User:Ancheta Wis/sandboxD

D R A F T part D Future directions (long term i.e. by 2049)

United States Army Futures Command (AFC) is a United States Army command aimed at modernizing the Army. It currently focuses on six priorities: 1— long-range precision fires, 2— next-generation combat vehicle, 3— future vertical lift platforms, 4— a mobile & expeditionary Army network,  5— air & missile defense capabilities,  and 6— soldier lethality. AFC's cross-functional teams (CFTs) are Futures Command's vehicle for sustainable reform of the acquisition process for the future.

Futures Command (AFC) was established in 2018 as a peer of FORSCOM, TRADOC, and Army Materiel Command (AMC), the other Army commands (ACOMs—providing forces, training and doctrine, and materiel respectively). The other Army commands focus on their readiness to "Fight tonight" when called upon by the nation. In contrast, AFC is focused on future readiness for competition with near-peers, who have updated their capabilities.

AFC declared its Full Operational Capability (FOC) in July 2019, after an initial one-year period. The FY2020 budget allocated $30 billion for the top six modernization priorities over the next five years. The $30 billion came from $8 billion in cost avoidance and $22 billion in terminations. Over 30 projects  are envisioned to become the materiel basis needed for overmatching any potential competitors in the continuum of conflict over the next ten years,   in  Multi-domain operations (MDO).

Transition to multi-domain operations (MDO)
"We're moving out and there's no turning back. We've shown the will to act over the last year, and now we have to show the will to follow through."

- Then-Under Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy

According to Secretary McCarthy, there will be three elements in Futures Command: Then-Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper emphasized that the 2018 administrative infrastructure for the Futures and Concepts Center (formerly ARCIC) and United States Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) (formerly RDECOM) remains in place at their existing locations. What has changed or will change is the layers of command (operational control, or OPCON) needed to make a decision.
 * 1) Futures and Concepts: assess gaps (needs versus opportunities, given a threat). Concepts for realizable future systems (with readily harvestable content)  will flow into TRADOC doctrine, manuals, and training programs.
 * 2) Combat Development: stabilized concepts.  Balance the current state of technology and the cash-flow requirements of the defense contractors providing the technology, that they become deliverable experiments, demonstrations, and prototypes, in an iterative process of acquisition. (See )
 * 3) Combat Systems: experiments, demonstrations, and prototypes. Transition to the acquisition, production, and sustainment programs of AMC.

"You've got to remain open to change, you've got to remain flexible, you've [got] to remain accessible. That is the purpose of this command."

- Secretary Esper

Cross-Functional Teams (CFTs)
Under Secretary McCarthy characterized a Cross-Functional Team (CFT) as a team of teams, led by a requirements leader, program manager, sustainer and tester. Each CFT must strike a balance for itself amid constraints: the realms of requirements, acquisition, science and technology, test, resourcing, costing, and sustainment. A balance is needed in order for a CFT in order to produce a realizable concept before a competitor achieves it.

CFTs for materiel and capabilities were first structured in a task force, in order to de-layer the Army Commands. Each CFT addresses a capability gap, which the Army must now match for its future: there can be a Capability Development Integration Directorate (CDID), for each CFT. The capabilities as prioritized by the Chief of Staff, will use Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the realms of requirements, acquisition, science and technology, test, resourcing, costing, and sustainment, using CFTs for: Modernization reform is the priority for AFC, in order to achieve readiness for the future.
 * 1) Improved long-range precision fires (artillery):—(Fort Sill, Oklahoma) Lead: BG John Rafferty  ... PEO Ammunition (AMMO)
 * 2) Next-generation combat vehicle—(Detroit Arsenal, Warren, Michigan) Lead:  BG Ross Coffman ... PEO Ground Combat Systems (GCS)
 * 3) Vertical lift platforms—(Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama) Lead: BG Wally Rugen ... PEO Aviation (AVN)
 * 4) Mobile and expeditionary (usable in ground combat) communications network (Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland)
 * 5) Network Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence— Lead: MG Pete Gallagher ... PEO Command Control Communications Tactical (C3T)
 * 6) Assured Position Navigation and Timing— (Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama) Lead: William B. Nelson, SES
 * 7) Air and missile defense—(Fort Sill, Oklahoma) Lead: BG Brian Gibson, ... PEO Missiles and Space (M&S)
 * 8) Soldier lethality
 * 9) Soldier Lethality—(Fort Benning, Georgia) Lead: BG David M. Hodne ... PEO Soldier
 * 10) Synthetic Training Environment —(Orlando, Florida) Lead: MG Maria Gervais ... PEO Simulation, Training, & Instrumentation (STRI)
 * Above, 'dotted line' relationship (i.e., coordination) is denoted by a ' ... ' Initially, the CFTs were placed as needed; eventually they might each co-locate at a Center of Excellence (CoE) listed below. For example, the Aviation CoE at Fort Rucker, in coordination with the Aviation Program Executive Officer (PEO),  also contains the Vertical Lift CFT and the Aviation CDID.

The CFTs will be involved in all three of AFC's elements: Futures and concepts, Combat development, and Combat systems. "We were never above probably a total of eight people" — BG Wally Rugen, Aviation CFT. Four of the eight CFT leads have now shifted from dual-hat jobs to full-time status. Each CFT lead is mentored by a 4-star general.

Although AFC and the CFTs are a top priority of the Department of the Army, as AFC and the CFTs are expected to unify control of the $30 billion-dollar modernization budget, "The new command will not tolerate a zero-defects mentality. 'But if you fail, we'd like you to fail early and fail cheap,' because progress and success often builds on failure." —Ryan McCarthy: Holland notes that prototyping applies to the conceptual realm ('harvestable content') as much as prototyping applies to the hardware realm.

A 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report cautions that lessons learned from the CFT pilot are yet to be applied; Holland notes that this organizational critique applies to prototyping hardware, a different realm than concept refinement ("scientific research is a fundamentally different activity than technology development").

Joint collaboration on modernization
The Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy meet regularly to take advantage of overlap in their programs:
 * Hypersonics — The US Army (August 2018) has no tested countermeasure for intercepting maneuverable hypersonic weapons platforms,In, for example Waverider hypersonic weapons delivery, China has flown a Mach 5.5 vehicle for 400 seconds, at 30 km altitude, demonstrating large-angle deviations from a ballistic trajectory, as well as recovery of the payload. See
 * 3 August 2018 China tests hypersonic aircraft Starry Sky-2 --Xingkong-2 (Starry-sky-2) first flight
 * China successfully tests first hypersonic aircraft that can .. Youtube clip XingKong-2 hypersonic aircraft (Starry Sky-2)
 * USSTRATCOM John Hyten statement 05:03, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
 * (15 Jun 2018) Lockheed Martin Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) Missile for US Air Force
 * Chris Martin (17 Dec 2019) Lockheed awards $81.5M contract for hypersonic missile motor to Rocketdyne for HCSW $81.5M, ARRW
 * NPR (23 October 2018) Nations Rush Ahead With Hypersonic Weapons Amid Arms Race Fear
 * DOV S. ZAKHEIM, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR (08/26/19) Putin built a hypersonic arsenal, while the Pentagon slept
 * Colin Clark (19 June 2019) Raytheon, Northrop Will ‘Soon’ Fly Hypersonic Cruise Missile Paris Air Show, new additive-process materials to build the combustor of a scramjet; potential integration among members of an intercommunicating swarm of hypersonics systems

Current test targets, such as Zombie Pathfinder are not hypersonic. Rand Corporation (28 September 2017) Hypersonic Missile Nonproliferation estimates there is less than a decade to prevent Hypersonic Missile proliferation. and in this case the problem is being addressed in a joint program of the entire Department of Defense. The Army is participating in a joint program with the Navy and Air Force, to develop a hypersonic glide body. The Long range precision fires (LRPF) CFT is supporting Space and Missile Defense Command's pursuit of hypersonics. Joint programs in hypersonics are informed by Army work; however, at the strategic level, the bulk of the hypersonics work remains at the Joint level. Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF) is an Army priority, and also a DoD joint effort. The Army and Navy's Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) had a successful test of a prototype in March 2020. A wind tunnel for testing hypersonic vehicles will be built in Texas (2019). The Army's Land-based Hypersonic Missile "is intended to have a range of 1,400 miles". By adding rocket propulsion to a shell or glide body, the joint effort shaved five years off the likely fielding time for hypersonic weapon systems. Countermeasures against hypersonics will require sensor data fusion: both radar and infrared sensor tracking data will be required to capture the signature of a hypersonic vehicle in the atmosphere.
 * Multi-Domain Operations (MDO)   — Joint planning and operations are also part of the impending DoD emphasis on multi-domain operations.     Multi-domain battalions, first stood up in 2019, comprise a single unit for air, land, space,   — and cyber  domains.   A hypersonics-based battery similar to a THAAD battery is under consideration for this type of battalion,  denoted a strategic fires battalion.
 * The ability to punch-through any standoff defense of a near-peer competitor is the goal which Futures Command is seeking.  For example, the combination of F-35-based targeting coordinates, Long range precision fires, and Low-earth-orbit satellite capability overmatches the competition, according to Lt. Gen. Wesley. Multi Domain Operations,space.png.]]      Critical decisions to meet this goal will be decided by data from the results of the Army's ongoing tests of the prototypes under development.
 * For example, in Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF), the director of the LRPF CFT envisions one application as an anti-access/area denial (A2AD) probe; this spares resources from the other services; by firing a munition with a thousand-mile range at an adversary, LRPF would force an adversary to respond, which exposes the locations of its countermeasures, and might even expose the location of an adversary force's headquarters. In that situation an adversary's headquarters would not survive for long, and the adversary's forces would be subject to defeat in detail. But LRPF is only one part of the strategy of overmatch by a Combatant commander.

Partners
AFC is actively seeking partners outside the gates of a military reservation, including research funding to over 300 colleges and universities. "We will come to you. You don't have to come to us. — General Mike Murray, 24 August 2018" Multiple incubator tech hubs are available in Austin, especially Capital Factory, with offices of Defense Innovation Unit (DIUx) and AFWERX (USAF tech hub). Gen. Murray will stand up an Army Applications Lab there to accelerate acquisition and deployment of materiel to the Soldiers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one acceleration technique; Murray will hire a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for AFC. Gen. Murray, in seeking to globalize AFC, has embedded U.S. military allies into some of the CFTs.
 * Artificial Intelligence (AI) Modernization — The Secretary of the Army has directed the establishment of an Army AI Task Force (A-AI TF) to support the DoD Joint AI center. The execution order will be drafted and staffed by Futures Command:
 * Army AI task force (its relationship with the CFTs is cross-cutting, in the same sense as the Assured Position, Navigation, Timing (A-PNT) CFT and the Synthetic Training Environment (STE) CFT are also cross-cutting) will use the resources of the Army to establish scalable machine learning projects at Carnegie Mellon University
 * the Army CIO/G-6 will create an Identity, Credential, and Access Management system to efficiently issue and verify credentials to non-person entities (AI agents and machines)
 * DCS G-2 will coordinate with CG AFC, and director of A-AI TF, to provide intelligence for Long-Range Precision Fires
 * CG AMC will provide functional expertise and systems for maintenance of materiel with AI
 * AFC and A-AI TF will establish an AI test bed for experimentation, training, deployment, and testing of machine learning capabilities and workflows. Funding will be assured for the Fiscal Year 2019.
 * A Global Network to counter cyber attacks, much like Five Eyes, is the recommendation for multi-domain operations (MDO), which is unified to present a synoptic view of any cyber operation to all the combatant commands simultaneously.
 * Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AlphaDogfight: Trials of eight AI teams, which began learning how to fly in September 2019. In August 2020 the eight AI agents faced each other, in a series of simulated fights. The simulations included the g-forces which limit a human (accelerations greater than 9 g's will cause most forward-facing human pilots to black out— AI agents are not subject to these human constraints). The champion AI agent eventually met a human F-16 fighter pilot in simulated combat on 20 August 2020. On 20 August 2020, the champion AI agent consistently defeated a human F-16 pilot in a series of dogfights.
 * DoD's Joint AI Center (JAIC) is providing a Joint Common Foundation, a cloud-based AI toolkit for any DoD organization (viz., Futures Command) to use. JAIC is seeking to curate the flood of data at DoD to allow systematic, reliable datasets which are usable for machine learning.
 * Adaptive Distributed Allocation of Probabilistic Tasks (ADAPT) is a DARPA model for testing AI-to-human communication in a toy environment.

Futures Command will stand up Army Software Factory in August 2021, to immerse Soldiers and Army civilians of all ranks in modern software development, in Austin. Similar in spirit to the Training with industry program, participants are expected to take these practices back with them, to influence other Army people in their future assignments, and to build up the Army's capability in software development. The Al Work Force Development program and this Software Factory will complement the Artificial Intelligence Task Force.

AFC is seeking to design signature systems in a relevant time frame according to priorities of the Chief of Staff of the Army (CSA). AFC will partner with other organizations such as Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) as needed. If a team from industry presents a viable program idea to a CFT, that CFT connects to the Army's requirements developers, Secretary Esper said, and the program prototype is then put on a fast track. The Secretary of the Army has approved an Intellectual Property Management Policy, to protect both the Army and the entrepreneur or innovator.

For example, the Network CFT and the Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications—Tactical (PEO C3T) hosted a forum on 1 August 2018 for vendors to learn what might function as a testable/deployable in the near future. A few of the hundreds of white papers from the vendors, adjudged to be 'very mature ideas', were passed to the Army's acquisition community, while many others were passed to CERDEC for continuation in the Army's effort to modernize the network for combat. Although some test requirements were inappropriately applied, the Command post computing environment (CPCE) has passed a hurdle.

While seeking information, the Army is especially interested in ideas that accelerate an acquisition program, in for example the Future Vertical Lift Requests for Information (RFIs): "provide a detailed description of tailored, alternative or innovative approaches that streamlines the acquisition process to accelerate the program as much as possible". In January 2020 the current Optionally manned fighting vehicle (OMFV) solicitation was cancelled when the OMFV's requirements added up to an unobtainable project; In February 2020 Futures command was now soliciting the industry for do-able ideas for an OMFV, using an RFI. The CIO/G6 has targeted Futures Command (Austin) in 2019 as the first pilot for "enterprise IT-as-a-service"-style service contracts; General Murray now (July 2019) has a sensitive compartmented information facility in his headquarters, as a result of this pilot. Two other locations are to be announced for 2019. Six to eight other pilots are envisioned for 2020. However, 288 other enterprise network locations remain to be migrated away from the previous "big bang" migration concept from several years ago, as they are vulnerable to near-peer cyber threats. The CIO/G6 emphasizes that this enterprise migration is not the tactical network espoused in the top six priorities (a 'mobile & expeditionary Army network').
 * 1) After AFC, the following G6 service contracts are high priority:
 * 2) The Combat Training Centers (Fort Irwin, Fort Polk, and Grafenwöhr)
 * 3) TRADOC and its Centers of Excellence (CoEs)
 * 4) The power projection bases from which deployments spring

By February 2020 the Vice Chief of Staff could assess that Army modernization was perceptibly speeding up.

Enterprise campaign planning
In 2019 DoD planners are exercising DOTMLPF in planning, per the National Defense Strategy (NDS), in the shift from counterinsurgency (COIN) to competition with near-peer powers. The evaluations from planners' scenarios will be determining materiel and organization by late 2020.

Futures Command is formulating multiyear Enterprise campaign plans, in 2019. The planning process includes Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC), AFC's cross-functional teams (CFTs), Futures and Concepts (FCC), Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC), and Army Reserve's Houston-based 75th Innovation Command. At this stage, one goal is to formulate the plans in simple, coherent language which nests within the national security strategic documents.

Futures
AFC faces multiple futures, both as threat and opportunity. The Army's warfighting directive, viz., "to impose the nation's political will on its enemy" —Chief of Staff Milley, is to be ready for multiple near-term futures. Under Secretary McCarthy notes that Gen. Murray functions as the Army's Chief Investments Officer (more precisely, its "chief futures modernization investment officer"). Funding for the top six priorities could mean that existing programs might be curtailed.

In the top six priorities:
 * 1) LRPF Long range precision fires
 * 2) *Hypersonic materiel development: the Strategic long range cannon (SLRC), for a hypersonic projectile,  is meant to have a range up to 1,000 nautical miles. An early ballistic test took place at Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, as announced at AUSA in October 2019. (See Identification friend or foe (IFF), Blue force tracking)
 * 3) **ERCA development at Picatinny Arsenal: evaluate several manufacturing technologies, tied to the XM1113 munition.
 * 4) * Targeting with thousand-mile missiles,  "streamlining the sensor-shooter link at every echelon"—BG John Rafferty,  in Integrated fire
 * 5)  NGCV Next generation combat vehicle
 * 6) *Much smaller and lighter ground combat vehicles, optionally unmanned (See Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC)) for robotic vehicles SmallMultipurposeEquipmentTransportCandidates.jpg
 * 7) **If robotic combat vehicles (RCVs) do not need to be manned, neither would they need to be armored; use of sensors and batteries could replace the armor. Soldiers have learned to remotely operate the weapons on such RCVs in several days; the CCDC RCV Center and CFT are placing RCV prototypes and the Soldier's vehicle prototypes in company-level scenarios in Europe, in 2020 and forward.
 * 8) *Robotic warfare, as a concept or capability at the Joint Corps echelon, was demonstrated at the operational level using Joint Warfighting assessment (JWA) 18.1 in April 2018.
 * 9) *JWA 19 (April–May 2019): I Corps, at JLBM (Joint base Lewis-McChord), is getting modernization training on the robotic complex breaching concept (RCBC), and the command post computing environment (CPCE) from Joint modernization command (JMC) training staff.
 * 10) **Create decisive lethality: Robotic experiments
 * 11) ***Jen Judson reports that Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley is proposing that the brigades begin to electrify their vehicles using hybrid, or all-electric propulsion, or perhaps other mobile power plants.
 * 12) ***Modified M2 Bradleys (MET-Ds) and other RCVs operating at Fort Carson, and in Europe have used robotic software to operate the vehicles, for both logistics and also for combat maneuver. As of August 2020, the RCVs are able to perform limited waypoint navigation; multiple vehicles can be controlled by one human operator.
 * 13) FVL "Our new approach is really to prototype as much as we can to help us identify requirements, so our reach doesn’t exceed our grasp. ... A good example is Future Vertical Lift: The prototyping has been exceptional." —Secretary of the Army Mark Esper
 * 14) *The FARA (Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft) scout helicopter prototypes are to be designed to fly along urban streets, to survive air defenses. Five design vendors were selected, with downselect to two for prototyping by February 2020.
 * 15) *These aircraft are envisioned as platforms for utilizing sensor networks to control and enable weapons delivery, as demonstrated in a 2019 experiment. In preparation for FVL platforms, the FVL CFT demonstrated a 2020 Spike non-line of sight missile launch from an Apache gunship at Yuma Proving Ground, for extended range capability; a forward air launch of an unmanned sensor aircraft (UAS) from a helicopter was demonstrated at YPG as well.
 * 16) Mobile & Expeditionary Network / MDO Multi-domain operations


 * 1) *In the battlefield of the future, where nowhere is safe for long, "you will miss opportunities to get to positions of advantage if you don't synthesize the data very quickly"—LTG Wesley (AI for multi-domain command and control: MDC2)
 * 2) **ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) needs to match the range of the upcoming LRPF (Long range precision fires) and thousand-nautical-mile missile standoff capability of the Army. Soldiers on the ground are now able to receive satellite ISR.
 * 3) **Cybersecurity   RAND simulations show Blue losses
 * 4) *Cyber warfare / urban warfare  / Underground warfare / Multi-domain combined maneuver
 * 5) *Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing (A-PNT) A solar-powered drone successfully stayed aloft at Yuma Proving Ground for nearly 26 days, at times descending to 55,000 feet to avoid adverse weather conditions, while remaining well above the altitudes flown by commercial aircraft, and landing per plan in the summer of 2018, to meet other testing commitments.
 * 6) **An A-PNT event is scheduled at WSMR for August 2019
 * 7) **Prototype jam-resistant GPS kits are being fielded to 2nd Cavalry Regiment in EUCOM before year-end 2019. More than 300 Strykers of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment are being fitted with the Mounted Assured Precision Navigation & Timing System (MAPS), with thousands more planned for EUCOM.
 * 8) **A Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) is under development.
 * 9) ***Low Earth orbit satellites for Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing— "When you look at the sheer number of satellites that go up and the reduced cost to do it, it gives us an array of opportunities on how to solve the problems" in A-PNT
 * 10) **CCDC Army Research Laboratory (ARL) researchers have proposed and demonstrated a way for small ground-based robots with mounted antennas to configure phased arrays, a technique which usually takes a static laboratory to develop. Instead the researchers used robots to covertly create and focus a highly directional parasitic array (see Yagi antenna).
 * 11) **CCDC Army Research Laboratory (ARL): ARL's Army Research Office is funding researchers at University of Texas at Austin, and University of Lille who have built a new 5G component using hexagonal boron nitride which can switch at performant speeds, while remaining 50 times more energy-efficient than current materials—the "thinnest known insulator with a thickness of 0.33 nanometers".
 * 12) **A demonstration of proof of concept allows Soldiers to communicate their position using a wearable tracking unit. The technology allows soldiers (or robots) to prosecute a fight even indoors or underground, even if GPS were lost during a NavWar.
 * Air,Missile Defense
 * 1) *Integrated Air and Missile Battle Command System (IBCS) award, including next software build. $238 million also funds initial prototypes of the command and control system for fielding in FY22.
 * 2) ** Hypersonic glide vehicle launch preparations, beginning in 2020, and continuing with launches every six months.
 * 3) **At Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake an FVL CFT-sponsored demonstration of interconnected sensors handed-off the control of a glide munition which had been launched from a Grey Eagle unmanned aircraft system (UAS). During the flight of that munition, another group of sensors picked up a higher-priority target; another operator at the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) redirected the glide munition to the higher-priority target and destroyed it.
 * 4) Soldier lethality
 * 5) *Sensor-to-shooter prototype for multi-domain battle, 2019 operational assessment: Air Force RCO / Army RCO / Network CFT
 * 6) *Night vision goggles thermal polarimetric camera. Integrated vision augmentation system (IVAS)
 * 7) *CCDC ARL researchers are developing a flexible, waterproof, lithium-ion battery of any size and shape, for soldiers to wear; the electrolyte is water itself. In 2020 the batteries were engineering prototypes; by 2021 soldiers will wear the battery for themselves for the first time.
 * 8) **CCDC ARL and DoE's PNNL are examining the solid-electrolyte-interphase (SEI) as it first forms during the initial charging of a Lithium-ion battery. They have found an inner SEI (thin, dense, and inorganic —most likely lithium oxide) between the copper electrode, and an outer SEI which is organic and permeable — a finding which will be useful when building future batteries.
 * 9) *CCDC ARL and MIT researchers are formulating atomically thin materials to be layered upon soldiers' equipment and clothing for MDO information display and processing.
 * 10) *Integrated, wearable cabling for capabilities such as IVAS, NGSW, or Nett Warrior are under development; the potential exists to reduce 20 pounds of batteries to half that weight.
 * 11) *CCDC ARL is undertaking an Essential research program (ERP) in the processes underlying Additive manufacturing (3D printing), which is applicable to munitions.
 * 12) *Natick Soldier RDEC has awarded an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract to prototype soldier exoskeletons which augment human leg strength under harsh conditions.
 * 13) *Plans for the Infantry squad vehicle (ISV) are underway. An ISV is meant to be airdropped for a squad of 9 paratroopers.
 * 14) **Assured pointing, navigation and tracking (A-PNT) devices are being miniaturized, with increased redundant positioning sources. This aids wearability.
 * 15) **In September 2019 in the Maneuver CoE's Battle Lab at Fort Benning, OneSAF simulations of a platoon augmented by UAS drones, ground robots, and AI were able to dislodge a defending force 3 times larger, repeatedly. But by current doctrine, a near-battalion would have been required to accomplish that mission.

Other Armies
The British Army is also investigating innovations, such as robots and drones, including 70 technologies funded by a $1 billion (₤800 million) innovation fund launched in 2016. Two hundred troops will engage in "surveillance, long-range, and precision targeting, enhanced mobility and the re-supply of forces, urban warfare and enhanced situational awareness".

"By 2020 the Army's programs for modernization were now framed as a decades-long process of cooperation with allies and partners, for competition with potential adversaries who historically have blurred the distinction between peace and war, " — from: Reorganization plan of United States Army
 * 1) In 2020, one measure of military power projection ranks the competition between the armies of the world (after the US Army, which is ranked atop this list).  The list of armies, a mixture of allies, partners, and competitors is estimated to be:
 * 2) Russia jammed the GPS signal during NATO exercises in November 2018.  In 2014 the DoD's research and engineering chief Alan Shaffer warned that the 'US  lost dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum'  (EMS), in part due to the US government selloff of EMS radio frequencies, and also due in part to the proliferation of digital technologies which allow for low-cost jammers. (See: meaconing)   General Valery Gerasimov advocates hybrid warfare, a "blend of political, economic and military power to bear against adversaries".  Russia took Crimea without firing a shot. In April 2020 Russia tested an anti-satellite system for Low earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
 * 3) China — RAND simulations show Blue losses. Six of the top 15 defense companies in the world are now Chinese, in 2019 for the first time. The competition with China is being shaped in the current decade 2010–2020, according to David Kriete.   In 2017 China adopted the National Intelligence Law which obligates Chinese companies to subordinate themselves to intelligence-gathering measures for the state. China is militarizing the South China Sea. The 30th BeiDou satellite was meant to complete China's own global navigation satellite system;  as of June 16, 2020 the launch of a BDS-3 satellite is postponed. The Defense Intelligence Agency projects that China will at least double its nuclear arsenal and that its production capability will be far expanded in the 2020s. Secretary Mark Esper said that China is aiming to be the dominant military power in Asia by 2049.
 * 4) India — faces Pakistan
 * 5) Japan — faces North Korea