Technology Horizons

A Vision for Air Force Science and Technology 2010–30

From its inception, the Air Force has conducted a major effort roughly once every decade to articulate a vision for the science and technology (S&T) advancements that it should undertake to achieve over the following decade to enable the capabilities it will need to prevail. Six such S&T visions have been developed, beginning with Toward New Horizons in 1945 led by Theodore von Kármán for Gen Hap Arnold, through New World Vistas conducted in 1995.

Since completion of the latter, 15 years have passed without an updated Air Force S&T vision. Technology Horizons represents the next in this succession of major vision efforts conducted at the Headquarters Air Force (HAF) level. In view of the far-reaching strategic changes, rapid global technological advances, and growing resource constraints over the next decade, this is an overdue effort that can help guide S&T investments to maximize their impact for maintaining Air Force technological superiority over potential adversaries.

What Is Technology Horizons?

Technology Horizons is neither a prediction of the future nor a forecast of a set of likely future scenarios. It is a rational assessment of what is credibly achievable from a technical perspective to give the Air Force capabilities that are suited for the strategic, technical, and budget environments of 2010–30. It is visionary, but its view is informed by the strategic context in which these technology-derived capabilities will be used. It is an articulation of the “art of the possible” but is grounded in the knowledge that merely being possible is only a prerequisite to being practically useful. It considers the spectrum of technical possibilities but acknowledges that budget constraints will limit the set of these that can be pursued.

It recognizes that increasingly more of the science and technology that provides the basis for future Air Force capabilities is available worldwide to be translated into potential adversary capabilities. It thus has sought to envision not only US joint and allied opportunities for using technologies, but also ways that adversary capabilities could be derived from them using entirely different concepts of operations or on the basis of entirely different war-fighting constructs. It acknowledges that capabilities enabled by new technologies and associated operating concepts often introduce new vulnerabilities not envisioned in the original capability. It thus has also considered potential vulnerabilities and cross-domain interdependences that may be created by secondhand third-order effects of these technology-derived capabilities.

Sources of Inputs

Technology Horizons received inputs from a wide range of organizations and sources. These included four working groups—one each in the air, space, and cyber domains and another that focused on cross-domain insights—that gave a broad range of subject matter expertise to this effort. Working group members were drawn from the Air Force S&T community, intelligence community, MAJCOMs, product centers, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC), defense industry, and academia. Further inputs were obtained from site visits, briefings, and discussions with organizations across the Air Force, the Department of Defense, federal agencies, FFRDCs, national laboratories, and industry, including Air Staff and Air Force Secretariat offices. Additional use was made of perspectives in several hundred papers, reports, briefings, and other sources.

Elements of the Resulting S&T Vision

The vision from Technology Horizons to help guide Air Force S&T over the next decade and beyond consists of the following elements:

1. Strategic Context

2. Enduring Realities

3. Overarching Themes

4. Potential Capability Areas

5. Key Technology Areas

6. Grand Challenges

7. Summary of S&T Vision

8. Implementation Plan & Recommendations

Overarching Themes for Air Force S&T

The strategic context and enduring realities identified in Technology Horizons lead to a set of 12 overarching themes to vector S&T in directions that can maximize capability superiority. These shifts in research emphases should be applied judiciously to guide each research area.

Potential Capability Areas, Key Technology Areas, and Grand Challenges for Air Force S&T

Based on the strategic environment, enduring realities, and overarching themes, the remaining elements of the vision from Technology Horizons are presented as follows to help guide the Air Force in making choices about the most essential S&T efforts that must be pursued to prepare for the environment of 2010–30. It identifies potential capability areas (PCA) and maps these PCAs across the Air Force service core functions to assess the range of impact they can have.

• It uses this set of PCAs to identify key technology areas (KTA) that are most essential for the Air Force to invest in over the next decade to obtain capabilities aligned with the strategic, technology and budget environments.
• It additionally defines four “grand challenge” problems to advance KTAs and integrate them in system-level demonstrations of significant new capabilities.
• It presents an implementation plan that enables the elements of this vision to be put into practice for guiding Air Force S&T efforts to maximize resulting capabilities in 2030.

Major Findings

The single greatest theme to emerge from Technology Horizons is the need, opportunity, and potential to dramatically advance technologies that can allow the Air Force to gain the capability increases, manpower efficiencies, and cost reductions available through far greater use of autonomous systems in essentially all aspects of Air Force operations. Increased use of autonomy—not only in the number of systems and processes to which autonomous control and reasoning can be applied but especially in the degree of autonomy that is reflected in these—can provide the Air Force with potentially enormous increases in its capabilities and, if implemented correctly, can do so in ways that enable manpower efficiencies and cost reductions.

Achieving these gains will depend on the development of entirely new methods for enabling “trust in autonomy” through verification and validation (V&V) of the near-infinite state systems that result from high levels of adaptability and autonomy. In effect, the number of possible input states that such systems can be presented with is so large that not only is it impossible to test all of them directly, it is not even feasible to test more than an insignificantly small fraction of them. The development of such systems is thus inherently unverifiable by today’s methods, and as a result, their operation in all but comparatively trivial applications is uncertifiable.

It is possible to develop systems having high levels of autonomy, but it is the lack of suitable V&V methods that prevent all but relatively low levels of autonomy from being certified for use. Potential adversaries, however, may be willing to field systems with far higher levels of autonomy without any need for certifiable V&V and could gain significant capability advantages over the Air Force by doing so. Countering this asymmetric advantage will require as-yet-undeveloped methods for achieving certifiably reliable V&V. The Air Force, as one the greatest potential beneficiaries of more highly adaptive and autonomous systems, must be a leader in the development of the underlying S&T principles for V&V.

A second key finding to emerge from Technology Horizons is that natural human capacities are becoming increasingly mismatched to the enormous data volumes, processing capabilities, and decision speeds that technologies either offer or demand. Although humans today remain more capable than machines for many tasks, by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes. Humans and machines will need to become far more closely coupled through improved human-machine interfaces and by direct augmentation of human performance.

Focused research efforts over the next decade will permit significant practical instantiations of augmented human performance. These may come from increased use of autonomous systems as noted above, from improved man-machine interfaces to couple humans more closely and more intuitively with automated systems, or from direct augmentation of humans themselves. The latter includes drugs or implants to improve memory, alertness, cognition, or visual/aural acuity, as well as a screening of individuals for specialty codes based on brainwave patterns or genetic correlators, or even genetic modification itself. While some such methods may appear inherently distasteful, potential adversaries may be entirely willing to make use of them.

Developing ways of using science and technology to augment human performance will become increasingly essential for gaining the benefits that many technologies can bring. Significant advances and early implementations are possible over the next decade. Such augmentation is a further means for increasing human efficiencies, allowing reduced manpower needs for the same capabilities or increased capabilities with given manpower. 

A further key theme is the need to focus a greater fraction of S&T investments on research to support increased freedom of operations in contested or denied environments. Three main research areas are of particular importance: (1) cyber resilience, (2) precision navigation and timing in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied environments, and (3) electromagnetic spectrum warfare. Additionally, the study identifies further key priority areas where S&T investment will be needed over the next decade to enable essential capabilities, including processing-enabled intelligent sensors, directed energy for tactical strike/defense, persistent space situational awareness, rapidly composable small satellites, and next-generation high-efficiency gas turbine engines.

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