Tech for Tomorrow’s Battlefield: How Concepts of the Future Drive Investments Today

Groundbreaking technology often emerges from military roots. BG Stephanie Ahern led an informative discussion with Army scientists, futurists, and commercial experts to explain how concepts about the future of battle influence where the Army invests today.

What you’ll find out

• What we do at Army Futures and Concepts (2:20)
• What we do at Army Research Labs (3:35)
• Where are the critical challenges ahead (13:10)
• How Army Futures engages small business (15:00)
• How to find government business (24:00)
• What’s the role ethics plays in threat concepts (35:18)

Key quotes

• “We’re really trying to bring the research through collaboration with universities, industry, and coalition partners and bring it out into the field as soon as possible.” — Tien Pham, ARL US Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory Chief Scientist (04:40)
• “Eventually when we’re in the capability development phase, we want to pull in our industry partners for all of their innovation as well in the process.” — Jean Vettel, AFC Chief Scientist for Futures and Concepts Center (06:25)
• “When we look to the future and we get to a time when you have artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomy, robotics, kind of underpinned by that data and the network, plus the quantum computing plus synthetic bio plus advances in energetics and so forth. When you start having that come together, kind of at scale, both on the civilian side, and to be able to impact things on the battlefield. How could we operate and much less, how must we be able to operate to make sure that we’re able to achieve our objectives? That’s really been the task that we’ve been looking at.” — BG Stephanie Ahern, AFC Director of Concepts(11:35)
• “What does deception look like in a world where we fundamentally aren’t creating perception in the same way? We have to change not just for a single threat, but across the whole threat spectrum overnight because some new technology proliferates.” — Chris Milloy, NVIDIA Senior Data Scientist (19:59)
• “You’ve got to be engaged, you’ve got to be involved, you’ve got to participate in those events, and bring those capabilities so that the services get an opportunity to see it, work with it, and play with it in the dirt.” — LTG(R) John Morgan, IBM Partner, Federal DOD/Army Co-Lead (25:10)

Who you’ll hear from

BG Stephanie Ahern, AFC Director of Concepts

Chris Milroy, NVIDIA Senior Data Scientist

LTG(R) John Morgan, IBM Partner, Federal DOD/Army Co-Lead

Jean Vettel, AFC Chief Scientist for Futures and Concepts Center

Tien Pham, US Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory Chief Scientist, Senior Science Technical Manager for CISD

▶️ Click to play the full Tech for Tomorrow’s Battlefield: How Concepts of the Future Drive Investments Today panel

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