Ep 148: Alex Miller on Battlefield Technology

Alex Miller, Senior Advisor for Science and Technology and the CTO to the Chief of Staff of the Army

Aaron MacLean:

One of the major themes of this podcast is how technological change affects warfighting. And in particular, how new technology not yet tested fully at scale, or in the face of truly robust countermeasures, will affect the battlefields of the near future for the United States. Today, we have the Chief Technology Officer to the Chief of Staff of the Army to tell us how the Army thinks about these very things. It's a really interesting conversation. Let's get into it.

Aaron MacLean:

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Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean, thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be joined today by Dr. Alexander Miller. He is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Advisor for Science and Technology for the Chief of Staff of the Army. Hello, Alex, thank you so much for joining the show.

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, Aaron, thanks. And I just go by Alex, so that makes it way easier.

Aaron MacLean:

All right, all right. Even though you're casually going by Alex, I want to ask you about your qualifications, I want to ask you about your background. How does one become the Chief Technology Officer of the United States Army?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

It has been a long and interesting road, and working for the Chief has been fun. I've been doing that since he was the vice, and that was roughly November of 2022. Before that, I was actually an intelligence professional. I worked in the Army G-2 for a number of years, and had an opportunity to serve in Afghanistan, worked several other places in the Pacific, before we did a pivot back to the Pacific.

But ultimately, I am trained as a computer information technologist, undergrad from Purdue, master's degree from Johns Hopkins, and then decided, during COVID, I thought things would slow down, they didn't, I decided to get a doctorate back from Purdue because I thought there would be a wealth of research in medical supply chains. And that's what I pursued, going back to my information technology roots.

Professionally, I started training warrant officers out at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, so the edge of the frontier out in Southern Arizona, and was able to move to D.C. shortly after graduating my undergrad to work as an intelligence architecture officer here. And that was really thinking through, hey, how do we move data about the battlefield? How do we get intelligence all the way from the national strategic folks here in D.C. down to the soldiers who were manning ECPs or checkpoints, collecting biometrics, and really just working patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror?

I continued to have harder and harder missions, and work on more complex things until the Army started what is known as Project Convergence now. And that is really an experimentation and exercise on how do you converge all of the different warfighting functions and all of these complex technical breakthroughs and technical investments into something that is coherent for the Army to fight.

Then I had an opportunity to work with now retired Lieutenant General Scott McKean on how to bring all of the information for a three-star JTF headquarters together. And that was when I was able to meet General George when he was the vice, and brief him on several of the architecture considerations and investments that we could be making, should be making, or might stop making, because they don't make sense anymore. And shortly thereafter, he gave me an opportunity to come and join his team as the vice, and then pulled me over as the chief. So, it's been a long road. A lot of people have given me a lot of opportunities that would probably be considered risky on paper, but I think I've helped.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, what the Army is evolving into today, in terms of the technology used, I read about, for example, the big exercise the Army just ran down in Fort Johnson, Louisiana earlier in September, and the account of the way in which tech is being employed on the battlefield, and it's just a completely different ground combat element than the one I served in, even just 15 or 10 years ago.

I want to tee you up here with a really big picture question. When you look at the battlefield in Ukraine, which seems to me to be the best close approximation to what a battlefield might look like, if we were to get directly involved in something, in terms of the Army's context, what are the issues, what are the problems, what are the evolutions that you see that are most significant, in relatively plain language, for a grunt like me? And how does that affect your thinking about what you're working on and the kinds of solutions you're developing for the Army?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, awesome question. The first I would offer is scale. So, we both grew up during the Global War on Terror, and that was very much the manhunting or human hunting mission. So, that was one person, or a group of people, or one network of people. So, social networks of small sets of individuals. When we think about what we would call large-scale combat operations, really just war in the 21st century, the scale in terms of size and distance is not something that we can ignore. So, we think of a front line of troops, or a FLOT, that could be 800 to 1,000 kilometers long. So, you're thinking about how do you disperse your organizations across that, and then how do you actually allow them to communicate so that we can exercise command and control, the art and science thereof, across that? So, that would be the first one. Little less technical, but a real observation that we're seeing in Ukraine, and frankly also in the Middle East with Israel and Gaza, and we saw that with Azerbaijan and Armenia, those are real, tangible examples of changes from the Global War on Terror.

On a more technically, or technology-focused aspect, electromagnetic warfare, what used to be called EW... What used to be called the electronic warfare, EW, has made a big comeback. And what I mean by that is, frankly, Russia and China have watched, have had the luxury of watching us fight, for 20 years, and they have been able to invest in the technologies that we haven't. We did not focus as much on EW, because we were focused on finding humans, hunting on cell phones, those types of things. And we've seen in Russia, [inaudible 00:06:31] and in Ukraine, a real investment in the kits and the capability and the people to run that.

And if you're not familiar with EW, it is spooky physics. So, it is how do you jam communications? How do you stop some of the drones that we're seeing from flying? How do you just impose your will on the electromagnetic spectrum as key terrain? Which is not something that we thought about it as for the last several years. And then you can jump immediately into the drone condition. We talk about a lot, we hear a lot, so there's calls that we should have a drone corps, there's calls that we should have a drone unit. And none of those capture fully what we're seeing, nor what the right response should be, based on the lessons from, again, both Ukraine and in Gaza. And what I mean by that is everyone has realized that cheaper, lower-end technologies can cause radical cost to positions. So, a $1,500 drone can destroy a multi-million dollar aircraft. So, we have to be focused on both how do you employ those lower-end technologies, and then pivoting on how do you counter them?

And the answer is, in a drone corps, the answer is how do you get that technology at echelon for every formation? Because what a squad or an individual soldier might need, in terms of a quadcopter, or something like the Switchblade 600 is getting a lot of news for being a loitering munition, is different than what a division who is several vehicles trying to move, trying to set up a command post, might need. So that is, I would say, the top three lessons that we're seeing right now coming out of there, in terms of scale, EW, and drones.

Aaron MacLean:

That's super helpful, and there's a lot there to unpack. And I propose we spend the next few minutes just unpacking different parts of what you said. I'll start right at the end, with the last thing you said about the kind of cost in positions that cheap equipment can cause, and how we respond to that. Let me ask a really dumb, man on the street, question, in response to that, and you tell me why I don't understand how the DoD works, or how the Army works. If the bad guys use cheap, off-the-shelf stuff to harm, theoretically harm us, but to harm their adversaries, high-end capabilities, why can't we have a budget, and buy a bunch of stuff off the shelf, and give budgets to different units in different circumstances, and say, "You want to go buy some drones? Go buy them." What are the obstacles in the way of that really simple way of thinking about solving a problem?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, no, it's a good way to think about it, because it's the way that we need to think about it. And what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to hunt the good first, and tell you what we are doing, and to tell you what obstacles still remain. So, your observation is astute. That's exactly what we're going to try to do. What we have seen some units actually do is use their OPTEMPO dollar, their operational tempo. Really, that's a reserve that units have to do things like flight hours, pay for fuel, do the things that they just need to do as part of the training mission that they have to go buy some of those off-the-shelf pieces of kit, and it's everything for... And it's not limited to drones. So, we've seen them buy better computers, different hardware, but drones are sort of in the forefront right now.

So, the 2nd Brigade, 25th ID is doing a great job. They've found some NDA-compliant quadcopters that they're using, and I'll come back to the NDA compliance here in a second. The 82nd Airborne down at Fort Liberty, they're doing similar with kits and components, so not necessarily buying things from a box, but buying the individual components and building them to need. The Ranger Regiment is doing something similar, in terms of building them. So, units are starting to move this direction.

But what General George as the chief, and our acquisition team, and our G-8, who run all the budgets, are trying to do is build a reserve within the budget that is specific to off-the-shelf drones. So, COTS, commercial off-the-shelf equipment that we know that we should be able to buy, that we shouldn't try to predict five years out, because that was the old way of thinking, you figure out what you want five years from now and then you figure out how right or wrong you were. So, they've set that up, and you'll start to see that in FY25 and '26.

The next piece of the puzzle is how do we ensure that we can continue to buy them, and that they don't go stale? And what I mean by that is normally, when the Department of Defense buys something, we want to buy it for a long time, and a lot of them, because that gets us toward some type of volume of scale and cost benefit. But we know that with really fast-moving technologies, and this is everything from drones to AI components to mouse and keyboards and tablets and phones, we don't want to buy 10 years out, and hope that the hardware is maintained for 10 years. We just want to buy as it becomes available, we want to get the right actors from industry in as soon as they become available.

And then we want to do two things. We want to incentivize those industry players to be good teammates, and we want to remove the perverse incentives for them to be bad teammates. What I mean by that is we don't want to say, "Hey, you have a 10-year contract, please make sure you update it." We want to specify that and say, "Hey, there are no 10-year contracts. We want to make sure that you're going to be a good" in the tech world, we have OEMs or original equipment manufacturers, we want to make sure that they're continuing invest so that, year over year, the technology gets better, or gets cheaper, or gets smaller, or some combination thereof.

Aaron MacLean:

So, I guess one of the things you have to deal with, and maybe this is what your initiative transforming in contact is about, is if you are going to follow the course you just outlined, and it seems like an admirable course, of greater flexibility, greater responsiveness, more reliance on off-the-shelf stuff that's cheap, but here now to meet the demands of the day, typically, in a military organization, there's so much gear, there's X amount of stuff you're going to actually work with on the battlefield, and you train to it, maybe for years. You develop tactics and operating concepts and what have you.

But if what you just described starts working, and actually you're cycling new stuff through at a fairly rapid rate to meet the demands of the day, and there's some diversity amongst the stuff, there's different kinds of things, how do you get soldiers ready? How do you get small units, or maybe larger units, ready to actually employ the stuff well, and to operate on the battlefield amidst this greater diversity of material that... This is kind of like a good problem to have, I guess, because it implies that what you just outlined is actually functioning. But how do you think about that?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, I love the conversation, because it highlights two things. So, I want to take a step back and talk about transforming in contact for just a second, because this is General George's chief initiative. I don't mean that as a play on words. It is fundamentally, at its most core, about enabling commanders to tailor both their organization and their capability to need. So upfront, the chief and the leaders designated three organizations, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne, 2nd Brigade, 25th ID, and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, as the three transforming in contact brigades. And the rationale for those three is because 2nd Brigade, 25th is focused on the Pacific, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain is focused on Europe, and 2nd Brigade, 100 is focused on CENTCOM. So, what that is allowing us to do is fundamentally, again, allow commanders to tailor the organization to their fight.

The second part of that, in terms of the capability and the tactics, is it gives us an opportunity to put capability in the hands of soldiers faster and get direct feedback sooner. So, there's two ways to think about it. I have never gotten, nor have I needed, an instruction manual for my iPhone, even though that is a very complex piece of kit. The interface is very simple, it's easy to learn, which is one of the metrics that Apple used. And over time, they've built in the safety mechanisms so that if you get lost, all you have to do is swipe up and you're back at the home. That's what the one button was for the original iPhone, that's what the one mouse click was for the original IMAX.

That mentality is how we are looking at all of the kit and capability we want to give the soldiers. Make sure that it does what it's supposed to do really, really well, but the interfaces the soldiers have to use? Make that really simple. I could get very pejorative, right? An M4 is a complex machine. It harnesses physics and explosives and gas. But at the end of the day, the user interface is a trigger. So, think about that for all of your electromagnetic warfare capabilities, for your drones. That's why the consumer market is so fascinated with drone now, because the controllers are really simple to use, or they're apps on your phone. So, being able to get that feedback from soldiers much faster, at a much higher cyclic rate, has paid dividends so far.

On the opposite side, there are some capabilities that are just really complex and they have to be complex. So, I'll give you an example. We fielded some new EW capabilities to 2nd Brigade, 101st, and they got them about two weeks before they went to their CPC, their combined training center, down at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Two weeks for a fielding of a new equipment is unheard of. It is antithetical to the process, it is scary for all the reasons that you named: it doesn't give the soldiers time to train, it doesn't allow for collective training, it doesn't allow them to basically get enough reps and sets to really say, "I'm confident with that." But 2nd Brigade's really forward-leaning, striking, and their leadership said, "Hey, we'll take it, we'll figure it out." And they gave feedback that said, "We got it working at a baseline, but we would've really liked another two weeks to get really proficient at it." That is also necessary feedback, because that shows the upper limit of how fast we can give units kit before there's actually a diminishing return, not a positive return.

Aaron MacLean:

So, you brought up electronic warfare again, and I want to get into that and I will start with a confession. I think you used the word "spooky" at some point; I personally find it spooky. It's also not my experience. We gave very little thought to this in Afghanistan, because obviously the enemy had virtually no capability to speak of in this space. To the extent it was ever used, it was used by us to hunt them. And it wasn't really me as a company level, company grade officer in the infantry using it. I read about the battlefield in Ukraine. You mentioned the extremely long forward line of troops and the scale there.

Let me propose, I'm curious if you agree, another phenomenon that seems to me to be quite striking, if you compare it to conventional warfare, say, throughout the 20th century, is there's now a depth to it as well that is much, much deeper. Deep battle is real, it's here. And it's not like you go up to that leading trench and you fire your direct fire weapons at the enemy, and you move back a little bit, and there's some artillery you have to worry about, especially if you're in the open, and you move back a little bit more beyond that and you're good. It's not like that.

Kilometer after kilometer after kilometer, tens of kilometers, maybe hundreds of kilometers at the very highest end or talking about aviation, you are vulnerable. Your headquarters are vulnerable, masses of troops are vulnerable, and EW is a huge part of why. It seems to be governing the battlefield in a way that, again, I'm completely unfamiliar with, and I imagine most folks, except the soldiers you've got at the pointy end of the spear that are training with this stuff, are unfamiliar with. Talk a bit more about EW, or whatever we're going to call it now, and how we're exploiting it offensively, and how we are trying to discipline ourselves to not be exploited by our own electromagnetic signatures.

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, I like the... So, EW has three flavors. You've got electromagnetic support, so think of that in a sense saying you've got electromagnetic protection, sounds exactly like what it is, how do you protect yourself in the electromagnetic spectrum? And then you have electromagnetic attack, and that is how do you use the EMS against your adversaries?

I'll start with the last question you asked first. One of our big efforts for command and control modernization is signature management. And I've read this several times, so this is not my analogy, but I think it is apropos. In World War II, they used to have a term the cigarette in the foxhole. So, in the middle of the night in dark spots, if you saw a light source, it was probably a Joe with a cigarette. And when it is very dark, if you've ever been out during a night land nav, you realize that you can see points of light pretty well if it's actually pretty dark. Cell phones, radios, other things that generate RF signals, so anything that talks wirelessly, those are the cigarettes in the foxhole for the 21st, and probably into the 22nd century.

And what I mean by that is exploitation of laziness or forgetfulness will cause troops to get hurt or killed, because the enemy can also sense those signals, and can attack based on those signals. So, signature management has been a huge effort for us. One of the things that STRIKEs of 2nd Brigade, 101st started trying down at JRTC is an old technique made new: antenna remoting. So, how do you take all of the antennas that you communicate through, and then how do you remote them so that they are not co-located with your command post? We did this in Afghanistan, but to a lesser degree, and then we realized that we owned it, the FOBs were sort of our kingdoms and fiefdoms, and we didn't need to. But if you strike a signal in the middle of the woods, and your main command post is a kilometer away, it's okay to lose those antennas, because you've lost no people, you've lost no capability, and you just run that cable again. So, that's on the sensing and signature management.

The other piece of that is survivability in an EW-rich environment means maneuverability and mobility. Something we didn't talk about, it's less a high-tech thing, it's more of just a how do you shoot, move, and communicate? Is our massive investment in the infantry squad vehicles. So, think about General Motors pickup truck. I'm blanking on it right now. But converted into just... Alex's personal opinion, it looks like a Warthog from Halo. I love it. It's fast, it's light, you can strap a lot of really good equipment to it, it's got a great power budget. But being able to just put the entire brigade into those vehicles, so that in the event that you realize you were being sensed, or jammed, or worse, targeted, you can get out of your command post in five to 10 to 15 minutes, rather than the 45 minutes to an hour that it took us when we set up big tents and lots of large vehicles.

Aaron MacLean:

Got it. And so here's another big picture swing at this. The United States military, and this is true of us in Afghanistan, it has become very dependent upon our ability to communicate, and our ability to rely on GPS. It's not just the literal communication of person to person, but reliance on a data architecture to know where we are, to place our weapons where we want them to go, et cetera, et cetera.

I would go as far, and I believe there have been war games where players have gone as far, as to identify this as virtually our center of gravity, our ability to operate a reconnaissance strike complex where we have excellent visibility of the battlefield, we put ourselves and our weapons where we... Or munitions where we want them to go, we know where the enemy is, all of that, all of that and the way we've become accustomed to operating, requires, I presume, generating a fair amount of cigarette light, if you will. How are we going to operate, how are we learning to operate, in a world where we have to be much more careful, for the reasons that you just described? Do we give a lot of that advantage away? Help me just think about this.

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, there's a couple ways to think about it, and it's a spectrum. So, on one side of the spectrum, there is near perfect knowledge and communications, because you've got access to everything, you've got access to everything the intelligence community can give you, you've got access to everything locally through open source or publicly available information, and you can designate targets and strike them as necessary. On the other side of that spectrum exists the "you are operating in a completely disconnected and disadvantaged environment", or a DDIL environment, where you have intermittent or limited communications, and you need to operate on commander's intent, based on principles of mission command, and then knowing what your objectives are.

So, everything comes back to tactics and standard operating procedures. I know this is an unromantic answer, but there are reason that we have joint prioritized target lists, high payoff target lists, there are reason that we have things like target selection standards and attack guidance matrices, and it is to make sure that in the event that a commander has decided what those targets are, and you have the ability to detect and engage the tech decide... Decide... I'm blanking on it, but your ability to actually make that decision, detect it, and engage those targets, you are operating under the principles of mission command, where you can take those shots as necessary. We call them windows of opportunity, or if you're getting really philosophical, your ability to conduct pulsed operations based on those windows of opportunity. But it all really comes back to being really trained at the basics and really, really good at those basics, rather than saying, "Hey, I need to have perfect knowledge every single time for every decision that I make."

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, no, the notion of the spectrum is really helpful. That's interesting. My heart goes out to the small unit leader out there, really the leader at any level, and now that I think about it, the individual grunt. You're asking these young soldiers to operate on a battlefield that was already pretty chaotic and confusing and difficult enough, and now, if you'll forgive the flight of fancy, they have to picture this whole invisible world and its effects. Literally the unseen. And it's very seeable, if you have the right kind of technology. And you can do people a lot of harm, you can have a lot of harm done to you if you don't take into account for it. How do you even train? You can always train someone on a particular piece of gear for a particular problem, and maybe that's the answer here, but how do you train leaders to think about this?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

This is actually a more difficult task. The first step is treating the electromagnetic spectrum, that invisible world, like it is terrain, and then operating like it is terrain. So, it is a finite resource, that you know that you are taking up some part of. So, every time you key the mic on your radio, or you turn on your your Starshield antenna, you are using part of that terrain. And then as soon as you get people to think about it like that, it becomes easier to manage, because then they can start applying the methods of reconnaissance to that key terrain, they can start applying the methods of dominance to that key terrain, rather than just going, "Hey, it's magic. I can't do anything about it."

I like how you determine that it's sort of an invisible world that they have to think about. One of the key technologies that we are trying to bring to bear is let's make it not invisible. We know the physics, we know how to bring it to bear, we know how to sense in the electromagnetic spectrum, so how about we give our commanders some type of set of tools that allow them to see and characterize rapidly? I had an opportunity to talk to some of the 101st team down at Operation Lethal Eagle at Fort Campbell, which was there, it is the 101st's set up, they used it as a preamble for their long-range air assault down into JRTC.

And some of their spectrum managers and their cyber operators were able to sit me down in front of their tools and their main command post at the DIVARTY, at the Division Artillery cell, and show me the spectrum. They said, "Hey, this is our sensor. This is another radio talking." And it's hard to describe in romantic terms what a spectrograph looks like, but the waterfall of, "Hey, there's something out there that we don't know what that is, and we're going to look for it." So, being able to just empower those commanders at all levels with the ability to "see", I'm using air fingers quotes, to "see" in that spectrum has been pretty powerful. I assume that we will have similar results when 2nd Brigade, 25th goes to their Joint Pacific Multinational Regional Center here in October, and then the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain goes to the Joint Multinational Regional Center in Germany in January, because those are the other two brigades that are going to apply some of these new technologies and TTPs.

Aaron MacLean:

So, I want to shift us a bit to unmanned systems, drones being, I think, the thing that are at the front of everyone's mind. You've pointed out, of course, correctly, that for all the attention that's paid to it, it's not the only thing that's significant here, but it certainly does seem to be very significant. How is the Army thinking about unmanned aerial systems specifically? Employing them, countering them, obviously countering them. If you read the reports coming out of Ukraine, EW is a huge part of that, that there's also directed energy solutions that are being developed. What does the drone war look like for the United States Army?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, I'm going to treat those as two discrete things, and I would just like to talk about... So, for UAS, one of the key things that the chief and the secretary did last October into the new year was the aerial rebalance. And two of the systems that we actually terminated as part of that were the Shadow and Raven. So, if you were part of GWOT for the Corps or the Army, we terminated those systems. And they're 20 years old, roughly thereabouts, and they were at the end of life, but we continued to invest in them simply because they were the programs. So, that was the first pebble falling out of the wall on the fact that we knew we needed to reset what unmanned systems look like for the Army.

The second part was undeniably the rise of the FPV drone in Europe, and we're seeing very similar things around other parts of the world. And again, the cost of position of a $1,500 piece of kit versus a multimillion dollar vehicle. So, that was the second piece, where everybody realized we have a problem, we need to rebalance, we need to think about how we pay for these things in a meaningful way.

So, what will end up happening is we are going to have UAS at every echelon, in every formation, and it will not be simply one or two systems, it will be a range of options. And I'll give a couple of examples and shout-outs. So, I talked about 25th and 82nd earlier, I'll give some meat there. The 82nd has a project called Shiv, where those paratroopers are trained to build quadcopters and different kits, and fly them alongside... We have a program called Short Range Reconnaissance, which is a hardened GPS-guaranteed or position navigation and timing enhanced quadcopter, which is really cool. If you've ever seen one, they're very quiet, they're top of the line, but we want to pair those with cheaper, disposable, attritable, consumable drones. That that very expensive piece of kit that's high-end is paired with a bunch of cheap, low-end pieces of kits that we can throw away, and soldiers aren't worried about having to a FLIPL, or a statement of charges, or a bunch of paperwork because they lost a quadcopter. So, that's down at the soldier squad team level.

As you move up, we've got a couple of things in the works. So, we've got the Soldier Borne Sensor, which is again a very small, soldier-borne, clear-based helicopter. The chief, General George and General Rainey from Army Futures Command just worked through was the company-level UAS. And that is how do you take something that used to be a brigade asset, and give it down to the company level so that they can do their own reconnaissance, their own surveillance, and their own targeting? But what's really, really interesting there is it doesn't have to be an aviation soldier flying it. It is all of your infantrymen, it's your truck drivers, it's your cooks if you need to. It is no longer an MOS-specific piece of kit, if you want to have UAS for your echelon.

As you continue to move up, as you break the coordinating altitude, so as you get into real airplanes and different things, we'll still use aviation soldiers, and we'll still have coordination with the FAA and those types of organizations. But what I'm really excited about is UAS will be prolific at all echelons, and it will no longer just be a small cadre of folks in the 15 series of SOAR, aviation military occupational specialty, that flies them.

If I flip it a little bit, and think about counter-UAS, we recognize that counter-UAS will be as prolific as UAS, because the enemy won't let us skirt anything there. It will be everything from individual soldier sensors, up through some of the most exquisite technology that we're pushing forward to Iraq right now, like direct energy lasers, high-powered microwaves. What I'm really excited about in the counter-UAS space is our partnership with CENTCOM on how do we do better, faster sensor integration in command and control, so that we are not making soldiers look at something before they loose a rocket or a missile or a cannon at an incoming one-way attack drum. The C-RAM saved my life plenty of times at Bagram, and when I think about the speed necessary to make those decisions, I do not want to impose a human in that loop.

So, as we think about the future of what counter-UAS looks like, we also don't want to force a soldier to have to make those decisions, because what we're seeing is a change in the number of, of mass, of techniques, of altitudes, of frequencies, and frankly, the enemy is a learning organization, the same way we are. So, they are changing the way that they use these drones, and we cannot make soldiers deal with that on a one-click, one-shot basis. It has to be automated. So, I'm really excited about not only the stuff of counter-UAS, but the architecture, the C2, and the workflows of counter-UAS.

Aaron MacLean:

I want to ask you a little bit more about automation, but your mention of soldiers getting in trouble for losing drones, and how that's something that needs to be managed just made me smile, because when I was a young... I think I was a second lieutenant, I got into a little bit of trouble at my unit, and I was given the task of running an investigation for the battalion of a company commander who we all liked, he was a great guy, and his company had lost this drone out in the middle of nowhere, and 29 bombs. And I was in trouble, so I wrote this thing like I was investigating the Kennedy assassination. I tracked the wind patterns. It was a work of art when I was done, over what must have been a $20,000 piece of equipment. And I felt bad about it then, I feel bad about it now, and if that former company commander is listening anywhere, I'm sorry. It wasn't as big of a deal as my report made it out to be.

So, on automation. So, you just spoke of it in the defensive context. You need to, of necessity, kind of need to take the human out of the loop on some of these fire or no fire decisions. That makes excellent sense. That opens a whole can of worms, as I know you know, in terms of how far, what kind of capabilities are we comfortable taking the human out of the loop on? I think you're the fair person to ask this question. When we think of offensive capabilities, where is the Army on questions like that? I feel like the bad guys, the Chinese, are not going to have too many... I will say that, you may not be able to say that, but our likely adversaries are not going to have too many moral or ethical concerns about pursuing whatever tech solution seems most lethal. This also gets into AI, and a bunch of huge topics that are sort of buzzwordy. Again, same variety of question. Help me think about all this, a huge, complicated piece of subject matter that's obviously critical for the future.

Dr. Alexander Miller:

It is, and I want to give fair credit to organizations like Army Futures Command, which are, I would say struggling... They're not struggling. We're wrestling with the concept of human-machine integrated formations. And that just sounds like word soup, but really, fundamentally, what it means is is exactly what it says. How do you make sure that formations are mixed up, humans and machines. And it's not just ground robots, it's things like loitering munitions, it's things like launched effects, it's things like UAS, it's things like next generation tank and the XM30, the next generation fighting vehicle.

And then we do have this conversation, pretty regularly, on what happens if you are way forward of the forward line of troops, if you are designated with a named area of interest, what are the left and right limits for an autonomous system to either defend itself on your behalf, defend you on your own behalf, the right to self-defense? And then what can you do? I don't have a good, philosophical answer. What I can tell you is things like loitering munitions are helping us understand what types of AI are actually being useful, versus just saying, "Hey, I want to sprinkle AI in everything because that is the go-to, I just want to AI-ify everything", versus, "Hey, how good can I get at target discrimination? And then what am I comfortable with, as a commander, delegating down to a robot?" Because if you think about DoD 3000.09, the Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems DoDD, it uses a term, "delegation of best human judgment". And that's really what we're trying to figure out. How do you codify that?

I'll go back to the D3A complex. So, the first D there is decide. That is where a commander has said, "This is a valid target. If you see them, you're able to affect them." What we will have to get much better at is how do you bound that in such a way where you mitigate most of the risk? I didn't say eliminate all of the risks, that's not real in war. How do you mitigate enough of the risk that you're comfortable using those autonomous systems, and allowing them to not make judgments, not make decisions, take action based on decisions that commanders have already made?

Aaron MacLean:

So, you've been very generous with your time. One last big, meaty question here. You've laid out a pretty ambitious agenda here, in terms of what the Army is already doing, and what it's going to do in the near term, to prepare for a battlefield that I certainly fear, it seems to be the consensus, is perhaps coming sooner than we might like. What does the Army need and not have, in terms of authorities, resources, what have you, in order to be successful at executing the kind of program or related set of programs that you're outlining here?

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, super easy question to end on, thanks. The easy button is always saying more money, and I don't think that's the honest button. What we need and what we are striving for, when you hear terms like flexible funding or adaptive funding, it is really the process by which we more effectively use the funds that we have. And I'll just go into a little bit of detail there. So, we've been working through this concept of flexible funding, and it's in certain bends. So, things like UAS that we talked about, counter-UAS, EW, and command and control. And rather than saying, "Hey, I want a slush fund", because that's not what we're asking for, it is, "I want a portfolio of dollars that, within this bound set of capabilities, like unmanned systems, I want to be able to use these dollars for the best capability that's available right now."

So, if a new company comes on the market, let's say Aaron Corp shows up, and you've got just a really high-speed piece of kit that meets 80% of the requirements, it doesn't meet 100%, but the cost figure is at the right place, we can onboard Aaron Corp. And if Alex Corp, which has been on the program for a number of years, and stops being a good partner because I'm no longer updating that hardware, I'm just sort of letting it atrophy, though I'm not bringing the price point down, I'm not staying in line with market conditions, in terms of reducing the size of chips and reducing the size of boards, the government and the Army should have the opportunity to off-board me as a partner, because I'm not being a good teammate.

So, that's really the flexible funding, and it's partly an authority's thing, it's partly how we budget, and it is more often than not a cultural thing. It is how do we change the culture of making sure that we're buying the best, most capable system at the right price point today, rather than trying to plan for four or five years out. Another piece there is, I'll just stick on the cultural thread, we have trained an entire cohort of professionals to gold plate requirements, not out of malice, not out of lack of understanding, but because it is so hard to move a requirement through the process to get something out the other end that we want to make sure that requirement has everything that it could possibly need. So, everything from negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit to positive 120 degrees Fahrenheit, nuclear hardened, soldier-proof, rather than just saying, "Hey, here's the general need, here's the general characterization of what our soldiers need. Let's try that. Let's put that out there to industry, and let them chew on it and come back."

Because maybe we'll find five or 10 different companies that make the 80% solution, and they're willing to invest their own dollars, they're willing to invest [inaudible 00:40:36], they're willing to work with us to get to that 85 to 90% solution. So, it's really about moving the culture into a space where we are a little bit more comfortable area, rather than trying to dot every I and cross every T [inaudible 00:40:51], because we know that if you try to make that prediction five years out, it's generally not a good prediction.

Aaron MacLean:

Dr. Alex Miller, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Advisor for Science and Technology for the Chief of Staff of the Army, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I appreciate you making the time, and thanks for doing what you do.

Dr. Alexander Miller:

Yeah, Aaron, thank you. Thank you for the questions. I think it sharpens us when we have to answer hard questions, so, thanks.

Aaron MacLean:

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