying every aspect of the decision process, the The future of warfighting is on the horizon. The spectrum machine learns the important features from a comprehensive of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, from perception tasks like collection of examples that have been labeled with the the previous example, to complex reasoning and planning, are correct interpretation. By providing the inputs (sensor data) already being developed. The next step for the Navy and the and the output (the correct interpretation), the machine HSM community is envisioning how we incorporate AI and can learn arbitrarily complex analyses. The burden then machine learning (ML) into warfighting doctrine. There are becomes gathering enough examples to properly teach the certainly limitations to this nascent technology but "history machine. As opaque and mysterious as this new phase of AI informs us that those who are first to harness once-in-a- may seem at first, this phase defined by machine learning is generation technologies often have a decisive advantage on not fundamentally new; it is still a computer just crunching the battlefield for years to come," said Defense Secretary Mark numbers. Esper. The Fleet’s Call to Action
AI Is Already Here, It Always Has Been
Fundamentally AI is just the process of automating a cognitive task and it is all around us when we operate our aircraft. The radar data processor analyzing radar returns to generate “tracks,” the acoustic processor detecting clusters and sequential detections, the electronic support measures system proposing identifications for detected signals; these are all examples of “expert systems” artificial intelligence. They have hard coded rules, created by subject matter experts, to automate the processing of sensor data. As aircrew, we trust them and we take advantage of the mental space afforded by these automated tasks to be a more effective crew. The limitation with these systems is their ability to scale to complex problems. The creators need to explicitly define the decisions the machine could make, ahead of time, which is Rotor Review #152 Spring '21
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The entire concept of machine learning relies on the premise that there is a large enough set of examples from which the machine can learn. This is simply not a true statement for the Naval Helicopter Community. The HSM Community faces many significant challenges in large scale data collection, from storage limitations to network bandwidth constraints in the shipboard environment. Serendipitously, in September 2020, the DoD, through its first ever DoD Data Strategy, established the vision to be “a data-centric organization that uses data at speed and scale for operational advantage and increased efficiency.” Within this foundational document, the DoD established 8 guiding principles. The three most relevant to HSM are:
