Alexa Write My OpOrd: Promise and Pitfalls of Machine Learning for Commanders in Combat

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CIMSEC – If used unwisely, without a solid understanding of what decisions machine learning (ML) will support, the joint force may be playing a rigged game against a peer adversary. ML-enabled capabilities can absorb large amounts of data, process and organize it, and generate insights for humans who work at a relative snail’s pace. However, these nascent tools cannot reason and interpret words or events as a competent military professional can. As strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Russian-Ukraine war, and other geopolitical issues, American political and military leaders must develop a better understanding of when and how to use ML to support joint force planning, execution, and assessment in combat, lest U.S. service members pay an ungodly sum of the butcher’s bill.

Further Analysis Of North Korea’s New Missile Submarines

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Covert Shores – A major question is whether ‘Hero Kim Gun-ok’ is the same submarine which was showing in 2019 when Kim Jong Un visited Sinpo. That boat, known in the West as Sinpo-C, was undergoing conversion to carry missiles. The temptation is to say that it is probably the same submarine. However, a comparison if the available imagery identifies significant and numerous differences. 

(Thanks to Alain)

Tumult in the Deep: The Unfolding Maritime Competition Over Undersea Infrastructure

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War Zone – With an average depth of about 4,000 meters (or about 2.5 miles), most of the ocean and seafloor are out of sight and out of mind. However, trends suggest that the deep ocean and seabed are poised to rise in importance – both physically and as a venue for Information Warfare (IW) – due to the intertwined nature of critical infrastructure, resources, and national security. Undersea infrastructure is rapidly growing and populations are becoming ever more dependent on its utility. This infrastructure growth is posing novel challenges and opportunities for competition and national security. Navies must astutely follow the development of undersea infrastructure as they may be called upon to defend, attack, or influence it.

Revamping Fleet Design and Maritime Strategy – An Integrated Naval Campaign for Advantage

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CIMSEC – The robotic age of warfare enables a much closer relationship between international partners using smaller, more numerous systems for maritime security and creating a lethal warfighting advantage by increasing surveillance, targeting, and weapon capacity in critical regions.13 Leveraging this relationship is the basis for a maritime strategy to maintain integrated forces with partners forward, while retaining major elements of the traditional fleet to preserve sea control along the ocean’s logistics lines. It can become the maritime component of a maritime nation’s national strategy, executed through a well-planned and worldwide integrated naval campaign.

American coast guard vessel is sailing into Russian Arctic waters. Almost at same time, Moscow launches naval exercise in the area

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Barents Observer – Only few days after U.S icebreaking coast guard ship Healy sailed through the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi Sea as part of a 7-week westbound voyage along the Russian Arctic coast, the Russian Navy started drills in the area on “protection of the Northern Sea.”

The future of underwater warfare

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Council on Geostrategy – Professor Andrew Lambert writes that while the prospect of AUV submarines powered by AI roaming the deep ocean, striking submarine cables, ships and land targets at will may add a frisson of uncertainty to current anxieties, the technology is costly and offers limited return for continental powers focused on sea denial and area defence. It is more likely that, in the short term, AUVs develop into effective components of mixed underwater and three-dimensional security and combat forces which will enhance sea control, rather than challenge it. AUVs operating as fugitives in a hostile ocean will find it difficult to achieve tactical, let alone strategic effect.

Australian, UK and US tech companies already reaping AUKUS benefits

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Defense News – Artificial intelligence and autonomy companies from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are already feverishly developing and pitching tools to gather ever-more data and then help operators make sense of an information-overload environment. They’re hoping all this work will lead to contracts at home and with the allies soon, as more details about the second phase of the AUKUS trilateral arrangement, focused on advanced technology, come to light this fall.