Artificial Intelligence (formerly Emerging Technologies): May 30, 2023

Riding the Wave: Maximizing the Opportunities and Mitigating the Risks of Artificial Intelligence Disruption

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the world. New capabilities demonstrate AI’s immense opportunities, but they also bring great risks: unsustainable power demand, worker displacement, and new ethical dilemmas that challenge global stability. As the People’s Republic of China pursues its goal to become the global AI superpower by 2030, the U.S. must act quickly and iteratively in collaboration with allies, partners, and industry to channel the disruption toward positive outcomes in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Biotechnology: May 30, 2023

Biotechnology: How the United States Can Mitigate Risks and Increase Opportunities for the Next Industrial Revolution

Like the previous industrial revolutions in chemistry and engineering, the era of biotechnology is swiftly altering human progress and the global landscape. The biotech industry is rapidly changing how humans create food, acquire resources, and approach healthcare – it has the potential to impact every facet of human life. Biotechnology provides tools through which humanity can effectively tackle the adverse consequences of human development, encompassing environmental degradation, climate change, and the inequitable distribution of food supplies. Biotechnology is also presenting society with new challenges, compelling people to confront ethical dilemmas, security threats, and divisions regarding the acceptance or rejection of this rapidly expanding industry.

Space May 30, 2023

Transforming the Defense Space Architecture with the Tools of the U.S. Federal Government

2023 Antonelli Award Winner: The asymmetric advantage the United States has long enjoyed in space diminishes as adversaries threaten the space system architecture underlying that advantage. The U.S. space system architecture depends on large, exquisite capabilities and a ground segment to manage and link those capabilities. It was leveraged to devastating effect during warfighting in the nineties and proved that space capabilities could transform air, ground, and naval power. It also spurred steep growth in the U.S. space industry, which had both first-mover advantage and generous government contracts to grow its knowledge base. In subsequent years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have sought to neutralize the advantage by developing strike and counterstrike capabilities of U.S. systems through kinetic, non-kinetic, electronic, and cyber-attacks. They have also sought to develop their own industrial base to compete with U.S. industry.

Electromagnetic Warfare: May 30, 2023

Electromagnetic Warfare Roadblocks: Stifling Innovation and Operational Effectiveness

The United States must innovate and operationalize electromagnetic warfare (EW) capability across the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) or U.S. national security will be at risk. Superiority in the EMS maneuver space is a fundamental precursor that enables the Department of Defense (DoD) to successfully operate in all domains and achieve the goals of the National Defense Strategy. The ability to operate freely within the EMS – at the time, place, and parameters of the nation’s choosing – is no longer guaranteed within today’s geopolitical environment. While acute threats like Russia pose significant EMS threats, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) presents the United States with its most significant pacing challenge. China fuses innovation across civil and military spheres, which enables it to make technological advances quickly. To maintain EMS superiority, the United States must remove roadblocks and impediments that slow EW innovation and prevent EW operational effectiveness.

Organic Industrial Base: May 30, 2023

The Defense Sustainment Agency: Leading the OIB of the Future

The Eisenhower School’s class of 2023 OIB industry study cohort, Seminar 16, set its sights on reimagining the OIB of the future with an academic focus on the depot-level maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), and modification services to sustain readiness of complex weapon systems. During the seminar’s journey, common themes were noted through several interactions with industry and government senior leaders across the MRO and sustainment enterprise -- flexibility, agility, interoperable, effective, efficient, forward projecting, and distributing to the point of need -- as key requirements for a future OIB. Seminar 16 welcomed the challenge of making this vision a reality in an OIB environment fraught with unfavorable market dynamics, aging and underfunded infrastructure, and a shrinking workforce. Accordingly, the conclusion of this report reflects the seminar’s aspiration for the creation of a new defense agency, the Defense Sustainment Agency (DSA), as a solution for mitigating the above issues and placing the U.S. on a stronger footing for prevailing in a peer conflict by 2030 and beyond.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems: May 30, 2023

The Rise of Robots and Autonomous Systems: Unraveling the Challenges in U.S. Commercial and Defense RAS Industries

General Douglas MacArthur is famously credited with saying, “Military failure can almost always be summarized in just two words: Too late.” Recently, the Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, resurrected this phrase to warn slow technological movement would place the United States at a strategic military disadvantage, with potentially devastating effects. As the U.S. faces a pacing challenge with China, with implications for the global world order, U.S. Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) advancement will play a critical role. The 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizes autonomous technology as an asymmetric approach to deter aggression, change kinetic conflict, and complicate escalation dynamics. The Department of Defense (DoD) seeks to mature autonomous technology through strategic investments in the domestic ecosystem and with U.S. allies and partners. The rapid advancement of commercial RAS drives the need for DoD to be a fast follower, rapidly incorporating commercial capabilities into military-relevant capabilities. Unlike many industries, the greatest obstacles to full RAS incorporation, commercially and militarily, will be cultural, ethical, and social. Accordingly, for the DoD to achieve superiority across the RAS industry, the United States must deftly navigate not only the technological challenges, but also the “soft” challenges: safety, social acceptance, trust, and human-machine integration.

Shipbuilding: May 30, 2023

Navigating the Waves: Assessing and Addressing Key Issues in U.S. Shipbuilding and Repair

For over seven decades, the United States has championed a rules-based global order, allowing international commerce to flourish. The 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) reaffirms this vision, specifying the United States' commitment to “an open, prosperous, and secure international order…free from aggression, coercion, and intimidation.” Critical to fulfilling this ambition is ensuring the United States has the military capacity to protect its territory and project its global power. To achieve this, the United States Government must dedicate time and resources to modernize and strengthen its military, equipping it to successfully prevail in great power competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while addressing acute threats such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Strategic Materials: May 30, 2023

Securing the Strategic Materials Supply Chain

In the case of military aggression by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) against Taiwan, economic shockwaves would ripple across the Pacific. How can the U.S. prepare America’s defense industrial base for this contingency? The answer begins with ensuring access to strategic materials – the essential elements that form the foundation of the modern economy. Since the end of the Cold War, the PRC has cornered the market on a wide range of minerals and downstream processing that converts ore into modern life’s building block materials. More troubling, the PRC has also demonstrated a willingness to flex its power by temporarily cutting off exports of strategic materials to America’s partners and allies, as it did with rare earth elements in 2010 and threatened to do in 2017.

Transportation (formerly Global Agility): May 30, 2023

Sustaining Global Power Through U.S. Transportation Infrastructure: Setting the Conditions for Optimal Multimodal Logistics

The United States’ dependence on uncoordinated public and private investment across the transportation and logistics ecosystem (trucking, railroad, air freight, port and harbor, inland waterway, deep-sea shipping, and warehousing industry) puts the nation’s ability to mobilize for major military action at risk. Despite various laws and government programs designed to protect the U.S. industry, recent wide-ranging supply chain chaos exposed systemic vulnerabilities which impinge on industrial, consumer, and national security interests. As economic activity normalizes in the wake of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic, there is no expectation that the various corporate and government entities will construct a robust, long-lasting, system-wide framework to repair these exposures.

Weapons: May 30, 2023

The Need for Speed: The Case for Continued Development of Hypersonic and Directed Energy Weapons

As the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and to a lesser extent Russia, rapidly develop and field hypersonic and directed energy weapons, the United States (US) faces a strategic military capabilities gap. The PRC’s arsenal of hypersonic weapons extends its anti-access area denial capabilities throughout the South China Sea, increasing the required standoff distances for US military forces to operate in a conflict safely. To prevent the PRC from reshaping the liberal world order, the US should continue to develop offensive and defensive hypersonic and directed energy weapons to complement its current arsenal while addressing defense industrial base issues, including infrastructure, supply chain, and human capital, and fostering cooperation with allies and partners.