WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio: “Humans today are still more capable than machines, but by 2030 that is absolutely not going to be the case anymore,” said Dr. Werner Dahm, the Air Force Chief Scientist, in describing one of the conclusions he reached during the Air Force’s first in-depth look at future technology in more than a decade.
The man charged with providing independent, objective scientific advice to Air Force leadership was at the Air Force Association Technology Symposium Aug. 26 to make a presentation titled ‘Technology Horizons: A Vision for Air Force Science & Technology During 2010-2030.’
The report gives an informed analysis of how the world of science and technology will develop during the next 20 years and indentifies candidate technologies that offer the greatest potential return for limited investment dollars.
“I would argue that the Air Force, perhaps more than any other service, is absolutely critically dependant on science and technology and, as a consequence, the broad set of debates that occur to help us make the best investment choices and the best programming decisions to advance those technologies is also absolutely critical,” Dr. Dahm said.
More than a year in the making, this report follows in the legacy of Dr. Theodore Von Karman’s 1945 report to Gen. Hap Arnold, ‘Toward New Horizons: Science, the Key to Air Supremacy,’ that laid the foundation for the post-World War II Air Force. It has been 15 years since the Air Force last made a concerted effort to chart the future of science and technology.
One of the initial challenges, Dr. Dahm said, was that to field a desired capability in 2030, the programming and acquisition processes must start years earlier. The report identifies new technologies that could be developed during the first 10 year step, and then from those technologies, asks what new capabilities could be fielded in the second 10 year step.
“Out of that set of possible capabilities, we have to hold those up against the likely strategic environment the Air Force is going to be facing in 2030, as well as the fiscal constraints the Air Force is going to be operating under,” Dr. Dahm said.
Choosing from that list of possible capabilities and targeting technology investment dollars is the true challenge.
“The effort here is to take a visionary, but credible, approach to identifying those science and technology areas that are disproportionately valuable,” Dr. Dahm said. “If those 30 (potential capability areas) actually span a broad enough set across the service core functions, then we could be fairly sure that the technology areas that underlay those 30 (potential capability areas) are good candidates for investment.”
From this process, Dr. Dahm briefly covered three of the report’s major findings.
The first, he cited, is a greater use of highly adaptable, autonomous systems to achieve both improved capability and the benefit of reducing manpower costs.
“We are not talking about simply more or better remotely piloted aircraft, although that is certainly part of it, but we are talking autonomy writ large,” he said.
However, the influx of autonomy will bring along the challenge of proving that autonomous systems are not only effective in the lab but will perform the way they should under every imaginable scenario.
The second finding Dr. Dahm presented spoke to the rapid evolution of technology to a state beyond natural human capacities.
“In our lifetimes, we are going to cross through that point where the human will increasingly become the weakest link, and so we will move to having the human be augmented in some ways with technology,” he said.
It is not just a matter of building better interfaces between humans and machines, he said. In fact by 2030, man and machine will be coupled in such a way where it is difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends.
Lastly, Dr. Dahm stated the Air Force must focus a greater fraction of science and technology investments on research to support increased freedom of operations in contested environments.
“Today, we generally operate in permissive environments, but that will not be the case in 2030,” he said. “Technologies that can support the Air Force’s ability to operate in those kinds of contested environments can be absolutely critical.”
The types of environments he cited warranting particular emphasis in terms of research are resilient cyber domains, operations in GPS-denied environments and electromagnetic spectrum warfare.
The first volume of the Technology Horizons report has been cleared for public release.
“This is meant to have an enduring value to the Air Force,” Dr. Dahm said in closing. “This report has, I believe, a balanced, very credible science and technology vision for the Air Force. It is not just about a bunch of technologies that can be opportunities. It goes much, much further to map out those opportunities to the strategic and fiscal environment we will face.”
