The conduct of the war in Ukraine to date has been a lesson in two distinct parts on the importance of air superiority. The first is the failure of the Russian Air Force to establish air superiority and overwhelm Ukrainian forces to achieve a decisive victory at the start of the conflict. The second part concerns the difficulty of establishing air superiority with insufficient resources and capabilities—a situation the Ukrainian Air Force has lived with for over three years as Ukraine has endured costly attacks on its territory. The lethal air defenses on both sides are denying each air force the ability to penetrate the opposing battlespace—a condition in which no force has control of the air. Unfortunately, without the advantages that air superiority ensures—namely freedom from attack and freedom to attack—this attrition-based conflict will be won by the side with the most warfighting personnel and materiel—Russia.
Today’s Department of the Air Force (DAF) is in crisis and faces severe capability and capacity shortfalls across nearly every mission area. Despite the need to rapidly recapitalize and modernize the force, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) legacy approaches to acquisition, development, and sustainment have proven too costly and inefficient to meet warfighter needs. They are also too slow to keep pace with the aggressive and ongoing modernization efforts of global adversaries like China. Moreover, perpetual efforts to reform U.S. acquisition policy have fallen short of the need to accelerate new capability development and fielding. Digital engineering has the potential to help develop and field new capabilities faster and at lower costs, independent of acquisition reform.
The U.S. Army is currently experiencing a challenging period, highlighted by potential shifts in the global balance of military capabilities, emerging technologies, increased threats to the U.S. homeland and other issues that impose new demands on the nation’s premier land force. China and Russia continue to challenge the rules-based international order. Aimed at supplanting the United States in its role as the world’s dominant military, both have become more assertive as they seek to advance their own global agendas. Defense leaders suggest that, by 2040, both countries will have positioned the instruments of their national power to undermine the global national security interests of the United States. The development and growth of the Army of 2040 must be manned, trained and equipped and must lead with a focus on readiness to conduct large-scale combat operations (LSCO). These types of operations are inherently joint in terms of scope and size of the forces committed, and they entail high tempo, high resource consumption and generally high casualty rates. Additionally, large scale combat introduces levels of complexity, lethality, ambiguity and speed to military activities not common in other operations.1
There are frequent discussions about how the U.S. military should draw from the country’s commercial innovation base to gain an advantage, especially when it comes to the application of artificial intelligence (AI). Too often, conversations lament missed opportunities, valleys of death, painful contracting, or other U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) processes. While these hurdles are real, there are also positive stories of instances when commercial tech companies, military leadership, and warfighters came together to create a meaningful advantage on the battlefield. One of these is the story of how the 18th Airborne Corps used the Scarlet Dragon Exercise series to develop the Maven Smart System (MSS), an instance where frontline army users and a coalition of technology companies—enabled by DOD leadership and policies—pursued and developed a new technology that is having a meaningful impact on operations.
Given the immense economic and societal damage caused by cyberattacks and recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), interest in the application of AI to enhance cyber defense has grown in recent years. Research is expanding on autonomous cyber defense that can not only detect threats but can engage in defense measures such as hardening or recovery. This report focuses on one promising approach to creating these autonomous cyber defense agents: reinforcement learning (RL).
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) bring new opportunities and hold exciting potential for both intelligence production and assessment, helping to surface new intelligence insights and boosting productivity. AI is not new to GCHQ or the intelligence assessment community. But the accelerating pace of change is. In an increasingly contested and volatile world, we need to continue to exploit AI to identify threats and emerging risks, alongside our important contribution to ensuring AI safety and security
Propulsion is a key element in all space activities because it provides the fundamental function of producing thrust to move launchers, satellites, and other assets from Earth to space or within space.
The cyber domain and the information dimension are the most contested areas in today’s security environment. As information technology—including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—continue to improve, the cyber domain and information will become increasingly more important. It is therefore prudent to thoroughly analyze these spheres and study how to obtain information advantage over our adversaries, enabling the U.S. Army to remain the world’s preeminent land force.
In 2018, the Army submitted its Army Modernization Strategy (AMS) report to Congress, establishing the Army’s six materiel modernization priorities and envisioning the endstate for the future Army of 2035.1 To achieve the Army’s modernization goals, then Secretary of the Army Mark Esper announced the establishment of Army Futures Command (AFC) in Austin, Texas.2 The modernization approach integrated elements of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leader development and education, personnel, facilities and policy (DOTMLPF-P) and aligns cross-functional teams (CFTs) within AFC to compress acquisition timelines from capability gap identification through operational experimentation.3 This paper contends that the Army is experiencing a risk in achieving its modernization mission through oversight of spatial computing research, which involves the integration of digital and physical worlds. The Army should, therefore, include spatial computing research as its tenth priority research area and allocate additional resources to bridge this seemingly overlooked gap within the AMS.
Space operations are dependent on digital technologies for every command sent and bit of data received. The United States Space Force intends to embrace this dependency and integrate digital tools across the spectrum of their missions and functions. As a result, the vision, success, and setbacks they encounter can serve as a case study from which other spacefaring organizations can learn. The overlapping focus areas of Digital Workforce, Digital Headquarters, Digital Engineering, and Digital Operations frame the introduction of Space Force initiatives. Digital Workforce encompasses all the enterprises involved in creating professionals with the right attitude and aptitude to successfully employ digital technologies, from basic digital familiarization to advanced training. Digital Headquarters seeks to streamline data-driven decision making at all levels of the organization. Encompassing the infrastructure, data, tools, and processes of the Space Force, Digital Engineering’s objective is to establish an interconnected digital ecosystem for all Guardians. Digital Operations is the culminating point for digital transformation, where robotic process automation and AI/ML algorithms make Guardians more effective and efficient.
“Kill chain” describes the process militaries use to attack targets in the battlespace. The kill chain can be broken down into specific steps—find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess—that enable planners to build and task forces for combat operations. The U.S. military has long relied upon its superior ability to rapidly close kill chains against adversaries. This advantage is now at risk. China has developed countermeasures to obstruct or collapse U.S. kill chains, which could lead to combat failures that have devastating, long-term consequences for the security of the United States and its allies and partners.
Coming out of the Cold War, the U.S. military possessed the capabilities and capacity to dominate global military operations when and where it chose. Due to three decades of budget-driven force structure divestments, this is no longer the case, and U.S. military capabilities and capacity simply have not tracked with growing peer adversary threats. Furthermore, adversary strategies that prioritize information and decision-making superiority indicate that success in future wars will go to the side that possesses better battlespace knowledge, makes better decisions, more efficiently directs its forces, and closes kill chains faster.
The war in Ukraine represents the first major inter-state conflict involving the widespread employment of long-range strike weapons and missile defense. The implications resulting from the deployment and use of these weapon systems extend beyond the Ukrainian theater and affect the broader strategic competition between Russia and NATO. This paper explores those implications, asking how the deployment and use of long-range strike weapons and missile defense systems in Ukraine affect NATO-Russia strategic stability. I argue that the missile war in Ukraine affects the prospects of strategic stability by shaping Russian and NATO force posture and strategy development, and helping to predict the technological trajectories of offensive and defensive missile capabilities. In the medium to long term, this can put additional pressure on arms control and crisis stability between Russia and NATO.
What lessons can be learned from the early phase of the Ukraine war concerning Russia's capabilities, strategy, and approach in cyberspace? To what extent do these point to broader conclusions about the domain’s role during above-threshold military conflict? This article examines Russian use of cyber and information capabilities to influence the course of the Ukraine war, analyzing prior expectations, what is publicly known of wartime realities, potential reasons for disparity between the two, and the distinct and sometimes contradictory take-aways that have been drawn within the analytical community. While the lack of consensus among experts this far into the conflict demonstrates the difficulty of drawing conclusions with incomplete and early evidence, it also indicates a division between analyses focused on evidence of Russian cyber activities versus those focused on questions of strategic impact. It likewise highlights the challenges to strategic learning and adaptation posed by the domain’s covert nature.
