 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval sea power 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. Well, good afternoon, and welcome to our eighth issues in national security held in the virtual world. I am Commander Gary Ross, and I'll serve as your host for today's event. To kick us off, as usual, I'd like to turn it over to Radmal Shoshana-Chapiel, president of the Naval War College, to offer her greetings. Radmal? Hello. It is so nice to be here. This is my husband, David Scoville. Most of you know already. And we are fans of and the biggest supporters of these issues in national security lecture series. We are so fortunate to see the roles swap this evening and to see our normal MC become our lecturer and to see Gary Ross step in and take over the MC role. So it's very special for us to hear more from Professor Jackson today. I encourage you to stick around for our family group and David has just a little bit to say about what we can expect just after the lecture. Yeah, I'm glad John's doing the speaking on the drones and not Gary. And Gary's doing the hosting in this case, not John. But other than that, we do have some people joining us for the benefits. Our benefits partners joining us for the family discretion group. A nice group of folks are going to jump in and tell us what they do and what their services provide us with. Most of you are familiar with Eugenie General from... Sorry, just come on. Hello, Eugenie from Humana. And as we're coming to the end of the open enrollment, she's just once again coming back to remind us. We've had her on a few times now. So this is just one more reminder for those people like me who procrastinate and still need to get their health benefits done. And then we also have, following her is Jennifer Hamill, our exceptional family member program representative. And I believe her regional person is with her as well. And lastly, we're going to try to hone in on the Marine Corps and see what they're doing during the Toys for Tots toy drive at the end of this. And we have a couple of gentlemen from the Marine Corps. I think it's a first admiral. I'm sorry, first Sergeant Marshall Cleveland and perhaps Corporal Richard Jones might be on board with us. I've not seen them yet, but we hope to check in on them and see how they're doing. So as usual, we hope to get some questions for each of our benefits partners from our spouses and participate in the dialogue. And of course, tell the guys with the Marine Corps what a great job they're doing. We think it's a wonderful cause. So there you go. That's what we've got. Back over to you, Gary Ross. All right, thank you very much, Admiral and David. For anyone just joining us, I want to reiterate that this series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. Over the past four years, it has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport. We will be offering 10 additional lectures between now and May, 2021, spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement will be detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture will be posted by me or my public affairs office. On Tuesday, 12th January, our first lecture of the new year, we will feature an engaging discussion on national security and space with Professor David Burbach. Each event will consist of three parts, the scholarly speakers' presentation, a question and answer period and then a brief pause before we proceed to the family discussion session. The final segment is a primary interest to family members residing here in Newport and it will feature guest speakers as the Admiral and David have already mentioned. Eugenia from Humano will be speaking, Jennifer will be talking about the exceptional family member program and as David mentioned, First Sergeant Marshall Cleveland will talk to us briefly about choice for thoughts. Very important program for this time of season. And if you didn't see my email earlier today, today's lecture is a special holiday edition. All participants are highly encouraged to show their holiday spirit and wear their favorite holiday sweater. So I hope that you've put it on tonight and are willing to show us. Participants will vote for their favorite sweater and favorite ugly sweater and be nice in the comments section as well. Winners will receive a $10 Starbucks gift card. So votes will be taken in the chat window and you can vote once in each category. If you'd like to participate, please turn on your video camera. Winners will be announced at the next lecture on January 12th, good luck and have fun. Okay, on with the main event, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature at the bottom of your Zoom window and we will address them at the conclusion of the presentation. I am very pleased to introduce our speaker, Professor John Jackson. Professor Jackson will discuss the past, present and future uses of robotic and unmanned systems, both in the military services and in private use. Known by many as the Duke of Drones, he will draw from his recent book, One Nation Under Drones. To address everything, you always wanted to know about drones but we're afraid to ask. John Jackson is a professor in the Naval War College's College of Distance Education. He teaches in the area of National Security Affairs and also serves as the program manager for the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program. And here's a tipper that professional reading program is about to be updated. So you will be seeing more official information about that program coming out of the Pentagon here shortly. A long time proponent of emerging technology, he has co-moderated one of the college's most popular elective courses entitled Unmanned Systems and Conflict in the 21st Century, since the 2009 academic year. In March of 2010, he was called to testify before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security regarding this course and the attitude of military officers towards evolving technology. In October, 2017, he was appointed as the EA Spirit Chair of Robotics and Unmanned Systems. He retired from active duty service in the US Navy at the rank of captain after 27 years of service in the logistics and graduate education fields. He has been listed in Marquis, Boussou in America since 1997. So I am pleased to pass the digital baton to my friend and colleague, Professor John Jackson. Over to you, John. Thank you very much, Gary. I apologize for that lengthy introduction, but then again, I wrote it, so I guess I shouldn't apologize too much. So it's a great pleasure to be here this evening on the other side of the platform and we'll spend a little time talking about my favorite subject, which is robots and unmanned systems. Over my shoulder here, I have Robbie the robot from the famous movie Forbidden Planet, so he will, I'm sure, join in periodically. So let me see if we can share our screen and we'll get started. Okay, are we coming through loud and clear, Gary? Okay. All right, well, what would like to say again? Loud and clear, John. Very good, thank you. Okay, well, what we're gonna do is talk about robots that fly, swim and crawl. It's a subject that you can hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper and not see something written about that subject. Thanks, Dean. Next slide, please. As I said, you can't pick up a magazine or newspaper without finding something to do with drones and the way they're being used, both in military and in civilian applications. Next slide. The question is, is this a new idea? Well, like most things we find in the world, not really. Next slide. This is the Sperry Automatic Airplane, which was developed in 1918. And what's interesting here is this is a unmanned aircraft and the process was to load it full of bombs and explosives, point it in generally towards the target. It would take off, it would count the number of times the propeller goes around and when it got to a certain number, it would cut off the engine and it would dive on the target. Not exactly precision guided munitions, but it was used successfully, not in war because by 1918, we were out of the business but it was the first opportunity. Next slide to have a system. And in these days, it was very difficult to get any airplane in the air for any substantial amount of time and to be able to do it as a robotic aircraft with no one in the cockpit is pretty significant. So we jump ahead to World War II, next session. Next slide. And this is the Radioplane Denny Mike. Reginald Denny, who was a movie star back in that period was also an advocate of radio-controlled aircraft. And he said, you know, I think these things could probably be used for more than just playing around in the backyard. So what normally happens is if you're gonna be a canineer, you're gonna be a naval gunner, you have to practice what you do. So many times they would take a manned airplane, tow a target behind it and ask the canineers to fire at the target, not at the airplane. Didn't always happen that way. So they said, maybe we could do something on a manned basis. And so that's what they did with the Denny Mike. And they built over 7,000 of these during the Second World War and were used as targets and to tow targets and were very, very successful. Next slide. So the company that was building these had a young woman helping to assemble the drones. They sent a picture of her at work. And the photographer said, you know, that's a pretty attractive young woman. I wonder if she could do something other than build drones. Next slide. And that turned out to be Marilyn Monroe. So this is the kind of ultimate bar bet. How did Marilyn Monroe get her start? And the answer is building drones. So next slide. We hear Lady Guy is interested in getting into the drone business. And if that's the case, I think I'm gonna get out of the drone business. So next slide, please. We're gonna take a look at aerial systems, maritime systems and ground systems. And on the aerial systems, we'll start with the largest and then look down towards the smaller. We'll also look at rotary wing and look at swarming systems. So next slide. This is probably the most famous largest drone that's being flown. This is the RQ-4 Global Hawk flown by the US Air Force. It's strictly a surveillance platform. No weapons are carried, but it is able to fly for up to 30 hours at a time. In effect, it could take off from California, fly to Maine, observe what's going on there and then fly back home. So it's been a very, very successful reconnaissance platform. In fact, next slide, the Navy looked and said, we have an awful lot of ocean area that need to surveil. So perhaps we should have a burn of the Global Hawk. And so Navy has developed the Triton, the MQ-4C Triton. It's shown flying over a carrier. It does not land on a carrier, cannot take off from a carrier. It is a shore-based aircraft. Next slide. Give you an idea of the size. This is yours truly standing by one of the Triton vehicles being flown by a VUP-19, which is the unmanned squadron operated in Point Magoo, California, and other locations. And it gives you an idea of how big the systems are. Now, when I'm doing this live, it's pretty obvious, but I want to let you know that I stand about six foot six. So if you'd play the next slide, please. This gives you an idea. Here's me and one of my fellow Naval War College professors. That's Professor Kieran Lannister from Game of Thrones. But next slide. Clearly I'm six foot six. So when you see all these drones, you'll know exactly how big they are. Next slide, please. This is the MQ-4 Reaper. The Air Force started out with the Predator, and this is the larger version of the Reaper. This you've heard an awful lot about, I'm sure. It's able to carry bombs, missiles, hellfire missiles, as you see here, and to do armed reconnaissance. Again, it can fly for up to 24 hours. And the aircraft is operated by pilots operating in the United States. So the aircraft is in the theater of operations, but the pilot is actually somewhere in the United States. Next slide. This is a photo from the Control Center at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. And they have a hole in the ground visiting Navy guys stand in so the Air Force guys look taller. But anyway, this is a full-size version of the Predator Reaper that you can see standing there in the overhead. So next slide, please. The Navy, again, was looking at could we operate unmanned air systems from our carriers? So while we have the Triton, which operates from shore, we've developed a aircraft that could take off and land from an aircraft carrier. Next slide, please. This is an indicator of how big that aircraft is. So you see, it's about an F-18 aircraft size drone. So these things are certainly not small nor are the toys of any sort. Next slide, please. The challenging, one of the more challenging things that naval aviators are asked to do is to do air-to-air refueling. This is a photo of an unmanned aircraft behind taking fuel from a manned tanker in the front. This was part of the developmental program and the Navy was able to demonstrate the ability to do that. And so as always, when you have air-to-air refueling you significantly enhance the distance and endurance that you can operate your aircraft. Next slide. The MQ-25 Alpha is the follow-on to the UCAS, which I previously showed you. This is the program that is going to develop a air-to-air refueler. So when you saw the previous slide, it was an unmanned aircraft taking fuel. This will be an unmanned aircraft which delivers fuel with a launch from the aircraft carrier, go out, refuel the fighters and attack aircraft as they're going out to their targets and as they return back. So this is a program, Boeing is the primary builder of this aircraft. They've flown a prototype and they'll be flying additional ones here in the near future with the hope that we get actual aircraft on the aircraft carriers by about 2024 if we can make that schedule. So next slide, please. This is very briefly, this is the RQ-170 Sentinel and this is a stealth version of a drone. It's slightly smaller than the UCAS and the MQ-25 Alpha Stingray, but this is a aircraft that has flown extensively in high security situations. And if you remember the video of the Ben Laden takedown, this aircraft was flying overhead providing overhead imagery. So that's the RQ-170. Rumor has it that there is a follow-on aircraft that has been developed, but we stay at the unclassified level. But if you have the ability to use a drone, it's stealthy, that's something that could provide great benefit to our services. Next slide. So we'll go down a little bit smaller. This is the U.S. Marine Corps Blackjack. Next slide, please. And this gives you an indication of the size of the aircraft and it will launch from either at sea or it will launch from a shore and will say a surveillance to the marine forces, the ground forces. And as always you're interested in knowing what's on the other side of that hill that you potentially are gonna have to cross. And so these aircraft provide great visibility for those situations. So the Blackjack has been fielded and the Marines are having significant success with that platform. Next slide. We go a little bit smaller. This is the switchblade. And you can see on the right hand side of this photo to the operator who's looking in the control console and is flying this aircraft. It launches from that tube with compressed air and goes up and flies for about 25 minutes at a time. Now what's interesting with the switchblade is that it has a warhead in the front of it. And so it is really a loitering munition and it will fly for about 25 minutes and when you launch it, it is going to detonate. So if you do not locate a target that you desire to strike then you will fly that into a hillside but you don't want that one coming back. It's not something you wanna see coming over the horizon and where it was launched. But switchblade is very successful. Special radio forces, the ground forces. Next slide please. This is a version of the aircraft that's known as Blackwing and it's designed to launch from submarines and it will fly to the surface, take off, fly for about 25 minutes and send badges of what it see. In effect, it gives us a mariner a four to 500 foot tall parachute and visibility of what's going on around the submarine. And there's no attempt to recover that aircraft otherwise they are relatively inexpensive. And so once they've completed their mission they will crash at sea. Next slide. There's a lot of discussion these days of loyal wingman. This is known as an intratable aircraft. And the notion here is what if you had an F-35 fighter or an F-22 fighter, whatever the case might be attack aircraft and you wanted to have additional weapons if you wanted to have a wingman who could fly potentially further inland and strike the target, this would be a way to do it. So significant money is being spent to develop this intratable aircraft. And the notion is that the pilot in control of the manned aircraft would control three, four or five of these flying in formation with them and significantly expand the capabilities of those individual aircraft. Next slide. A fascinating program, this is called Gremlins. And the question here is if you have the ability to carry a number of these aircraft in a cargo aircraft as you can see in the background, launch these UAVs on manned aerial vehicles they will fly out and do the surveillance mission that you've asked them to do. Then they come back and they'll be recovered in flight by the cargo aircraft. You'll bring it back, refuel it and take them back out and use them again. So it's really a remarkable capability and to be able to think that you can launch and then recover aircraft in flight is a significant capability. The design work is underway. The Gremlin aircraft have flown and they've done a tentative lock-ons to recover them and went back into the aircraft. So this will be a great capability once it's developed. Next slide. The issue of swarms is one that's of great concern. A ship can defend itself from incoming aircraft it can defend itself against incoming missiles. Can it defend against tens, dozen, hundreds of swarming UAVs? And that's a significant challenge to be able to do that. You've probably all seen swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles flying over the Olympics, flying over various stadiums and whatnot. So the capability exists to fly large quantities of these aircraft. If they were able to be militarized it could be a significant challenge for us. So we are working hard on how to deal with the swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles. Next slide, please. We'll switch here to rotary wing drones. This is a design that I certainly would not want to take on myself. It looks like a flying egg beater, if you will. But there's so many different approaches to how these rotary wing aircraft might work. And this is just one example of a multi-multi-rotor aircraft. Next slide, please. This is the NQAC fire scout. This is an unmanned helicopter. It's a converted Bell 407 helicopter, which has been converted to fly totally unmanned. There'll be an operator somewhere nearby that's operating this aircraft. It can fly surveillance missions primarily, although efforts have been developed to carry weapons in some circumstances. Next slide, please. And again, this is an indicator of the size of the aircraft. This happens to be a smaller version of the fire scout. And once again, that's the standing ruler, if you will. You'll note I'm wearing a blue shirt. I took a bunch of these photos at a conference I went to. My boss said, oh, we sent you to a five-day conference. You spent one day going around and taking pictures. And you spent the rest of the time on a golf course. Well, number one, I don't golf. And number two, I learned a lesson that says change your shirt between photos or you're going to get yourself in trouble. So next slide, please. So this is the Roya Laki K-MAT. And this is a fascinating aircraft that it weighs 6,000 pounds and it can carry 6,000 pounds. It carries cargo slung beneath the aircraft. Greens took this to Afghanistan and had significant success. The notion is that if you're going to supply an outpost, you'll have to send in trucks with materials. The trucks can be attacked with IEDs and with other weapons. What if you didn't have to send the trucks at all? What if you could take the material and fly it directly into your forward operating base? And that's what the K-MAX was intended to do and did very successfully and moved several million pounds of cargo during this test period. So the question now is, will the Marines, will the Army continue to develop unmanned helicopters? They are doing the design work now and we'll see if they wind up in the inventory in the near future. Next slide. We go down even smaller and this is the Instant Eye Quadrotor. It's got four rotors versus why we say quadrotor. This is known as the quads for squads and the Marines will be equipped, each squad will be equipped with their own drone that they can throw into the air and fly over the hill and see what's going on before they have to deal with it. So you can see the one troop launching the aircraft and the operator there to his right. So huge numbers of these are being procured and again, the Marines have been really on the leading edge of using unmanned systems for a number of different applications. Next slide. This is the Black Hornet, which is a nano drone and this is really the smallest militarized drone that's being used. You can see the size of it there in that troopers fingers. It's designed for surveillance. You throw it in the air. It'll send back a video of what it see for 10 to 12 minutes at a time. You recover it and recharge it and you can launch it again. So a very unique device is being used by U.S. forces, Allied forces and a number of people around the world. So it looks like a toy, but it is not a toy. It does successful work and saves. So next slide. On the civilian side, there's been a lot of talk about using rotary wing craft. This is a design for a unmanned aerial vehicle taxi developed by a Chinese company. And the theory here is that you get into this machine, you touch the iPad to tell it where you wanna go, take me to Tiverton. It takes off no pilot, no parachute, just one terrified passenger. It's a interesting approach and we'll see if that comes to pass. But next slide, please. This is another version. This is called the Volocopter and this is yours truly in Singapore looking at this device. People like Uber and Lyft and others are very, very interested in using unmanned aerial vehicles to carry passengers within the United States and all around the world. So if in fact they can develop the ability to use these, you can see them landing on top of a building in downtown Los Angeles and flying you out to wherever you wanna go, dropping you off and either picks up a passenger and comes back or comes back empty and is ready to fly again. So watch this space. You'll see a lot going on in this area. Next slide. Rotary craft, there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of toys being used. This is a unmanned aircraft that was flown onto the lawn of the White House back in January of 2015. You may have remembered this, it was New Year's Eve and somebody decided to take their Christmas gift and see if they could fly it into the White House. And so it made an awful lot of people nervous because these are very, very difficult to defend against because they're so small, they don't have much of a radar signature. And so there's a lot of question as to how we would deal with such vehicles. So here comes the best photo of the presentation, I believe. Next slide, please. This is what I call my John Wayne picture. This is the Skywall. And so it's a counter unmanned aerial system device and what you do is you look through the viewfinder and you follow the quad rotor, whatever it is, it's coming towards you. When it goes beep, beep, beep, you press the trigger, it launches a projectile which flies out and dispenses a net and catches the drone and brings it back to Earth. It can put out a parachute and float it back gently to Earth or it can just let it crash. Either way, you've got the ability hopefully to go to it and do some forensics and see if in fact you can determine where this aircraft came from or learn how you can prevent them on another occasion from attacking. As you can see, we're on the front lawn in front of the War College and we shot down four or five drones that day and it was a highlight. Next slide. This is another counter UAS. This is called the drone killer. And the issue here is it does not use a kinetic device to knock the drone down. It uses an electronic signal to jam the operator, to jam the drone so that it cannot execute its mission. One of the problems with this approach is it also tends to jam other nearby radios and communication systems and whatnot. So it's usable in a combat environment, not necessarily in a civilian application. The previous one, Skywall that we showed conceivably could be used outside of football arena or anywhere else that the people are gathering and use it in a civilian context but for defense of that facility. Next slide. And this interesting enough is they've actually trained hawks to attack unmanned aerial vehicles and fly up there and knock them out of the sky. When this was first developed, there was concern from the SPCA and others that the hawks were gonna injure their talons. They actually developed little bitty gloves, Kevlar gloves so go up and attack the drones and take them out of the sky. So lots of ideas, anybody that's got a good idea as to how you can counter these things should bring that forward because it's a growth market. Okay, next slide please. So we've talked mostly about aviation so far. Let's talk a little bit about maritime systems. This is a artist conception. It's a illustration of the Sea Hunter which now exists. It is an unmanned surface vehicle, about 131 feet in length and it's designed to either track submarines underwater or to be applied to various other tasks. Sea Hunter some months back sailed from San Diego to Hawaii and back with no one on board. It understands the rules of the road. It will avoid collisions. It's a remarkable platform. The company Lightos is the builder and they have been hired by the US Navy to build a second version of the Sea Hunter and they will both be used in experimental capability to see how the US Navy could use such vehicles on the surface. Next slide. And we don't know. There's a whole family of unmanned surface vehicles in development. This is just artist conceptions of medium unmanned surface vehicles. Next slide. And this is a maritime system. This is a unmanned, I'm having a terrible day. Unmanned undersea vehicle and they come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Next please. So this was a little out of sequence. This is the surface platform and this is a potential uses for an unmanned automated surface vessel. The picture on the bottom could theoretically be a arsenal ship. It could have hundreds of missiles in the ship controlled by a manned vehicle somewhere else. And so it would significantly expand the capabilities of those surface ships to fire missiles on various targets. Next slide. We briefly mentioned unmanned undersea vehicles. This is a very busy slide and just suffice to say at the bottom we talk about small man portable vehicles. We go into the medium size into large and then to extra large vehicles. All of these have capabilities in various applications. Next slide please. Some of them as we indicate are able to be launched by one individual. At the top are a bunch of sea gliders which can actually go out for six to nine months at a time. And basically travel with the currents and send back information on temperature, salinity and all the factors that the submariners are particularly interested in in terms of anti-submarine warfare. And then the bigger ones as you see there are launched by ships and the larger they are, they seem to be more capable and the longer range that they have. Next slide. This is one of the more interesting ones. This is the Echo Voyager which was built by Boeing for the ORCA program. And the notion here is, can you have an unmanned submarine that's large enough to do missions of up to six months at a time to carry weapons, to carry whatever you want in a huge cargo area. The vehicle is 81 feet long. It has a 34 foot payload section. It can drop mines from the bottom. It could launch UAVs or missiles from the top. It could even launch steels, navy seals and shallow water against targets ashore. Next slide. And this is the launch of the vehicle out at the Boeing facility. And as you can see, I'm there. Again, I always like to have a blue shirt. So next slide. There you go. Always like to have my blue shirt wherever I go. Boeing has been contracted to build five of these vehicles and they will be turned over to the Navy within the next 18 to 24 months to start developmental work on exactly how they can be used in various applications. Next slide, please. And this is ashore. This is the size of that payload area. So as you can see, it's really huge and gives you the flexibility to do many different things with this unmanned submarine. Next slide, please. Okay, let's switch away from maritime time to ground and we'll go pretty quickly on that. So we leave some time for questions. Next slide. This is the Pac-Bot, which is a explosive... I am having a terrible day. This is a explosive ordnance disposal robot and it's designed to go after improvised explosive devices, IEDs. These have been used extensively in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. And rather than send a individual and EOD troop with a bomb suit to go down and see what's going on with a pile of trash or whatever target you've seen, we instead send this robot. Next slide. This is a larger version of a armed robot. This is done by a company called Kinetic and it actually is kind of a mini tank and it has a machine gun, it has a laser dazzler, it has a tear gas dispenser, it has a speaker and a microphone system so you can roll this in and basically tell people clear this area or we're gonna engage, engage you. Always a human in the loop, always someone whose finger is on the trigger and controlling when this thing is utilized. The picture on the right there is a former War College president, Admiral Christensen and the day we brought an armed robot to the War College took a little finagling to get it through the gate but it was an interesting demonstration for our students. Next slide please. This is the multi-utility tactical transport or the MUT. Again, it's the experimental program. This is the idea, can you actually take a larger sized weapon and mount it on a vehicle that will travel with the troops and go where they go and assist them in what they're doing. Next slide. This is kind of a family of unmanned ground vehicles. The small one is the throw bot which is designed to be tossed through a window and give you visibility of what's going on inside that building before you have to go in. Again, an IED type robot on the right and then the larger one there is a utility transport approach which people don't realize other than the soldiers on this. This call is that a modern soldiers has to go into battle with more weight on his back than the knight in shining armor did. And so if you could offload that material on the back of the individual soldier could make them more effective fighters. So the notion here is you would have this mechanized mule in effect that would carry some of the hardware some of the ammunition, some of the batteries and other things. And again, travel with the dismounted trooper as he goes into battle. So lots of different designs, some with wheels, some with tracks, but all designed for the same purpose. And that's to aid in the work that the troops have to do. Next slide, please. This is Boston Dynamics. One of the problems is we've all seen so many robots for so many years in the movies just walking around and doing things like human beings. In fact, that's a very difficult task. And Boston Dynamics has done more than most in terms of developing a humanoid shaped robot that can actually walk alongside or actually do work as a human being would do on the right hand side or some of their designs for the mechanized mule that we talked about and then several other designs for humanoid robots. Next slide. This is Atlas and this is another design by Boston Dynamics. If you wanna go on YouTube and look at this it's a fascinating piece of video. The robot is brings this box over the human being takes it and knocks it out of his hand. The robot picks it up. The human being knocks it out of his hand again. The robot looks at him like, I'm gonna remember you and when the robots take over you're the guy we're coming after. So it's a humorous video but it shows the capabilities of the system. Next slide please. This is a naval war college version of Battlebots if you will. This is the class that we teach twice a year on unmanned systems and conflict in the 21st century. And you can see there the large scale armed robot. You can see one that I've got my foot on which is a fascinating ball shaped robot that will swim through the water, swim up on the beach. It has the cameras and sensors on either side and those little glass domes. And it is been used by the Marines and by other security operations to basically put it in a storage area and have it roll around and patrol for whatever kind of problems might pop up. And the two smaller ones as you see there there's another round version of the bigger ball and then two of the ground robots that we talked about previously. Next slide. Been a lot of talk of driverless cars. The photo with the yellow car there is really not what we have in mind where you climb in the back seat and let it cruise. However, Tesla, as you can see there in the red car has developed a driverless car system. It's not a fully driverless car. Tesla says you need to stay engaged. You need to keep your hands on the steering wheel or be ready to grab the steering wheel if necessary if the system does not function properly. There have been a number of people who have been killed in Tesla's. They found in many cases it was a driver error. They in one case they were watching a video and the vehicle crashed into a truck. And so it is not ready for prime time although it is coming. The small white when you see there is something that's more involved with like a taxi that would be used on a college campus and whatnot. But driverless cars are potentially in our future. And I think the day will come when you can get in that car and basically say take me to Chicago and it will be able to do that. But it's not here now and people need to be very careful of driverless systems. They're really driver assist systems that use a type of artificial intelligence to drive the automobile under human supervision. Next slide. Very briefly, since we talked so much about military systems I want to touch a couple of touch on a couple of civilian system. This is called Zipline and it is a drone that's been used extensively. Tens of thousands of flights in Africa, many locations. The infrastructure, the road structures is not as good as it could be in bad weather, they become impassable. So this is a system that will launch a drone, fly it for several hundred miles, get over the target, drop the medicine, whatever might be in the box by parachute. It's recovered by the people on the ground and the drone comes back and is reused. So it is a prime example of drones being used for good. Next slide. This is another design. There have been uses of drones to fly medical equipment, defibrillators, et cetera into locations where they're needed. There have been a number of rescues by drones taking flotation devices off the beach to people who are drowning and saving those lives. Next slide. One of the more interesting applications is precision agriculture. And this is a picture of the drone that's going over a field and using sensors to determine which parts of the field potentially are dry and need irrigation, which are infested with the animal, insects and the drone will then report that back to the farmer. And conceivably the drone could then come back and spray materials onto the crops. We have a great need to enhance the ability of crops to feed the hungry and drones have great potential to help us do that. Next slide. Google, Google Air is looking at ways to be able to deliver packages as is Amazon. Can you actually fly a drone and drop off a package on your backyard, on your front yard? It's been done. They've delivered everything from pizza to burritos to medicine, but the issue is really air traffic control. Do we want hundreds or thousands of these aircraft flying around in areas that are gonna have commercial aircraft in them? So a lot of work being done by the FAA to designate certain altitudes for drone use only. And so we think it will come to pass, but still a ways to go on that as well. Next slide. This I love, this is an Amazon prime air and this is a pretty wild concept for a basic blimp warehouse that would fly over various locations. If you decide you want a t-shirt and you're in that stadium, you get on the phone and you order your item and the drone brings it down and drops it off. Why that's better than going to the store and buying it, I'm not quite sure, but a lot of money is being spent on concepts such as this and the ability to deliver material when and where it's needed in new and innovative ways. So next slide. Okay, so we've talked about robots that fly, those that swim and those that crawl. Next slide. Before I mentioned One Nation Under Drones, this is a picture taken on top of the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and those are indeed my pasty weight feet, but One Nation Under Drones is an interesting book and if you wanna know more about how these systems operate, that's a way you can do it. So next slide, please. All right, Gary, I think we're ready to take any questions anyone might have. Thanks very much. All right, thanks Dean for bringing us back to our Zoom session. So we have one question and I would encourage anybody out there that has like additional questions to, please go ahead and type them in the chat box. The one question that we do have and I also have a couple of other questions as well, are what are your views on the challenge at Skeptic State with the use of drones, which is its vulnerability to jamming, hacking and cyber terrorism? Well, that's three big questions right there. I think we have to understand that these systems are vulnerable to hacking, they are vulnerable to jamming. What you have to do is develop the capability in some cases for these systems to be more autonomous so that you give them a task and you're not required to continually provide input as the drone executes that task. The predator, as you may be aware, are hand flown. There is a pilot in command every second they're in the air. If you jam that signal, the aircraft will return to its home base but you don't accomplish the mission that you want to accomplish. So if you have an autonomous system that you say, okay, here is your task, go and do it, send back information and return, then you've avoided that need for the continuous data link. Hackers absolutely are an issue. You can use various systems to harden your control links so that it's not as easy to hack but you're always gonna be subject to potentially someone who's able to crack in there and do you ill. The whole issue of whether or not we should use these, there's a lot of moral and ethical discussions about, do we wanna use these kind of systems? I think the US Navy, the US government, and others, the Air Force have taken a long, hard look at these and have determined that when properly used, they are systems that provide capabilities that we need to execute our mission and to protect our military personnel. And so I think you will continue to see them more and more sophisticated versions of them doing a wide range of applications. All right, thank you very much. One of my questions is, you've absolutely demonstrated that we are here in the unmanned systems world, right? And so if you could talk just a little bit about, how does your course, and this is kind of like, why would someone wanna take your course in order to stay up on kind of like the latest technology of where DOD is going? And can you talk a little bit about the certificate program as well? So what would students be expected to accomplish in order to get the certificate up as well? Absolutely, the course came about because we saw a need for education on this subject. We like to say that when people come into the military, they understand the level of technology it exists. As they get a bit more senior, they understand evolving technology. In the case of unmanned systems, they've kind of dropped in from the top. People are being asked to use and to manage and to make procurement decisions on systems that they really are not that familiar with. So what we hope our course is able to do is to provide that level of knowledge to our students. And it's very interesting. We have students who are drone pilots who know everything there is to know about flying drones, but they don't know much about the ground systems. We have everyone from the border patrol to a large representation of international officers who take the course because of the application these things have in their nations as well. So it's intended to be a baseline course. We will teach during the 10 weeks, we'll teach a maritime session, an aerial session, a ground session, a legal and ethics session. We'll hear from experts in the field, such as PW Singer who wrote the book Ghost Fleet and Others. And so the intent is they spend 10 weeks really involved in these systems. When we get back to the situation where you're in person, then what we do is we bring those vendors into the college and we allow the students actually hands on with these systems. And Admiral Chatfield has had the opportunity to fly some of these things and use some of these things. So it's a good, great opportunity to get beyond the PowerPoint and actually put hands on with these. The course is useful if you wanna go for the Emerging Military Technology Ethics and Emerging Military Technology Certificate Program because it's one of the courses that really applies to what they're doing. So it is usually a popular course in that it's so timely and so relative to what all of these people are gonna be dealing with when they leave the Naval War College. All right, excellent. Yeah, I've seen that it's been very popular and we've covered your graduations when you're handing out your certificates. We have a couple more questions that have come in in the chat and thanks very much for submitting those questions. One question came in and wanted to talk about, so have countries come to terms with drones and have they established the proper policies to control these drones for commerce and its users? And I guess, I mean, that could be, we could flip that over and talk about the policy for like the military uses, but this was kind of focused on the commerce side of the house. Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely, it varies by country. Obviously in the United States, the FAA has taken a very slow and steady approach toward allowing these systems to operate in the national airspace. And I applaud them for doing that. Some of the vendors say, hey, you're tying our hands, you're not allowing us to move as quickly as we want to, but we all travel in commercial aircraft and we've heard stories of these drones making near approaches to aircraft coming in for landings and whatnot. It is unfortunately only a question of time before one of these things has sucked into the engine of a commercial aircraft with a potential very, very bad effect. So it behooves us to make sure that we move quickly. There are systems in most of the drones that are imported in the United States or are built in the United States, the small commercial drones that will not allow them to fly into controlled airspace. So the drone will actually detect that it's around a airport and it will not fly into that area. So we need to make sure that those systems are in action at all times to protect that. But absolutely, if you have the ability to fly cargo without a pilot in the aircraft, it's just a much more cost effective approach. And there are a number of people, DHL and others who are looking at this to say, can we in fact eliminate the flight crew and can we do this robotically? The fact of the matter is that most of the flying that's done is done robotically, is done automatically. The pilot is in the front of the airplane in case something goes wrong, but the great potential, the most of the flying is done by the systems at this point. The question is, are we willing to take that next step and say, I'm willing to get in an airplane that does not have a human being in the front of it? I'm not quite there yet, but the day may come. And you're exactly right. I mean, we may not realize how much we are already in a drone when we're up in the sky already. Well, thank you very much, Professor Jackson. We certainly appreciate your time and kind of like going through all of the unmanned systems that are currently out there and being developed. And I am particularly interested in the Echo and the unmanned sub. That looks like so cool. And I'm looking forward to seeing that develop further and us taking possession of it and seeing how that fits in the overall operational submarine world. But thanks so much. And so we are going to take a quick pause for about five minutes and then we are going to move into the family discussion group.