When totalitarian regimes play by different rules in tech, how the U.S. military can

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When totalitarian regimes play by different rules in tech, how the U.S. military can compete
By: Jill Aitoro C4ISRNET - 12-1-18 ~ 17 minutes ago
RE: https://www.c4isrnet.com/digital-sho...y-can-compete/

SIMI VALLEY, California — The United States faces a conundrum: Develop advanced technology capabilities that enhance our military at a pace fast enough to compete against totalitarian regimes that play by different rules.

Pentagon is wrestling with the standards and ethical aspects of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence – how data is collected to enable such technologies, and how those technologies are subsequently used. This even as China and Russia move rapidly ahead without consideration for such things, said leaders from the Pentagon, industry and Congress that spoke at the Reagan National Defense Forum.

“China is gathering a lot more data, [and therefore] able to do more correlation," said Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, during a panel on how the Pentagon can engage better with Silicon Valley. “That will help them not just in military but in private sector, which in China is exactly the same. They don’t have privacy concerns. We are at a disadvantage because of the freedoms we enjoy.”

That challenge has become more pronounced with a strategy in China for “civil-military fusion” – an effort to expand collaboration between civilian and military research and development, as part of a broader effort to ween the country off foreign dependency.

“It sounds basic and obvious, but for the Chinese, it’s a departure given past reliance on state-owned enterprises, which are pretty clunky,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., during an earlier panel focusing on U.S. competition with China in technology. That intermingling of military capabilities and commercial technology investment also complicates U.S. efforts to balance cooperation with China, through trade and nuclear deterrence efforts for example, with competition in its technology capabilities.

“I think the wisdom in the current moment lies in recognizing this is not a country we share long term interests with,” Gallagher added.

Participants in both panels emphasized the need for the United States to establish standards in technology development that can extend beyond the U.S. to allies, creating power en masse to both compete against China and also protect our own systems against tactics from adversaries that perhaps blur the lines of what we deem appropriate behavior.

In the case of cybersecurity, “we have never been clear in our requirements. We say cyber, we have high-level standards, but we haven’t disaggregated them where we measure against them clearly,” said Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. “And we just have to. It comes down to design requirements, performance requirements, and being clear from the onset.

“We can’t continue to be defensive. We have to go on the offensive.”

The Pentagon also needs to work fast, both to maintain technological superiority and to attract talent from the technology community, which is accustomed to moving quickly and accepting a degree of risk.

“We have to think a lot smarter if we’re going to beat" China and Russia, Luckey said. “We’re good at building iterative improvements of things we already understand. But when it comes to these new technologies, we’re slower moving. But we have to move ahead full steam. Otherwise, Russia and China will write the norms.”