Capabilities that more closely link humans and machines for warfighting and planning purposes should be harnessed in the near-term to lower the costs to the U.S. and United Kingdom for potential wars, increase costs for adversaries, increase situational awareness, and gain “decision advantage” over adversaries, and predictive maintenance, a U.K. thinktank says in a new report.
The militaries of both countries should pursue the development of specific groups of human-machine collaboration (HMC) and human-machine teaming (HMT) capabilities in the areas of sensing, analysis, planning, and decision-making, creating lower cost sensing and attack platforms that are expendable, attritable unmanned resupply assets, and better deceiving enemy forces, says the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“If attritable forces are created in sufficient numbers, massed machines, when assigned tasks by their human teammates, could overwhelm traditional defences, often at a relatively small cost in human casualties compared with more traditional offensive operations,” RUSI says in Leveraging Human-Machine Teaming. “These changes would increase the number of options available to U.S. and U.K. commanders, and thus an opponent’s operational uncertainty.”
Ukrainian forces, in their war against Russia, are using what are called first person view drones, which are unmanned aircraft systems that an operator can use to sense and attack the battlefield and adjust plans and operations of the drone based on sensor feedback.
The U.S. Defense Department is already moving forward with a near-term effort it calls Replicator to acquire autonomous, attritable unmanned systems at scale for potential use in a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region.
HMC and HMT capabilities would also provide U.S. and U.K. forces increased resiliency for supply operations in contested, expeditionary operations, the report says. Attritable resupply assets could be part of these capabilities, it adds.
Uncrewed logistics and sustainment capabilities employing HMC and HMT technologies could mitigate the challenge of resupplying dispersed forces and allow forces to “continue fighting at a higher level of intensity for longer, inflicting greater losses and increasing their adversary’s uncertainty, thus weakening the adversary’s ability to gain military advantage,” RUSI says.
HMC capabilities, which improve the ability of people to process information, and which would be aimed at improving decision-making, could speed planning, allow for better integration of intelligence, and provide more options, are another priority capability for improving sensing, planning, and analysis, the report says.
“The ability to plan with smaller headquarters or staff would also enable smaller units, operating in a fragmented and information-denied battlefield, to conduct operations based on horizontal collaboration with those units they can communicate with, rather than relying on top-down direction from higher echelons that may not be possible in denied environments,” RUSI says.
The report also prioritizes HMC and HMT capabilities to enhance operational deception, which would limit U.S. and U.K. force losses while making it easier to penetrate an adversary’s defenses. Examples of these capabilities would be automating network cybersecurity, deceiving an enemy in “physical and electromagnetic spaces” of true intentions, and using artificial intelligence to identify weaknesses in networks and software.
Another example would be employing HMC capabilities to understand how an adversary’s AI works, which would provide insights into overcoming their AI and ML algorithms, the report says.
The final near-term priority area called out in the report is predictive maintenance, which entails using automation to better predict when parts and systems will wear out and need to be repaired. These capabilities would “enhance and harden logistics operations,” it says.