 Well good afternoon and welcome everyone it's good to see already some familiar faces to these issues in national securities lectures and also some new faces. Welcome to this seventh session my name is Sergio Gomez I'm an international fellow from the Chilean Navy at the humanitarian response program of the Naval War College and on behalf of Professor Dave Pilati and the organizing team of these lectures I have the honor to introduce this afternoon Professor John Jackson. Professor Jackson has served at the Naval War College for more than 20 years teaching in the areas of national security decision making logistics and unmanned and robotic systems. He holds the Elmer Ambrose Sparey Chair of unmanned and robotic systems. His latest book you can see it there One Nation Under Drones was published by the US Naval Institute in December 2018. Professor Jackson teaches the elective course entitled unmanned systems and conflicts in the 21st century which I had the privilege to be a student a year ago. This course provides students with a broad exposure to current and projected unmanned and robotic systems in use with the Department of Defense and in the civilian sector. As a retired Navy captain he served in supply and logistics assignments both both afloat and short retiring in 1998 after 27 years of service. He is also the program manager for the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Rating Program. Additionally he serves on the president's action group and as chairman of the 9-11 Memorial Committee. He is also an active member of the Association for unmanned vehicle systems international and the consortium for robotics and unmanned system education and research. Today he will present a fascinating and technological lecture named robots and unmanned systems in war. Please join me and welcome Professor John Jackson. It's probably the best introduction ever I'm kind of excited to hear what I'm gonna say. So it is a great pleasure to to have you here this afternoon and what we're gonna do is talk about unmanned systems and robotics. It's a very interesting diverse group here. I've got a very young person there on that side. I've got some old people up there in the corner. Hi Jim. I'm not talking to my wife. I'm talking to my buddy. So anyway we will go through some slides and talk to you about how these systems are really revolutionizing how warfare is going to take place and what's going to happen in the civilian side as well. I hold the EA Sparry chair of unmanned systems as was described and that's Elmer Sparry. Early 1900s inventor of the gyroscope and a lot of other things. He developed one of the first unmanned aircraft and I'll show you a picture of that. But I thought maybe to be a little more distinguished. I grew a mustache. So I did that. My wife said I looked like a porn star. Use car salesman or something. So anyway I shaved the mustache very quickly and whatnot. But you know particularly if you're a army or a marine you're always concerned about what's over the next hill. Navy guys are always interested about what's over the horizon. And nowadays you've got tools that allow you to see what's over the next hill before you have to go over and engage with those targets. It's not a new concept really. This is the Union Balloon Corps Thaddeus Low during the Civil War. They'd put an observer in that balloon and raise him up over the battlefield and see what the enemy formations looked like and whatnot. So not a new task necessarily. But nowadays you can't pick up a newspaper or magazine or go to a bookstore and not find something related to drones and how they're impacting us. Wired for war in the corner up there is PW Singer's book. We use it as the text for the course that I teach. And it's an excellent book about how we got where we are today. And just a lot of other discussions about how these systems are impacting us. So is it a new idea as I said not really. If you look this is the the spary automatic airplane. And this was in the 1917 timeframe. And we barely could get manned aircraft into the air. Well this is an attempt to say let's see if we can take the pilot out of the airplane altogether. So what the spary airplane would do is they load it up with explosives. They point it in the general direction of the target. They would launch it and it would count the number of times the propeller would go around. And when it reached a preset number the engine would stop and it would dive on the target. Not exactly precision guided munitions as we talk about them today. But that was the design and they managed to do it in in a number of tests. And then when radio control came in they were able to do even a better job of directing the motion of the the aircraft. Jumping ahead to World War two we don't have time to go to every single year. But this is the the Denny might. There was a actor named Reginald Denny ask your grandmother. Maybe she will remember Reginald Denny the actor. He was also fascinated by radio controlled aircraft. And so he built some designs that proved to be very successful. If you're an artilleryman if you're firing naval guns whatever the case may be you need to practice. And so the way that normally is done is a manned aircraft will tow a target will tow a sleeve behind it and the people with the guns are told to shoot the target shoot the sleeve don't shoot the airplane. Unfortunately they didn't always work out that way. So Denny said well maybe we could do a remote controlled airplane that would tow that target. And during World War two they built 7000 of these and used them with great success. So they were building these out in California and photographer went out to take a picture of the factory and they found this attractive young woman building drones. And the photographer said you know she is really quite attractive. I wonder if she could do anything else. That's Marilyn Monroe. So that's the ultimate bar bet. If anybody says how did Marilyn Monroe get her start. It was building drones during the Second World War. Now I've been told Lady Gaga is getting in the drone business and if that's true I think I'm getting out of the drone business. Anyway this is the we call the drone survival guide. This is a human being down here. So this gives you an idea of the scale. These are not small aircraft. Some are. Some are quite tiny like the AR pirate parrot and some of the other smaller ones. When you talk about the larger ones like the X 47 B the global Hawk and some of the other international partner aircraft there's an awful lot of these things and they are really really big and very complicated. So we'd like to operate these things. And so breakthroughs in technology have allowed us to do it in a rather unique way. And are there Air Force officers in the audience. Don't correct me. Whatever I said just shake your head and say that's right. So anyway this is what we call remote split operations. And what this allows the the Air Force to do is to have an airplane in the theater. So if it's in Iraq Afghanistan wherever they want to be operating the airplane is here. The ground control system is in the United States. Created Air Force base is kind of the center for RPA remotely piloted aircraft operations. But there's about 15 other bases that actually fly these aircraft. So the operators are here. This is where the launch and recovery element works. You communicate with these through fiber optic cables under the ocean. Then you go up to satellite communications and you go back down to the plane. We'll do it all that takes anywhere from a second and a half to two seconds to make that loop. And if you're at 10,000 feet and it takes you two seconds for the plane to turn or go up or go down that's not really a problem. If you're landing the airplane and something goes wrong and you say pull up and it takes two seconds for the airplane to react that's not good. So the launch and recovery element is actually Air Force personnel in the area of responsibility and what they'll do is they'll get the airplane in the air and then they turn it over to the operators back here state side. And when it comes time to land the airplane again they will take over control line of sight and bring the airplane down. Predators and reapers are the types we predominantly are talking about here and we'll tell you a little bit more about that. So rather unique and the communications allows us to do it. What's the advantage of this operation? Well, you don't have to have nearly as many people in theater. You can have a small group, the launch and recovery element and some maintainers there. You don't have to have the entire system there. These people back here this airplane can fly for 24 hours. So someone will sit down and fly it for eight hours. Somebody will tap him on the shoulder, get up. Someone will sit down for another eight. They'll do this for 24 hours. So you have great flexibility in terms of how you're going to do the operation. So that's the way that the Air Force has developed to use these and it's been very successful process. So let's talk about hardware. This is the Predator and the Reaper which most of us have heard about. The Predators originally were the surveillance aircraft. That's all they could do. They had no weapons aboard. The story is that they were observing one time and they found a tall individual down on the ground with a bunch of people around him and whatnot and they said, I think that's Osama bin Laden. By the time they were able to get another aircraft in with weapons to attack the target they had scattered and so they missed that opportunity. So the Central Intelligence Agency who was operating these things at the time said, can you fire a weapon? Can you fire a missile without ripping the wings off the airplane? Can you drop bombs from this aircraft? And in fact, you can. And so it now becomes both a surveillance and an attack aircraft. And the Air Force has stopped using Predators. They are smaller and not quite as robust. Don't carry as many weapons. Does not have as much range. And so we've gone to an all Reaper Force and you can see here it's firing a Hellfire missile. Built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Sounds like something from the Jetsons if you remember that cartoon series. But General Atomics built these and then said to the Air Force and said to the CIA, are you interested? And of course they decided they were. And in the early days, the system was new and people weren't familiar with it as they got more and more familiar with the operational concepts and whatnot. We developed up to 65 combat air patrols. So that meant that you had a Predator or a Reaper in the air, 65 of them in the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just an incredible capability. And even that did not meet all the demands of the combatant commanders. So very, very interesting program, very successful program. This is the Global Hawk. Global Hawk is strictly a surveillance platform. It has the ability. It's a jet powered aircraft. It can affect in effect fly from California to Maine, spend eight to 10 hours looking at Maine and fly back to California. That's the kind of range that it has. The airplanes are operated out of primarily Beale Air Force Base in Sacramento. And it's strictly an observation platform, but it can stay airborne for at high altitudes for extended periods of time and send back all the information about what the aircraft is seeing. Want to know how big it is? That's how big it is. Now I'm six foot two. So you can use that as a indicator of how nobody's buying that. Okay. I'm not six foot two, but you get the idea it's a pretty big airplane. It's not a model airplane by any stretch of the imagination. So the Navy said, you know, we like that Global Hawk idea. We probably ought to have one that can do open ocean surveillance, a little bit a different mission. And they developed a different aircraft to do that. This is called the Triton. It takes off from ashore. It's not a carrier based aircraft. It operates with the P threes and now the P eight maritime patrol aircraft. And it can, as you indicate, they're go low interrogate these ships decide whether they're friend or foe. And if necessary, vector in some aircraft to take action or vector in surface forces to board the ship and find out what's going on there. So the Triton is currently in operations there have a point has a base in Florida has a base and they're becoming part of the regular platform used for surveillance. But the Navy said, well, can we fly these things from a carrier? And this is what they developed. Northrop Grumman built this aircraft. It's called the UCS D the unmanned combat air systems demonstrator. As you're all aware, we love acronyms. And that's that's the UCS D. And the intent there was to say, could we in fact develop an aircraft that could fly from a carrier deck? That's how big it is. Again, if you'll notice, I'm wearing the same blue shirt I was wearing in the previous picture. I brought these pictures back showed them to my boss and they said, Okay, I sent you to Vegas for a week. You obviously were there one day, took all the pictures in your blue shirt, this blue shirt, by the way. And then you went out and played golf. So we learned at this point, at least change your shirt between each picture that you take and keep the boss off your off your back. But it's a good size airplane. It's an F and 18 size airplane wings fold up. So you can move it around on deck. And as you can see, it had provisions were 4500 pound bomb load. They never flew weapons on it. But it was really a demonstrator. So they got really good at this. This is UCS landing on the the carrier bush. And the first time it made that landing, the chief of naval operations was aboard the Secretary, the Navy was aboard. All the reporters are aboard. It was not a good day to have a crash. And they did not. They landed very successfully. They say this airplane lands perfectly every single time catches a third wire, to the point where it wears the deck out in the place where the wheels are touching down. And doesn't matter whether it's night or it's day, and doesn't matter much about whether the weather is because the robot is perfectly able to bring that airplane on the deck. And here it is doing a catapult launch. So we built two of these as demonstrators. And it was really an effort to say, can we operate them from carrier? Can we operate in the same airspace with manned aircraft? Can we deck handle these things? You know, you always see the yellow shirts on the carrier deck going like this. And the pilot does whatever the guy says. Well, there's no pilot. So you have to come up with a secondary approach to move the airplanes around. And they've done that by having another person on the carrier with a control center on his arm. And when the yellow shirt goes like this, he makes the airplane go where it needs to go. They're looking at alternative ways to do that, you know, we can all play video games where it recognizes the movement of the arms and whatnot. And ultimately, the deck handling will be done kind of automatically. But at this point, they didn't want to take any chances of these things going off the side or anything else. And we even did air to air refueling, one of the most demanding tasks that any pilot has to do. And so this is the UCAS coming up behind a civilian tanker. And sometimes they say passing gas, but I won't say that today. So passes the gas back to the airplane. So that's fixed wing aviation. There's also something called the RQ 170 Sentinel. And you may have seen this in the news. This is a stealthy drone. Those are Iranians in the in the top here. And they captured this aircraft, the RQ 170. They claim they hacked it and brought it down. We think it basically had a communications problem and it glided until it ran out of gas and then landed in the desert. Whenever you see it, the undercarriage is covered up with sheeting and whatnot, because we think it made a mess of the bottom there. But initially, we said not our drone. And then we said, Okay, it's our drone. Can we have it back? Any Iranian said no, we'll share it with our friends and Chinese and other people. And we've since since seen pictures of very similar looking drones. Now, we don't know if they have the capability to do anything other than get in the air and fly like a model airplane. But they they did in fact, capture, capture this thing, but obtained this thing and gathered a little bit of intel from it. Is there an RQ 180 out there somewhere? I don't work in the classified world and I wouldn't tell you if I did. So, you know, we don't believe we've lost a tremendous amount. You've all seen the famous picture when the Osama bin Laden take takedown happened in Abadabad, Pakistan of the control center at the White House with the president, Secretary of Defense, Secretary Clinton, all of them watching something while they were watching feed, video feed coming back from the RQ 170. So it's a very interesting capability and it's stealthy, which is different than the other devices that we're looking at. So we had the the two UCAS demonstrators, they flew very successfully, multiple takeoffs and landings, refuelling, etc. So the question was, what is the next generation of aircraft going to be? So the question was, is it going to be primarily an ISR platform, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance? Is it going to be an attack aircraft where it can actually carry bombs and missiles? The Navy said it's going to be a tanker. It's going to be a refueler. A lot of people shook their heads with that. So why exactly are you doing that? The Navy's position is we need an onboard carrier onboard refueler. Right now we use FNA 18's carrying buddy stores. So we're using a high tech jet to refuel other jets. And it's wearing out the airplanes, just not an effective way to do business. So we put out a call for bids on a new design and Northrop Grumman initially was in the competition and they dropped out. Boeing, Lockheed and General Atomics all competed. And the ultimate winner was Boeing. And they have come forward with the design for what they call the MQ-25 Alpha, which is called the Stingray, which I like because I drive a Stingray. So I think that's kind of cool. This is the aircraft. It's their design. And you notice it's not a stealthy airplane. It's not a flying wing design. It's got a tail. It's got wings and whatnot. But that's what they believe is necessary to do the tanker mission. So you launch a flight of F-35s or whatever other aircraft you're operating, the tanker will go up, tank those planes so they can go in and do their mission, meet them when they come back, tank them off so they can land and whatnot. So it's a legitimate requirement. And Boeing actually has a aircraft that's ready to fly. So sometime later this year you'll see them fly the prototype and then we'll move forward to build four of these aircraft and then we'll take them out to the fleet and see how they operate and how many we ultimately have on each carrier deck is yet to be determined. This is an interesting design. This is called the Tern, tactically exploited reconnaissance node. We love acronyms. Navy's always wanted to get aviation onboard surface ships. You know, can we have aviation capability without having to have an aircraft carrier there? So this is designed to go off a flight deck of a destroyer-sized ship, take off straight up, transition over into horizontal flight, go 600 miles inland, do ISR or do an attack mission, come back, put its nose up and land back down on the carrier deck. Pretty exotic stuff, but it's somewhat similar to what we did back in the late 1960s. This is an aircraft called Pogo and the pilot would climb up into that cockpit with a big ladder and he'd lay on his back and he'd turn the throttles and it would take off straight up, transition over, do its mission. When it came time to land, he's now looking over his shoulder and adjusting the throttles. They did it a few times but they didn't like it. So they said we're going to stop doing this. Bottom line today is that computer can do that extremely well. Knows exactly where the airplane is, where the flight deck is, brings the two of them together. So Tern could very well be the way that we're going to get fixed wing aircraft at sea and it's a DARPA program, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, which is transitioning to the Office of Naval Research. So we'll see if it actually goes forward. Northrop has a contract to build a couple of demonstrator aircraft. So those are kind of big airplanes. We'll talk about some smaller airplanes. This is the Boeing in situ scan eagle and this aircraft will fly for 24 hours on a gallon and a half of gas. Engine is a converted weed wacker engine and it was built originally to fly off tuna boats and look for schools of tuna and say that's where they are and then the tuna fleet would go over and get them out of the water. After 9-11 they said, you know, I think this thing can do a lot more than look for tuna and so what they've done is develop this version which will launch from a destroyer-sized ship. This is your sensor package. It can fly with various sensors, daylight, infrared, etc. and can go out and do missions up to 24 hours at a time. Then it comes back and lands, hooks onto a cable. So, you know, traditional naval aviators or tail hookers, this is kind of a wing hooker and so they hang a line off the side of the ship. GPS knows where that line is and knows where the edge of that wing is and it brings the two of them together and as soon as it touches that wire, they shut off the engine and they winch it back on board. They fuel it up and then they send it back out by catapult to do another mission. If you remember the Marist Calabama, the Captain Phillips piracy operation, Skain Eagles were flying over that the entire time, flying off the USS Bainbridge. So, it's a fascinating aircraft system. The Navy has never bought one. The Navy buys data and a civilian company and sit to, flies the airplanes and provides the data. If there's no data coming in because of weather or mechanical problems, we don't pay for it. If there needs to be an upgrade to the airplane, the company pays for it, we don't pay for those upgrades and they've made on the order of 400 upgrades to that aircraft since the program began. So, it's called contractor-owned contractor operated. It's a very unique approach so you don't have to spend the money to buy the machines you just bring by the product that they produce. There's also a version which is called the Blackjack which the Marines own and operate and this is the Blackjack a little bit bigger size, same blue shirt. So, what the Marines have decided is they are going to fly these themselves and Marines are going to maintain them and whatnot. They will fly from shore and do that same basic mission of what's going on on the other side of that that hill. Have flown successfully and they continue to enhance the the avionics packages and there's been talk of putting weapons on them anytime we build anything the question is can you put weapons on it and this does have the capability to carry some small weapons but at this point it's strictly a surveillance platform. We continue to ramp down on the size of these things you know if you're out in Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever you might be operating and you want to know what's going on you can call the Air Force and you can say I'd like to have a reaper come by do a do a pass and give me data about what I'm going to see. Well there's only so many reapers they may be obligated to another mission and whatnot so the troops like the notion is something it's organic that they have with them that they can take wherever they go and this is the Puma and you basically throw it in the air as you can see here it'll fly for about an hour and send live video back to the operator and then it's designed to land a shore or to land in the water and you can go out with a boat and pick it up. It's built by a company called Arrow Virement. They claim to be the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world because they've made over 7,000 of these kind of aircraft. They're not very big but there's a lot of them. This is another one of their models this is called the Raven and similar not quite as much capability but the same idea throw it in the air and see what you see. I went out to Simi Valley where they build these and they said would you like to go fly one? I said would I like to go fly one? So we went out to this big lettuce patch there in California and there were a couple of guys there and they were flying these things and the Marines and the Navy and the Army require them to test fly 100% of them before they ship them. So I asked these guys I said how often do you do this? They said 11 hours a day seven days a week. We are flying these things. They said you want to fly it? I said sure. Give it a shot. So you uh you've got this uh it's battery powered you've got this propeller in the back and it's I throw this thing and bang it hits right in the dirt okay the wings fall off and the tail falls off well that's the way it's designed that helps absorb the energy so you pick it up you put the wings back on you put the tail back on you throw it back in the air again twice boom right in the ground I said you know I think I'm not going to do this anymore they said well throw it like a football I said do I look like I know how to throw a football? No I don't know how to throw a football but I said throw it like a football and he said Ollie North took six times before he was able to get it up in the air so I got it up on a third shot little applause in the back please thank you thank you anyway so that's that's the Raven and again they've made tens of thousands of these things and the troops really like them because it gives them the ability to have that control of their own destiny if you will this is one another error of my program it's called switchblade and what you can see here is it's launched out of a little tube pneumatic tube throws it into the air the wings and the tail pop out that's why they call it a switchblade and the operator is looking in this device and is controlling where the UAV the unmanned area vehicle is going to go unique thing here is it's got a warhead in it this is the UAV you don't want to come back because when it launches it is going to detonate one way or the other so you're either going to attack the target you want to attack you're going to command detonate it you're going to fly it into a hill side whatever needs to be but it's not designed to come back at all but special operating forces seals and whatnot really are like this it's almost like a backpackable cruise missile if you will and again that gives them the ability to to attack a target it flies for about 45 minutes and and then we'll go down and attack you know a bus a car it's a fairly small warhead it's about a grenade size warhead but it does the job there's another version of this called black wing and it's a surveillance platform and the submarine force launches these from submerged submarines they actually launch them out of the flare tubes alongside the sail of the submarine it flies up and in effect it gives you about a 500 foot tall periscope so you can see what's going on all around you what's on what's on the other side of the the hill what's beyond the horizon the submarine force does not attempt to recover these because you don't want to you know give up your position while you're up there on the surface or something trying to recover them and the cost is such that you don't you don't necessarily need to recover them so this is new and i just recently put this in the package this is an edible drone called pouncer so if you're doing humanitarian assistance and there's a lot of people in that business here have done done a lot of good work you need to get food to the people that need it well you can fly a c130 a c17 you can chuck it out of the back parachute comes down maybe the pallet hit somebody maybe it doesn't or you take the mre easy just throw them out loose and they flutter down wherever they're going to go the notion here is you can fly it directly where you want it and each one of those little square colored areas is a different kind of food so it's compressed rice it's whatever else the the structure is made out of woods you can break it up and use it for firewood and they even got a design that they're working on that would not be made of wood but would be made of another edible uh plant fiber material so they could actually fly it and where it needs to go so interesting concept and uh you know again it's r&d so we haven't gone too far down road down the range with it but the pouncer edible drone so we talked about fixed wing aircraft going from really big to really small let's talk a little bit about rotary wing this is helicopters and this is the mq-8b fire scout built by north grumman and the intention here is to wear on a situation where you have manned helicopters on board a ship the pilots are able to fly a certain number of hours and then they have downtime etc this robot helicopter if you will can get up and cover the period when the manned aircraft is not available uh built by north grumman that's basically the size of the fowler's fire scout and the bigger version is called the mq-8c fire scout this is a bell 407 helicopter which has been converted for robotic use uh there's thousands of bell 407s around the world uh this notion here is it's getting to the point where making it unmanned is is kind of the easy part so you put the electronics in there you put the brains in there you paint the windshield gray and you can launch it and do do good work so fire scout has worked both a shore and a float we lost one during the Libya operation but we didn't lose a pilot nobody was captured nobody was killed and so that's one of the big advantages of these unmanned aircraft is you do not put the pilots at risk this is called the k-max and it was a partnership between Lockheed and common or Cayman aircraft and this is a 6,000 pound airplane that can lift 6,000 pounds the thought was the marine said you know we have a forward operating base and then we've got even further operating bases we need to resupply them so we take a couple of trucks worth of stuff then we take a couple of trucks worth of people to protect the trucks worth of stuff after a while you've got this long train of people going down the road and improvised explosive devices IEDs were the biggest single killer of people in that war they said what if we could skip the roads all together what if we could pick up the material in pallet loads and fly it to where you need it and they were able to do that they moved hundreds of thousands of pounds of food they did a two month program extended to a six month program extended to about a two year program and the guy on the ground just needs to shine a laser on the ground and the robot will drop the material wherever you need it to go so the question now is you know is there money in the budget for both army and air force and marines to use something like this and the U.S. navies even looking at unmanned helicopters for underway replenishment vertical replenishment so interesting piece of gear flying taxis this is not what a flying taxi looks like but it gives you the idea this is what a flying taxi looks like this is a Chinese design for a flying taxi what you do there is you open the door you get in you get on the iPad you say take me to uh Cranston and the airplane takes off no pilot no parachute just one terrified passenger and it will take you where you need to go seems like a pretty exotic concept but there's a lot of work being done Dubai is test flying different configurations of these these devices and Uber and Lyft and whatnot are looking very seriously because they say right now you can call an Uber and it'll come get you why couldn't you call a unmanned helicopter you go to the top of a building that picks you up and takes you where you need to go so we'll see what transpires but a lot of serious money being spent on those so we'll talk about unmanned ground vehicles we're going to talk about things that fly let's talk about ground vehicles this is a German a Nazi unmanned tank drone tank that was used in the Second World War and it actually was not radio control but it would string out a telephone cord basically behind it and they would direct it up into a formation of people up into other tanks and trucks and whatnot it's called Goliath and was used very successfully these are some British soldiers who captured some of these at the end of the war we deal with mostly things like this this is the pack butt and this is an explosive ordnance disposal and EOD device it used to be if you saw a pile of trash or something you didn't know if it was a bomb or it was trash you'd put on the big bomb suit you'd walk over there and you'd investigate what it was this way we send a robot it goes over there it has radios it has a video coming back and you decide whether that's a target or not if so it can leave an explosive charge back away and detonate the charge all without risking anybody's life so the troops love these things and they had robot hospitals in theater in country if you had one that got broken or blew up you could take it back down there this is me at iRobot headquarters in outside Boston this is called Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo was a EOD robot and it was blown up and the troops said can you fix it and they said no we'll have to send it back to iRobot headquarters and whatnot but again nobody had to write a letter to a loved one to say your trooper was killed by a bomb instead you said okay the robot was destroyed but nobody got hurt this is a interesting this is the modular advanced armed robotic system Mars this is almost like a mini tank it has a machine gun has a tear gas dispenser has a laser dazzler it has a microphone and speaker system so you can roll it into an area you can say disperse or we're going to engage the targets etc this is Admiral Christensen the past president of the war college the base security when I call them is that I'm bringing a robot with a machine gun on board to do a demo it took a little gymnastics to get them to approve that notion but we brought it aboard and this has been used operationally in a number of locations more current designs are being evaluated now other countries have used these North Korea DMZ and whatnot has similar devices like this so it's not Robocop but it's you know not a totally different idea this is Mutt and Marine doesn't look like he trusts that thing because he's got a bead on it but this is a device that is designed to carry weapons or maybe carry weight supplies a modern troop going into battle has more weight on his or her back than a knight in shining armor did when they were wearing their armor so you're being asked to carry 100 plus pounds go into a combat zone and if you could find a way to offload some of that ammunition water whatever else you had to carry to one of these unmanned vehicles it might be a very successful idea this is a smaller version this is the dragon runner you see how thrilled she is to have that thing strapped to her back you know they're different sizes little ones big ones bigger ones need vehicles to carry them smaller ones the dismounted troop can use them to do the same kind of EOD investigation it's got manipulators on the end of it so you can move stuff and do what you need to do to prosecute the target this is called a throw bot and you can see the quarter there gives you an idea how big this thing is I've got models of a lot of these over in the future forces gallery if any of the students have the opportunity to go down near the learning center and near the writing center you can see some of these and there's one of these in the display case this is designed that you can throw it off a third floor roof and it won't break what happens is it has altar it has a microphones you can hear what's going on it has light cameras and infrared cameras so you can see what's going on in the location they say what happens is you chuck it in the window and everybody would run because they thought it would blow up so of course the seal said can you make it blow up can you put a little explosive charge on there and the company said well you know I can throw it out the window and it won't break or I can make it blow up but I don't think I can do both so at this point it's a strictly a surveillance and observation machine and police are using it first responders in the United States are using a similar design this is Boston Dynamics Big Dog again I'm talked a little bit about how you could offload some of this weight there are tracked vehicles there's wheeled vehicles and this is one that's designed to walk like a digital electronic mule if you will and carry that equipment Marines have experimented with this quite a bit to see if it might be something they want to invest in this is Atlas so this is a humanoid robot you know we all watch movies and the robots can do everything you know and in reality it's very difficult to get them to walk and do what you want them to do I recommend you go to YouTube and you look up Atlas because there's a great video Atlas picks up that box the guy with a hockey stick knocks it out of his hand the robot goes huh okay picks it up again he knocks it out of his hand again and you can see the robot looking at him like you know when we take over you're the first to go because you made me mad knocking that box out of my hand and whatnot so it's a a lot of work in this area being done and Navy is interested in having a robot firefighter on board a ship you know do you have to send a crew member in there to get the smoke out of the space or to carry the high pressure water into the space and when I could you get a robot and frankly you know you gotta step over those knee knockers and whatnot you gotta be able to move around on board the ship so it's a difficult challenge but they're they're spending a lot of time and effort to be able to make that happen so Naval War College we're gonna talk a little bit about Navy kind of stuff there's unmanned surface vehicles of various sizes and shapes this is the one that's most interesting right now this is called Sea Hunter and this is a 131 foot surface ship designed to go 10,000 miles on a tank of gas it is programmed to understand the rules of the road and avoid collisions etc and it recently transited from San Diego to Hawaii and back with no one aboard Navy just put out a press release that they're investing 400 million dollars to do additional design work on a bigger version than this something that would be 200 to 300 feet long that would be part of what they call the ghost fleet and it would have the ability to travel with full-scale combatants and maybe it's a sensor platform maybe it carries weapons whatever the case may be but this was designed by Lightos and has operated successfully as I indicated for a number of years to the point where the Navy said okay it's no longer going to be an office-enabled research project we're actually going to go operational with this with this vehicle unmanned maritime vehicles sometimes they call them unmanned undersea vehicles autonomous undersea vehicles lots of different names most of them you see are like this this is a REMA 6000 from Hydroy that's at Woods Hole Maritime Oceanographic Institute and these are free-flowing they're not tethered they go where you want them to go and these have been used to identify find the black boxes on airplane crashes find sunken ships from World War II there's been a lot of press about aircraft carriers and other ships being located on the bottom of the ocean and so they'll go down there and they'll identify it and then they'll bring back other unmanned vehicles to do some of the photography work and whatnot so very interesting most of them can be no longer than 22 inches in diameter if you want to be able to launch them out of a submarine because that's the extent of your submarine tube so if you want something bigger than that you've got to use some delivery method other than delivering them from a submarine and this is the Echo Voyager this is it also is known as Orca and Boeing just got a contract this thing is 81 feet long about 8 feet in diameter and it dives to 11,000 feet not 1100 but 11,000 feet depth of water it is diesel electric so it operates on battery for about 48 hours and it comes to the surface puts up a snorkel runs its diesel generator recharges its battery and goes back down and does other things so what could it do you know it has a cargo bay that's about as big as a con-exbox you could drop mines out of the bottom you could launch missiles or UAVs from the top you could even have seals swim from it not from 11,000 feet but in shallow water and whatnot and so this is the rollout of the Echo Voyager and that's me in the middle there and since I didn't have a blue shirt I put one on for this presentation might as well beat that dead horse one more time so what a lot of people talk about is these drones in America's airspace these are the ones that are really scare a lot of people there's tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of these small unmanned aerial vehicle quad rotors this is some of the basic designs I've got down in the future forces gallery you'll find this parrot on the bottom Amazon has spent a lot of money to be able to deliver something to your house within 30 minutes of you ordering it the question is do we really want thousands of these things flying around back and forth dropping off our stuff and porch pirates steal our stuff now they could just follow the drone and maybe grab it when it lands but a lot of money a lot of money going into this design this is January 2015 you may have remembered this but somebody got a little liquored up on New Year's Eve and said I wonder if I can fly my drone on the White House lawn and they did they did and got a lot of people excited because it's very difficult to combat to counter UAS work the army and others have said this is the single greatest threat to our forces because you can go and buy one of these things for a couple thousand bucks put a grenade under it and ISIS and other people have attacked U.S. forces using these basic drones so it is a concern so for counter UAS work you say you know how could we potentially stop this you're ready for the best picture of the show there it is this is what I call my John Wayne show Valerie made me let me put it in the Christmas card this year so what this is is this is a way to knock down a drone and we went out on the lawn in front of the War College and we shot down four drones and what it does is it has a compressed gas tank it has a sight so you follow the drone when it comes in and it goes beep beep beep beep you press the button it launches a projectile when the projectile gets near the target it splits open throws out a net grabs the drone and brings it down with a parachute so nobody gets hit in the head you can go find the drone and maybe figure out where it came from there's other versions drone killer and others which use electronics to jam the signal but there's a problem a lot of times when you're jamming that signal you're jamming your own signals and you're jamming television radio and everything else so the ability to use some kind of a kinetic device to actually launch that projectile capture it and bring it back down it's pretty pretty remarkable they've even trained hawks to attack drones and the ASPCA said well you know you're gonna hurt their little claws when they get caught in the rotor so they made little Kevlar gloves to go on their on their claws but it works you know it is it is a way to to stop these things so number of different systems as I said some are permanently mounted on buildings this one is a shoulder mounted it's been used to support Air Force One and other operations so pretty interesting the other one is driverless cars and you know this is not what we're talking about you're not supposed to get in the back seat and let it go Tesla does have driverless cars and other companies are developing driverless cars Tesla says you know keep your hand on the wheel you know it'll drive for you but you need to be ready to take over any time something comes up you may remember a couple of years ago there was a someone killed in in an accident in a Tesla because a truck cut in front of them and the sensor couldn't tell the difference between this whitish blue truck and the whitish blue sky and the individual crashed right into it he was watching a Harry Potter video when it happened and so clearly he was trusting the system to do more than the system is intended to do at this point a few more years you know I think you will find that they're pretty much able to do their driving by themselves and again Uber and Lyft and those guys are really looking for ways to use automated autonomous cars because paying that individual to drive that vehicle is is an expensive proposition so I'm not a fan of driverless cars like I said and honestly I've got my core event anyway there are issues for consideration and I'll have a few minutes for questions here we talk about is it legal to do to use these systems is it ethical if it is legal is it something you should do unintended consequences are we encouraging more terrorists than we are taking out and they're being used against American forces how do we stop that and then there's domestic issues invasion of privacy you know I've got a drone I can fly over in my neighbor's backyard and take pictures of everything that's going on over there probably not what we want to do and air space deconfliction people have all said it's only a question of time before a drone flies into a commercial aircraft and causes a disaster I wrote an op-ed piece it was published by United Press International on the 5th of February that says we shouldn't just say it's going to happen we ought to try and stop it three pieces we need to educate people how stupid it is to fly anywhere near aircraft number two systems like DJI which is a Chinese company they build into their system what they call geo fencing and it you cannot fly in a restricted air space it just will not let you do that so we need to make sure that any of these systems that are important in the United States have that geo fencing capability and the third piece we talked about was malicious you know people who are doing this on purpose and that's where you need something like sky wall something like eagle something like whatever else to to patrol the airports and when something comes up they're able to respond to it so one nation under drones got a flag my book this is the book published in December I've got a little info card there if anybody's interested in ordering it it's 13 chapters I wrote two of them and I've got 11 other chapter authors who talk about legal aspects use in civilian industry et cetera and whatnot so we use that in my class funny how that worked how did that book get in my class I don't know anyway so that's it at the moment are there any questions have any questions in the back thank you sir this is really fascinating my husband works for national park service and they have problems with drones all the time coming into restricted airspace and flying but then the park service turned around and used a drone for search and rescue how do you start going about making the determination what they can be used for how do you put limits on that yeah it's a douled sword you know there have been a lot of problems with forest fires that people are flying drones to take pictures and they've had to ground the manned helicopters out of fear that they might collide with the drones police have used these for a number of instances you know lost people they've helped find lost kids and that kind of thing so it's a trade-off between you know what is the situation you're dealing with the FAA has established you know you can't fly near airports or higher than 400 feet within that area and you're doing it for a good cause you're pretty much okay but it is something that you know people are wrestling with because every day somebody says I've got a new application precision agriculture is one that has great promise you know people can fly drones over their crops see okay this one's infected with bugs this one needs water etc and then you can adjust what you're doing in your crops so generate create more food to produce more food and whatnot so there's lots of positive applications but there's also areas of concern where you've got to make sure these things are not out there causing problems other questions okay this is the air force this could be this could be this could be dangerous sir kevin james air force thank you very much could you talk a little bit about the strategic implications for the u.s. military in terms of changing the character of our forces incorporating more drones going away from man systems and some of the risks of that relative to our adversaries with this higher dependence on technology absolutely a great question you know they drones are particularly good to do in the dull dirty and dangerous work so if there's jobs that are dull looking at water ocean areas for hours on end you know that's a dull so maybe we get a robot or a drone to do that is it dangerous so you're flying an area with a lot of missiles and anti-aircraft capability that's dangerous dull dirty dirty you know radiograph radiographic issues we used a number of drones in the Fukushima cleanup in Japan because we didn't want to put human beings in that area so what does it mean for the the military I think it's an inevitable move toward using more and more of these systems autonomous systems or if you look at something like Reaper it's not an autonomous system it's it's flown it's just the pilot is not in the machine the pilot is elsewhere so I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to move forward with this approach and say where can these things do the best job you know the loyal wingman design is is getting a lot of play right now and that notion is maybe you have an F-35 with a man pilot in it and he has four or five robot airplanes on either side of them and it's carrying bombs and missiles it's the bomb truck etc and when it comes time to attack the target maybe the man pilot sends his robot in to strike the target there's a design for something called the Gremlin which is designed to fall out of the back of a C-130 or a C-17 small airplane go out and do its mission come back and be captured in mid-air captured in flight and brought back into the airplane kind of like they do air-to-air refueling you know you hook up with the with the refueling hose in this case you hook up with something it brings you back in there so you know robots are not going to replace human beings it's going to be manned unmanned teaming it's going to take place and we're going to hopefully make soldiers on the ground more efficient and more safe people in the air the same kind of thing we're going to be able to go against targets we might not want to go against otherwise by sending in large numbers swarming is a big issue you know from the enemy's perspective on ours we can defend an aircraft carry if you get 8 or 10 targets coming in we can probably stop those targets with Vulcan, Phalanx, guns and other systems if you had 300 or 500 of these small UAVs swarming against your ship could you stop them all and they don't have to sink the ship they just need to knock out the communications and whatnot and get a mission kill so that's a big concern and Navy's looking a lot at that to say you know how do we protect the ships that are out there doing their job from something like a swarm attack so it's inevitable it's the wave of the future we need a lot of smart people in this business we need a lot of youngsters who do math and science and the STEM programs and whatnot because these are high tech systems and that's what you need to be equipped with to do that kind of work so it's ma'am yeah that'll work out for me we'll get a robot next time what are the implications for the education and training that will be required to follow the shift in technology yeah I think it's you know right now we have seen Air Force is now training more RPA remotely piloted aircraft pilots than they are manned pilots so that's a whole different training pipeline what we need our recruits to be able to do is step into that operation and there's a lot of discussion there's some articles called blue hair in the gray zone and whatnot and says you know maybe if you've got somebody that's really good at doing this unmanned operation do we care if he or she has purple hair and an earring and maybe weighs a little more than they need to you know should we recruit different kinds of people to do the kind of jobs we need because we're not going to be able to get everybody we need if we continue to recruit just the kind of people we do today hard sell you know somebody says hey you're in the military you're going to be squared away you're going to wear a uniform and whatnot if you're going to be different than that I guess we'll hire you as a civilian but we don't want to put you in uniform but we may have to break that paradigm so you know we hope that you know high schools and through programs like the lego league and others that develop expertise in robotics first robotics and others that people you know students get excited about this stuff the first robotics competition Dean Caiman established and he looked at high school and said why is it the only cool people are the football players again I don't know how to throw a football the football players and the athletes and the cheerleaders why don't we respect the nerds who are smart good at math and those kind of things and what they have been able to do with the robot clubs that have been established is schools actually have cheerleaders for the robots they go to national competitions and it's really taking a lot of people and said you know I do see success in this different path than what we normally do so I think more of that is needed other questions are they robotic cheerleaders just kidding no my question is how easy are these drones to hack because now anything can get hacked so if we're sending a drone overseas you know you're explaining how it goes fiber optics and they go up to satellite and then back to another controller before they land and everything like that I imagine there must be measures not to not hack them but how easy is it to hack these drones you had to ask that question didn't you yeah that's that's one of the tough areas and you know in the reaper world as we said they if they lose that link the drone is smart enough to turn around and come back to where originally took off and land itself if it has the right location and the right conditions and whatnot the enemy if they can jam that signal that's going to knock them out completely so you know as we're going forward and what we've learned over the past 10 or 15 years of war is you know we owned the sky nobody was really hacking us you know we were able to fly when we wanted to fly without any problems you can encrypt data you can protect that data it's expensive and difficult to do but you can and if we find a situation where we're going against a sophisticated enemy China, Russia, Korea or whoever the current RPAs are not gonna not gonna make it so that's going to have to be an autonomous aircraft that is programmed in advance that says take off find your target execute your mission return if you can without any mid-course guidance without any communications so it's something that everybody's aware of and the scientist are taking a good hard look at how would you do this in a environment where perhaps there's no GPS satellites either you know in an ugly war situation there's no GPS nobody knows exactly where they are on the face of the earth certainly the unmanned aircraft won't do it so it's a it's a challenge it's all all I can say I guess other questions yes Jim ask me at the O Club okay any other questions okay John okay how long is it gonna be before we won't have naval aviators naval aviators man man of any brand yeah I don't think it's it's ever gonna happen I think it's always gonna be a team kind of operation you know nobody has really ever said that these things are gonna do air-to-air dogfights it's just not in the design it's not not being seen there's a lot of things that a man man can do in the aircraft that these guys simply can't do you can't program every possible you know action that might need to be taken and whatnot so I don't think we'll ever get in the world unless you're talking Star Wars way down range and whatnot so that's why I find I was called down to testify on Capitol Hill one time and the question they ask is you know how do your students at the War College feel about these things are they afraid it's gonna put them out of business or whatever else and I think all of us realize we're in a transitional phase and in the 20 years of a career we may see a change in the way these things are operated but nobody's going to get fired because a robot has come along and taken your job so I don't think it's something we need to fear it's just something we need to be prepared to reach out and use like any other tool and you know if that's the best way to do a job we ought to use that you know if you don't want to say we had the ability to take out that target using an unmanned aircraft we chose not to do so we sent in a manned aircraft and they got shot down you don't want that to happen so you need to be you know very succinct about what context you're going to use these things in and how they're going to do the job that needs to be done anything else I think we're about at closing time so thank you it's a pleasure