 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in National Security Lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Good afternoon everyone. Joining us here in Spruance and out there via electrons. My name is Tim Schultz. I am the Associate Dean of Academics and I have the high honor today of introducing our guest speaker and the issues in National Security Lecture Series. It is Professor John Jackson, the one and only John Jackson. He has the coolest job title in all of the Naval War College. He is the Elmer A. Chair of Robotics and Unmanned Systems. No better title or job than that. He also has the coolest office swing by there someday and it is this modern day diorama of robots and science fiction memorabilia and models and all kinds of things and if you go downstairs to the Future Forces Gallery which John Jackson built you'll also see another diorama that you can marvel at a diorama of the modern age. So check that out. I am privileged to work very frequently with John because he co-teaches one of our premier electives all of our electives are premier but this one has endured it's one of the few that is taught more than once a year. It's the unmanned systems and conflict in the 21st century elective students flock to it super relevant. John has testified to Congress about this elective and about how military officers perceive innovation so he is a force here at the Naval War College and John is what arson investigators would describe as an accelerant. John makes things happen. He is a catalyst here at the Naval War College. He doesn't burn things down. He build things up. He is a creator of things. Not only did he help establish this national security lecture series he also serves as the program manager for the chief of naval operations professional reading program. He does a lot of special event work for the president of the Naval War College. If something good is happening at the Naval War College there are probably John Jackson's fingerprints on it somehow somewhere. He does a lot of work in the College of Distance Education as well. He's particularly well qualified for today's topic and exhibit A is his book One Nation Underdrones and exhibit B is the same book One Nation Underdrones only published in Chinese recently by Taiwan's Ministry of Defense. His work has gone global and do a place of a particular interest here in Newport as well. He is becoming known not just here but far beyond these walls as the avatar of AI, the baron of bots, the Caesar of cyborgs, the Duke of Drones. I personally refer to him as a weapon of mass instruction. Ladies and gentlemen Professor John Jackson. It's always nice to have your office mate who lives next to you do the introduction because he knows where most of the skeletons are buried and whatnot so it is a great pleasure to be here. I'm wearing my official One Nation Underdrones merchandise which I'll be selling out of the trunk of my Corvette after the show here tonight. So what we're going to do is a presentation I've done before. If you've seen it before I apologize because the jokes haven't changed but some of the content in the speech has so we're going to talk about robots that fly swim and crawl. Oh this way point that way. How we doing Dean? Let me see they're forward. All right there we go I've got it. Okay bottom line is you can't pick up a magazine, a newspaper, anything else and not find something about drones and robotics and how they're going to change the way the world operates how we all do our day-to-day business and how America and the rest of the world are going to fight. So as always we ask is this a new idea and what we find out is no it really isn't. If you look back in history this is the Sperry Automatic Airplane was designed towards the end of the First World War and the theory here was you would take that airplane no pilot you'd load it with explosives you'd point it in the general direction of the target it would take off and as it flew it would count the number of times the propeller went around when it got to a preset number the engine would cut off and it would dive on the target. Not exactly precision guided munitions but fundamentally it it got the job done and this is a model of the aircraft and you can see that down in the future forces gallery as Tim mentioned. So that was towards the end of the First World War radio control then came along and people decided that was a better way to do it than just kind of ballistically throwing the weapon on the enemy and so in the early days of World War II there was an airplane called the Denny Might. Now there was a actor named Reginald Denny ask your grandmother she might know who Reginald Denny was he was an actor but he was also interested in radio controlled aircraft and if you're a canineer if you're a gun officer gunnery officer on a ship you've got to practice your trade and what they traditionally would do would be to fly an airplane with what they call a sleeve towed behind it and the gunners would shoot at the sleeve I say again shoot at the sleeve not shoot at the airplane. Occasionally they did lose some of those aircraft and so Reginald Denny and others said well maybe there's a way we could use a radio controlled airplane either as the target that they would actually shoot at or would tow the sleeve. Over 7,000 of these Denny Mites were built during the Second World War and used very effectively for training. Well there was an army captain by the name of Ronald Reagan who was in the public affairs business and he heard about these things and he knew that the factory existed in Southern California so he sent a photographer out to look into the situation and found this young woman attractive young woman who was building drones. Now they looked and they took some pictures and they said you know she probably could do more than build drones and so that's Marilyn Monroe. So this is the ultimate bar bet you know if you're hanging around the bar and somebody says how did Marilyn Monroe get her start she got her start building drones. Now there's a vicious rumor that Lady Gaga is getting into the drone business and if that's true I'm getting out of the drone business but anyway so let's jump ahead here and what we're going to do with the the systems primarily is we're going to talk about aerial systems, maritime systems, land systems and talk a little bit about some of the civilian uses and what not. So let's jump first into the aerial systems and one you may have heard about is the Global Hawk. This is the largest unmanned system that the U.S. operates and it is a surveillance aircraft. It does not carry a weapon but it has the capability to in effect fly from California to Maine, spend six or seven hours surveying what goes on and then fly back to California. That's the kind of range and endurance it has. Operated by a crew primarily out of Sacramento, California and so the Global Hawk has been incredibly successful in terms of providing that uh overwatch and that surveillance for what needs to be seen so that we know what the enemy's up to. Well the U.S. Navy looks and says you know we have an awful lot of territory that we'd like to uh surveil as well and so this is the MQ-4C Triton. This is the Navy's version of Global Hawk if you will and it's designed to fly over open ocean and surveil what's going on. You can see the aircraft carrier down at the bottom there. It does not take off from an aircraft carrier. It does not land on an aircraft carrier. It's far too large to do that. So it's a land-based maritime patrol aircraft and it is intended to operate with the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft which is a manned aircraft. So Triton can go out for 24 to 36 hours at a time. If they see a target then they can contact the P-8s. P-8s have the ability to come much quicker on the station, investigates what's going on and can carry weapons and attack that target if necessary. So the combination between the Triton and the P-8 has been very very successful. This is me at Point Magoo in California and what you may not realize and it's hard to tell when I'm at the podium here but I'm six foot seven tall and who's laughing back there. Now I'm gonna prove it to you. So there it is. This is me and this is one of my fellow professors also worked in Game of Thrones but as you can see I am clearly at least six and a half feet tall. So we will use myself as a ruler as we talk about the size of some of these vehicles going forward. So the next one that you may have heard about as well is the MQ-9 Reaper. Originally we operated the Predator which was a man an unmanned armed long endurance drone and it was originally designed for surveillance and they were flying one time, looked down, saw a group of people all gathered around a very tall individual wearing a turban and whatnot and the people watching the screen said I think that's Osama bin Laden. By the time they got an aircraft down to attack the target they dispersed and they were gone. So the question was well could we fire a missile or drop a bomb from an unmanned aircraft and not rip the wings off and so they decided to attempt it. They found out they were very successful in using hellfire missiles and gravity bombs. This is a shot in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and they have a hole in the ground. They make the Navy guys stand in so the Air Force guys look a lot taller. At least that's my story but this is a Predator Reaper with bombs under the wings and whatnot and a couple of the commanders of that activity. So the interesting thing about the Predator and Reaper craft are they operate in theater somewhere whether it's Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, wherever the case may be. The pilot is in some other location in the continental United States and is flying that thing via electronics and so if he is in Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas or in about 25 other locations around the United States he can fly that aircraft the sensor operator sees what's going on and they can surveil and if necessary attack the target. So it's interesting because it allows a pilot to sit in the seat fly for eight hours get up replaced by a second pilot flies for another eight hours third shift comes in continues to fly then you have to land the airplane refuel it and send it back up again but the airplane stays in theater throughout the entire period of time so this is called remote split operations and it's been very very successful. The Air Force was operating up to 75 of the Predators and Reapers at any point in time so 24 hours a day seven days a week they could have 75 aircraft in the air doing the job and that wasn't enough the demand was even greater than any of that so very very successful program it's scaling back a bit and the next generation of aircraft is going to be designed to be able to operate in a higher threat environment because if you're flying in an area against Chinese or other targets you're potentially going to need to be able to be much stealthier and be able to potentially defend yourself so the next generation of unmanned aircraft will be somewhat different which brings us to this version. Now again the Navy said we'd like to get unmanned aircraft on aircraft carriers the Triton far too big but this is the UCAS the unmanned combat air systems demonstrator which is able to take off and land from an aircraft carrier and the decision was that there is the indication of the size of the vehicle and so the thought was well is it going to be an attack aircraft is it going to be a surveillance aircraft what is its primary mission going to be the determination by Navy was what we needed more than anything else was an air-to-air refueler and so that is what the the MQ-25 Alpha Stingray has now been developed in this case you're seeing the refueling aircraft passing fuel passing gas which they say to the unmanned aircraft but in the future it's going to be done in reverse order so this is the MQ-25 Alpha Stingray and it is a carrier based air-to-air refueler and here you see it in the air refueling an aircraft so the notion here is you're going to have an organic capability on the deck of the aircraft carrier right now the U.S. Navy uses FNA-18 aircraft fighter and attack aircraft that carry fuel pods and do air-to-air refueling it's not a very efficient way to do business we're burning up there's fighter and attack aircraft doing a important but less critical refueling mission so Navy's decision is we're going to buy this air-to-air refueler and that's what you see here Boeing has flown their test version what you're seeing there in that photo and construction of the fleet of the the stingrays is currently underway and we hope to see those onboard ships within the next 18 to 24 months this is the the Sentinel the RQ-170 Sentinel and this is a stealth surveillance aircraft it was known as the beast of Kandahar in the days when it was flying secretly in Afghanistan and you may have seen the Iranians claim to have shot down one of these and you may have seen it on display in Iranian photos we did lose an aircraft we don't think it was shot down we think it had electronics problems and then flew until it ran out of fuel and glided into the desert where the Iranians were able to pick it up and whatnot so we don't believe that we lost a lot in terms of security from the loss of the RQ-170 and this is at an unclass level and that's how we teach our course also at the unclass level but in the public press you see discussion of the follow-on stealth version of an aircraft such as this if you remember the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad and you've seen the famous picture of President Obama and Secretary Clinton and others watching the raid take place they were watching video feed coming from these one of these RQ-170 sentinels so very very successful aircraft and we will see them operating in a lot of different ways in the future so let's shrink down a little bit smaller this is the Marine Corps blackjack and dairy again is an indication of the size and the notion here is the Marines have said you know we're operating somewhere we could ask can the Air Force could you send a reaper up by or send a a global hawk by and let me know what's going on in the battlefield maybe they will maybe they not it depends on what the requirement is so the Marines have said we want to have our own aircraft that we take with us and we operate and we task it for what it needs to do and when it needs to do it so this is the blackjack it's built a civilian version of it very similar to the scan eagle which you can see flying in the future forces gallery but it is operating and again it's a surveillance platform they've strapped some bombs under it no matter what it is we'll put a bomb under it and see if we can get it to operate but primarily it is a surveillance platform that's trying to let you know what's on the other side of that hill before you have to go over there and fight this is again smaller so this is arrow environment switchblade and they call it a switchblade because the wings pop out the tail pops out after it leaves its launcher and you can see the trooper there looking in the control system and flying this thing it'll fly for about 25 minutes you direct it where you want to go and the interesting thing about this unmanned area vehicle is it has a warhead and you don't want this one to come back when it launches you're not going to bring it back and reuse it it's a one-time use device and if for some reason you do not have a target that you want to strike then you'll go ahead and drive it into the ground and and destroy it so there's a larger version of the switchblade which i'll talk about in a few minutes it's currently being used in Ukraine another version of the same aircraft is called the black wing and this is used by the U.S. submarine force and what the submarine force will do is come to periscope depth launch the black wing wings pop out and it gives them basically a 2000 foot tall periscope so they can see everything that's going on in the area in which they're operating when they're finished with it goes in the water they do not make any attempt to recover it but the price point is such that it's it's efficient and ineffective in doing that so submarine force really likes you know staying stealthy and knowing what's going on around them and the black wing gives them that capability talk about another program which is in the design phase right now and they call this the loyal wingman and the notion here is what if you have a manned aircraft whether it's an f-35 or an f-22 or whatever the case may be what if you could fly the manned aircraft and flying alongside his four to six loyal wingman who are flying with him and under control of that pilot and the loyal wingman are carrying additional weapons or they're carrying jamming devices and they will go across the beach and jam the systems as necessary so a lot of work being done on loyal wingman the australians are building one right now in conjunction with Boeing and so I think what you're going to see is manned unmanned teaming it's kind of the buzzword you'll find that the drones are not replacing pilots in some cockpits they're replacing them but the pilots are still going to have plenty to do in the the manned aircraft and perhaps controlling other aircraft this is a fascinating program called gremlins and the notion is if you have a small unmanned aircraft they don't really have tremendously long range so the idea is what if you could load a cargo aircraft c-130, c-5, c-17 with a whole bunch of these aircraft you throw them out the back end of the aircraft and they fly in and do whatever mission you want them to do jamming attack whatever the case may be and then they return and are captured in mid-air by the capturing aircraft winched back inside flown back to base fueled up taken back up and used again so they have done this experimentally we said that air-to-air refueling is a very demanding task well this is air-to-air capture of another airframe and we believe this has got great potential for providing the legs that you need to get close into the targets that you're going to want to attack I mentioned Ukraine and so we'll just touch briefly on this is Iranian drones the Shahid 136 and the Iranians have sold a large number of these to the Russians who are using them to significant effect in Ukraine they are long range they are you know 1500 miles or better they carry a relatively small warhead about 60 to 100 pound warhead they're not terribly accurate but they're accurate enough to do what needs to be done and they cost about $20,000 a copy so that's incredibly cheap and so these things are being purchased and used in the hundreds and used to attack targets in the Ukraine this is the Bayrector this is a Turkish built drone which the Ukrainians are using to great effect and again they use them for surveillance what they'll do with some of these drones is they will fly at night they'll look down and they'll find Russian tanks that have pulled over to the side of the road and stop for the evening and they're still radiating heat to the point where the drone can pick up that heat signature and direct a weapon either artillery or another drone onto that target so great success the Ukrainians are very very clever folks and what they're doing and have caused tremendous damage to the to the Russian forces as you have read this is the switchblade 600 so we talked earlier about the switchblade 300 small warhead this is the switchblade 600 which is a much larger warhead longer range can fly for you know hour and a half at a time carry a bigger bigger warhead and so these are being manufactured and shipped to Ukraine basically as quickly as we can and they're fundamentally easy to operate one of the issues has been the Ukrainians they said you know give us modern fighters so we can fight the Russian Air Force learning to fly and operate those aircraft very difficult maintenance is very difficult so the real sweet spot is potentially using unmanned drones which are easy to learn how to operate smart in terms of how they operate and so that may be the big pick payoff as opposed to manned aircraft so these have all been fixed wing fixed wing aircraft we call helicopters rotary wing aircraft this is a design which this guy apparently doesn't think much of his legs because if you look there are dozens of whirling blades flying around and he's going to land that thing and try and get off at some point so i'm not sure that's the best idea the best design and whatnot but there are a number of rotary wing drones this is one of the more successful this is the mq-8c fire scout and this is a bell 407 helicopters helicopter which are used there's hundreds of them if not thousands all around the world so what they've done is they've taken the the bell 407 they've painted the window gray put an unmanned operating system in it and they have used this very successfully both ashore and from ships and the notion is if you can put this on a ship with a manned helicopter the robot unmanned helicopter can fly when the other robot manned aircraft is down the pilots are taken pilot rest etc this is a smaller version of the fire scout and that's me once again i'm wearing my blue shirt now my boss sent me to las vegas for a conference and i took pictures and i brought him back and showed him to him and he said you know i know what happened here is you went to the conference one day you went around took pictures of everything the rest of the time you spent playing golf or gambling so the moral of the story is either don't show the pictures to your boss or change your shirt between the various things that you're going to take pictures of so this is the Lockheed KMAX and this is a fascinating aircraft it was originally built as an aerial logger so the idea is you would go into an area you cut down the logs well how do you get the logs out do you have to make a logging road at great expense and very demanding on the environment and whatnot or could you fly in pick up the logs and bring them somewhere for processing and that's what the KMAX originally was intended to do it's a six thousand or six thousand pound airplane that can lift six thousand pounds dual counter rotating propellers it's quite a interesting evolution and so the marines looked at this and said you know we find that when we're trying to maintain a forward operating base we have to send truck loads of stuff to that forward base so we have a couple truck loads worth of stuff then we have a couple truck loads of people protecting the truck loads of stuff etc improvised explosive devices are the biggest single killer of of our troops in that environment and whatnot they said what if we didn't have to use the roads at all what if we could pick up the material at a staging base fly it into the area you want marine or soldier on the ground uses a laser pointer and says drop it here it carries a carousel of four pallets and so it can drop a pallet here then go to another location drop a pallet pallet and back strictly unmanned most of the time they flew at night very successful a couple million pounds of cargo moved they sent the device over there for a six month test it stayed for two and a half years because the marine said we're not going to let it come home until you can replace it with something so additional design work is being done on this aircraft by a lot of different companies both Lockheed and other manufacturers and the question is you know to what degree can the U.S. forces afford to buy a logistics unmanned helicopter for doing logistics work so we'll see as force structure develops how many of these have but the payback is truly remarkable there's even been designs done for casualty evacuation if you have someone that's injured do you need to send a manned aircraft in to try and pick that person up and potentially lose the crew if you could send an unmanned helicopter in to pick up that casualty it might be a a good idea so we'll see how that develops so we're ramping down in size we're still talking about rotary craft this is the instant I quad rotor the Marines have a belief that every squad should have their own drones with them again the notion of what's going on on the other side of that hill so they now have the ability to find that out and so the quads for squads is a small unmanned helicopter and it can fly and send back live video of what's going on in the in the area smaller yet the black hornet nano drone and this one you can tell he's holding in his fingers looks like a toy but it very much is not it can fly for about 15 minutes the troops wear a box on their chest that carries two of these drones in it they take one out they throw it in the air and they control it with a controller and it flies over to see what's going on inside the compound or wherever else it might be visual only so it's it's come sending back data it's not carrying a weapon of any sort and then when it comes back it lands they send another one out they recharge that one and they keep going back and forth the special forces people both us and special air service and other folks uk have used these extensively and so they they look like a toy but they very much are not so so that's some rotary wing military applications let's look at some civilian applications now this is the ehang a chinese uav taxi now the design here is it's an unmanned aircraft you walk up to it you open the door you climb in you take the ipad you say take me to tiverton you press the button it takes off and takes you to tiverton no pilot no parachute just one terrified passenger and so i don't know if this is going to work successfully but there's a lot of people doing a lot of investigation on the concept of aerial taxis uber and lyft are looking extensively at these to say that's the next level of transportation you know could you call a helicopter to come pick you up from a rooftop in downtown new york and take you to the airport or take you to wherever you needed to go and whatnot so this is another design this is the volocopter and that's me sitting in it at the singapore air show and it is a round circular support facility with electric motors on all those various points and whatnot and the notion is that it can do the urban mobility mission that people believe needs to be done shrinking down even more this is a a basically a toy drone there have been hundreds of thousands if not millions of hobbyist drones built this is one that was flown in january of 2015 onto the lawn of the white house you may have heard about it got a lot of people excited they're so small they're hard to detect they're usually non-metallic so you really can't see them on radar so the notion is how do you stop something like this from attacking the the white house or anywhere else and you could put a very small explosive on these if necessary and that's one of the big concerns for this is swarms you know if you have one drone two drones a couple coming and whatnot you theoretically could knock them down what if you had tens or hundreds or thousands of swarmed drones coming at you at one time could you stop them you've probably all seen on the olympics and a super bowl and otherwise up to two thousand drones in the air at one time making various designs and figures and disney world is using these as a replacement for fireworks because they can take them and fly them and use them again year you know day in and day out so the whole notion of small groups or even large groups of drones is very very interesting in a lot of ways so now this is the best photo of the entire program so get ready this is what i call my john wane photo so this is called the sky wall it's a counter uas system and that's me out on the grass in front of loose hall shooting down some drones now the notion here is if you have drones quad rotors or octa rotors however many rotors it has flying in how do you stop them well this is a way to use a viewfinder a search device you look in the screen there you put the crosshairs on the drone when you get to the appropriate place you press the trigger compressed gas shoots a projectile out when it gets near the drone the projectile splits open drops a net onto the drone and drags it down to the ground probably has a parachute if you choose to that can help the thing float down it helps not hit anybody in the head it also helps you be able to do forensics on the drone and say where did this thing come from perhaps we can find out where it was and stop it sky wall also has a permanent designed gun that can sit permanently in place around airports or high value targets and whatnot and i've seen photos of it outside air force one providing you know coverage of that that aircraft so so how do you stop these things this is a kinetic way this is a way to mechanically knock the drones down this is called a drone killer and this is a device that basically uses an electronic signal to either jam the signal that's controlling the drone and force it to go somewhere else or jam it and cause it to crash the problem with the electronic version is you also jam a lot of other frequencies jam your own communications if it's in a civilian environment you know if you're trying to protect the Super Bowl do you want to knock the network television people off with a digital signal and whatnot so not always the best notion but a lot of different ways are being tried they've even gone as far as to try using hawks and they've trained these birds to go up and catch these things out of midair so the aspca and other folks say well you know the claws of the birds are going to get hurt if they come in contact with the rotor so they've built little kevlar gloves to put on the claws of the birds and have used them so they've used a lot in australia and a lot of other areas obviously you know a lot of concerns with using animals and how that might work but it has been done and so if you have an idea how to do the counter uas counter unmanned air system business bring it forward you can probably make a lot of money okay so that's aerial let's jump quickly to maritime and so the US Navy has a belief that you know we would like to have 350 ships we're not going to get 350 ships we can't afford to buy that many the chief of naval operations has said potentially we will have 200 man ships and 100 unmanned ships and we're looking at a class of small medium and large unmanned surface ships this is the the autonomous continuous trail unmanned vehicle called active it's also known as the sea hunter and there's now a sister ship called the sea hawk and it has operated from san diego to hawaii and back totally unmanned the idea initially was it was going to locate a submarine and then stay on top of that submarine as long as necessary and potentially force the submarine to the surface or at least you're keeping track of where the thing is they said you know it can do a lot more than anti-submarine work and so the sea hunter has been used in a number of exercises rim pack and other exercises as an example of what an unmanned surface vehicle can do this is just some artist's conceptions of what some unmanned medium-sized unmanned surface vessels might do we'll come back to those and tell you a little bit more about them we're talking about unmanned undersea vehicles a lot of work being done in that area that yellow thing is down in the future forces gallery and this is the design for a unmanned undersea vehicle that would ride on the outside of the submarine would spin off go and do its mission come back reconnect to the submarine there are a lot of versions that will operate out of torpedo twos there's a 21 inch limit to the diameter of a torpedo tube and so if you want something it's bigger than 21 inches you're going to have a different way to launch it and potentially you're going to do that out of vertical launch tubes in a lot of different ways that we might do that this is out of sequence but i'll go ahead and talk about this is back to the surface business so what are you going to do with that large unmanned surface ship well there's a concept some decades ago called the arsenal ship and what that says is okay you've got a modern destroyer cruiser and it'll hold 60 to 100 missiles what happens when they're they shoot all those on the first day of the war potentially well if you had an arsenal ship with maybe 500 or a thousand missile tubes traveling with you you could target the targets that you want to use with the man platform and then launch the aircraft launch the missiles from the unmanned surface ship so a lot of design work a lot of money potentially going in that the US Navy is building a shore based test facility you know the idea is could you take an unmanned ship and operate it for six months without touching it pretty demanding and our friends in congress have said you need to prove to us that you can do that so you build a engineering system on the beach somewhere and you run it for six months and see if you can do it so US Navy is in fact doing that to do the experimental work to see if in fact we can scientifically and technologically design a surface ship that would not have any crew aboard now potentially what you do is you'd have flyaway teams on your man ship and if something broke you'd fly them to the unmanned ship or there's even very there's concepts for very limited small crews that would ride these ships but the idea of unmanned to me is unmanned with nobody this is a an eye test but this is unmanned undersea vehicles this is the one that i find most interesting and this is the echo voyager or the the orca program this is an unmanned submarine it's 80 feet long about eight feet in diameter dives to 11,000 feet depth of water not 1100 but 11,000 and it's truly truly a remarkable design this is me at the launching of the the echo voyager and that one behind me does not have the 34 foot payload section so it's smaller than the actual one will be and you see i'm not wearing my blue shirt but i put the blue shirt on just in case here is the actual echo voyager that's me on the on the beach and you can see that 34 foot payload section so the front end is basically sensors the back end is propulsion and diesel electric so it carries enough diesel fuel to operate potentially for six months at a time what does it do all right it could launch missiles or UAVs from the top it can drop mines it can launch torpedoes from the bottom it could even swim seals from a deck shelter inside that that submarine not from 11,000 feet depth of water but obviously shallow water so US Navy Boeing spent about 150 million dollars developing the echo voyager of their own money and you know it's the old idea if you build it they will come well they built it and they experimented with it and in fact Navy has now ordered five of these which are under construction one test model is currently in the water being operated now so the US Navy is very interested in this and you know we're not going to have enough submarines to do everything we want can an unmanned submarine do everything a man submarine can do of course not but it can do a lot of things and it can free the man submarine to do the more demanding mission so if you take an unmanned submarine like this and you sail it from whatever ports you want to operate it from or you can air load it in a cargo aircraft in one lift you can move that entire submarine which weighs about 55 tons in one lift with a C5 aircraft you can launch land load it take it where you need it offload it put the three pieces together use a 50-ton yacht crane to put it in the water and it swims off and does its thing so it's a truly remarkable concept and so we will see them increasingly and the oil and gas industry which has more money than DOD is very interested in these as well to do pipeline construction inspection undersea cable inspection construction and whatnot and so we think that once the US Navy has proven this concept that the civilians will buy some of these and the US Navy is good with that you know we we wouldn't mind if the Chinese or the Russians don't know whether that's the US Navy down there or that Shell Oil it just complicates the firing solution so there's some other designs on some of the smaller vehicles some are man portable as you can see there some are you need a crane to use them but depending on what the application is the sea gliders and some of these other unmanned aircraft unmanned submersals can do all kinds of work this is one snakehead which was developed here at the naval undersea warfare center and that's actually floating there in there again at bay they've reduced the funding significantly to this and they're just doing experimental work with snakehead but we may see some more of it as well this is a fascinating concept this is called the sail drone this is a sail powered drone and it gets underway and it can go out for six months 12 months at a time it's controlled by a control center in oakland california which moves the sail and the rudder as necessary to drive this item where you want it to go so what does it do it measures depth of water temperature salinity a lot of things that that anti-submarine warfare folks care about it does a lot of work for oceanographic institutions and there is myself once again i love my picture this is launching a couple of sail drones from narragans at bay and this is university road island which is operated a number of these and they're out to investigating the Gulf stream and how it operates up along the coast here off off new england and so they towed the sail drone out and turn it loose and away it goes and sends back data continuously for the extended period and they have sailed some of these sail drones into hurricanes and have found that they've survived so it's a truly remarkable capability there's hundreds of them being built and there's bigger versions they've got solar panels as you can see on there but that's to drive the electronics it's not to drive a propulsion system although they do have some larger ones with a propulsion system built in maritime now let's talk about unmanned ground vehicles this is the pack bot which is basically a improvised explosive device disposal robot you know traditionally you'd see a pile of trash down the road and is that a pile of trash or is that a bomb that's been placed and so normally you'd put a eod operator in a bomb suit and they go down there and they try and find out what it was hopefully without detonating it what they do now is they send a robot and the robot goes down investigate what's going on if they say you know this looks like an explosive device they can leave an explosive charge back off with the pack bot detonate the explosive charge and destroy that explosive device so very successful save save many many lives there's a version of pack bot in the future forces gallery you can look at this is a armed drone ground drone this is Mars the the modular advanced armed robotic system and that's Admiral Christensen one of the past presidents when we brought the Mars here to the base you know how hard it is to get on the base right security can be a problem well the day we said we're bringing a robot with a gun took a lot of talk to convince them to let it on well the actual one carries a machine gun it carries a tear gas dispenser a laser dazzler a microphone and a speaker and you can roll into an area and basically say clear this area or we're going to engage the target and there's always a human being with their finger on the trigger before a decision is made to to shoot and so that's a big issue for do we allow a robot to make a kill decision and as time goes forward we may very well find the situations where we need to do that us policy is we will not do that there will be a human in the loop this is the multi utility tactical transporter mutt and that trooper kind of looks like he doesn't trust it because he's pointing his gun at it what people don't realize people in this audience i'm sure do is that a modern trooper when he or she goes into battle carries more weight on his or her back than a knight in shining armor used to wear when he was wearing armor so you carry all this kit all this gear and whatnot we probably fly you into theater keep you up for days throw you out of the airplane and then ask you to go do your job so the question is is there a way we could offload some of that weight to a robot of some sort that could carry a gun could carry ammunition could carry batteries etc and so the marines have really been leaning forward on various aspects this is kind of a composite picture of a number of unmanned ground vehicles some of them have wheels some of them have tracks some of them have you know different ways to to get around and there are many many designs being studied at this point a lot of work is being done by boston dynamics you may have seen spot the dog which was recently used by the fire department of new york when that parking garage collapsed they sent spot in to see what they could find out i took my class up there a few months ago and we got a chance to drive spot around and whatnot but the boston dynamics has done a tremendous amount of work in robots this is atlas and if you want some fun google atlas and it is a walking robot now i like to say we've all seen robots in the movies and they just walk around and they do things and they run and when that's a very difficult thing to do engineering the ability for a robot to walk is incredibly difficult and so here is atlas and you can see the video atlas picks up that box the guy comes over with the hockey stick and knocks it out of his hand atlas picks it up he knocks it out of his hand and you can see the robot kind of looking like you know when we take over you're the first guy we're going to find because you are not making me very happy so this is again this is at boston dynamics one of their bipedal robots and there we are with spot the dog this is a shot of our class and it's not battle bots but it's kind of like battle bots uh pre-pandemic we used to bring the robots here and we take them out and practice with them and whatnot i'm standing there with my foot on a round robot which will roll through the ground can get in the water and swim through the water there are cameras on either side of the device and it can be used for surveillance the really little ones can roll under a car and see what's going on if there's any explosives and whatnot so a lot going on there very briefly driverless cars you know the yellow in there where he gets in the back and drives that's really not where we are in terms of driverless cars tesla has a driver assist module and they're very clear about saying this is not a driverless car and they say you must keep your hands on the steering wheel if you don't the car detects that and puts an alarm sometimes you can disable it apparently but there've been a number of people killed in teslas and in one case they found that the individual is watching a video uh not paying attention and drove into something and killed himself another instance a truck crossed the front of the of the tesla the device could not detect the difference between the blue sky and the blue truck drove right in and killed the people so we're not there yet but there will come a day when you can get in the car and say take me to chicago and it will get you there but we're not there yet and you need to be you know cognizant of the fact that driverless cars still have a ways to go this is a interesting civilian use of aerial drones this is called the zipline drone and this has been used extensively in africa roads are not always good rainy season roads are even worse and so the zipline has been used to deliver medicine blood supplies other things from their central hub to where it needs to be when it gets near it it opens its bomb bay and drops the package out by parachute goes back and gets more so very successful a lot of similar work being done in the us uk and other areas this is a design for a defibrillator you know it's been used to fly a defibrillator where you need it to rescue people this is a quick shot of precision agriculture which is the idea that you can use drones to inspect your crops determine where there's a disease insects not enough water and then you can go back and either spray with a drone or with a manned aircraft do your irrigation and whatnot so precision agriculture is a is a huge potential field no pun intended this is google airs designed for delivery robot and so it will come and fly over your house and lower that box down and disconnect it and drop off whatever it is you've ordered a lot of a lot of money by a lot of companies to develop this capability question is do we really want hundreds or thousands of drones buzzing around our neighborhoods how about the deconfliction with aircraft we don't want to suck up a drone and a manned aircraft engine and whatnot so i'm not sure how this is going to go but they've been used to do everything from deliver pizza and burritos and whatnot so so we've seen robots that fly swimming crawl you want to learn more that's my book that happens to be me at the marina bay sands hotel in singapore the world's largest zero-edge swimming pool and those are my pasty weight of toes for which i apologize so and as we mentioned the chinese version the ministry of defense of taiwan bought the rights to the book published 2,500 copies distributed to their their troops and we suspect it may be the PLA and navy's reading it too but there's nothing classified in it it's just a good overview of what goes on in the world so with that i will conclude and are there any questions yes sir use your microphone please yes i'm a captain paraskevolos from the helenic navy regarding the unmount the underwater unmount vehicles like the orca i wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about their means of communication with the center that controls them because i suppose that would be a limiting factor regarding their utility are you a are you a submarine or by chance yes yeah you know we can't talk to our submarines very easily when they're underwater there are ways that things can be done but the captain's exactly right communicating with these is very difficult and so what that does is drive you a couple directions one is a high level of autonomy to say here's what i want you to do and without any further communications do it the other option is that you come up to periscope depth and you communicate with your command and control operation you hate to do that because that's how you can be discovered you know in by the opponents and whatnot but that kind of communications is is what is necessary so you know people sometimes throw rocks at the unmanned undersea people they say hey look the aviation guys can do all this stuff and say well yeah well you can talk to them they're not operating at incredibly depths crushing crushing vehicles and whatnot you can't communicate with them so it is one of the more significant challenges is how do you do that communications and there there are workarounds and one of the big issues is to be able to autonomously do a lot of what you want to do so other questions david do you have something hello john uh david school uh makes me wonder a little bit so currently our policy is that we uh all decisions regarding drones are made by human uh actors are we aware of any other countries that don't share the same philosophy and then there's a follow-on question to that that's the same protocol and then what about the integration of ai and drones now is that coming and if so are we aware are we looking at programs or other countries such as china looking at that absolutely good questions uh yeah the the whole notion of uh does the rest of the world carry the same kind of ethical and uh legal uh issues that we do and the answer is no they do not uh you know the orca is a diesel electric submarine the chinese and the russians are both developing reactor powered submarines so it gives them incredible endurance just like nuclear powered submarines do us navy is not going to allow the u.s government is not going to allow a nuclear reactor to wander around at sea by itself uh just not going to happen so we follow different set of rules uh we absolutely believe you know the the north koreans have a similar ground-based uh system which will fire automatically when certain conditions are met now in all honesty you know if you look at a mine a mine is an autonomous system that operates when certain situations certain sensors detect a set of circumstances it will go off it will detonate so it is a fully autonomous weapons system a lot of contention with using mines and there's a lot of countries that will not allow mines to be able to be used the us has not signed up to all of those anti-mine uh systems so we uh we believe that we we will play with the white hat and that we will keep humans in the loop except of the chance when we can no longer do it and if you find yourself on a ship and you're using the Vulcan say phalanx system and it detects a target coming in and you have three seconds to react you do not have time for the human being to say i don't know if i'm going to engage this or not so in a fully autonomous mode that weapons system will engage as well so it is uh you know and the day is coming when things move even faster and then we're not going to have so is there going to be a human in the loop or is there going to be a human on the loop or is there going to be a human outside the loop don't know how that'll all develop artificial intelligence everybody talks about ai and every aspect and it certainly is a factor you know we use autonomy uh as kind of a a form of artificial intelligence but it's not true ai or you know generalized ai where the machine is able to understand a set of rules and regulations and adjust those rules and regulations based on what it learns so machine learning is a real challenge and if you are trying to control an ai system and you don't know tomorrow what it's going to do because it encountered something new that is a very very tough situation i had an opportunity to go to a ai conference in Rome and we talked about the fact that you know what we need to have ideally is like the air traffic control system in the world is basically uses english as the language the rules and regulations are followed by everyone who's going to fly could we have a similar set of rules for ai could we say if you're going to operate an ai system you have to let us know what that black box does so we can know what's going on and we potentially can control it well i was quickly corrected to say well number one if it's a military system we're not going to let you look in that black box because we don't want the enemy to know what it's going to do if it's a commercial system we're not going to let you look in that black box because that's our intellectual property that's how we're going to make our money so uh you know tremendous tremendous issues going on and i think it was cbs news or abc news one of them did a whole series on ai here in the last couple of weeks and uh it will reach every single aspect of life and someone had said if you want to get rich take any system anything we use today add ai to it and you can get rich so any questions on zoom or are we ready to wrap up here one question we do have one question on zoom john throw it out regarding unmanned surface vessels is there a concern with unmanned surface vessels operating by themselves that they would come under you know attack from uh pirates or other malign actors yeah absolutely and if you look at that seahunter and seahawk uh there is no self defense capability now what could you do you could have an electrified deck that if somebody steps on it there's electricity you could have gas that fills the controls system the engineering system and when you could do a lot of different things but at this point you know the you're counting on international law law the sea to say that's a us owned flagged vessel no one is allowed to touch it and we rely on that in time of war all bets are off and you know you would have to be able to defend that unmanned surface ship and if it's some huge thing that's got 100 or 200 or a thousand missiles you're certainly going to have to operate in a battle group that could protect it but in the near term these things are pretty vulnerable uh i think you may have seen the news the iranians picked up a sail drone that was being used in the med some organization called task force 59 that's done some marvelous work they've had over a hundred unmanned systems operating with many of our allies and whatnot and the iranians came and picked it up and so the us you know gathered people around them armed people around them and whatnot let them let it be known that we wanted our sail drone back and they in fact gave it back to us the chinese at one point picked up one of our our sea gliders and whatnot and ultimately gave it back but you know international law law the sea says you're not supposed to do that stuff so we'll see if that works any other questions yes sir one more sir major drew king i'm a army field artillery officer so obviously the army is very very concerned with counter us specifically we're seeing kind of the lessons learned in Nagorno-Karabakh and now now playing out in ukraine as well so the army is investing in more short-range air defense capability as we kind of tackle that problem said do you see it more as a like a quantity issue because you know like we're we're not going to be able to keep up in terms of just how cheap it is to throw drones out there and that that threat is going to be persistent rush has got one of the best air defense capabilities in the world and and they're getting you know pretty badly beaten in the air just your thoughts on kind of how the army needs to address that problem yeah quantity quantity is going to be important and so we have to get these things to the point where they they you can afford to lose them the thing about the loyal wingman that we talked about you know we think that airplane is going to cost maybe 10 million dollars a copy if you lose it okay it's not good but you know it's not the end of the world and whatnot same thing on these drones i just read something before i came over here this evening said that $20,000 drone that the iranians have provided to the russians can cost $150,200,000 to shoot it down so you're on the losing end of that proposition you know every day it's the same thing of patriot missiles and whatnot you know how many patriot missiles do you use to shoot a quad rotor helicopter it's coming over so i think we're going to need to come up with you know designs that allow us to do electronic jamming to do counter uas to do the ability to do these things in significant numbers and it's just it's going to be the wave of the future and you know the army has is really looking very seriously at this stuff because you know when you're there and your large emplacement and whatnot you're very vulnerable and it used to be you know you needed an air force to attack a ground of formation now you don't you know you know terrorist groups and everybody else have strapped grenades to the underside of commercially available quad rotors and and killed troops with them and whatnot so i know that the the army chief of staff has put that as one of his highest priorities is how do we fight the counter uas how do we build the counter uas capability it's time for me to stop okay thank you very much for your time