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July 6, 2023 | International, Naval

After Washington’s refueling woes, US Navy eyes new plans for carriers

The aircraft carrier Washington's refueling ran two years long, due to the pandemic, industrial base challenges and unplanned work in the propulsion plant.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2023/07/06/after-washingtons-refueling-woes-us-navy-eyes-new-plans-for-carriers/

On the same subject

  • US Army buys long-flying solar drones to watch over Pacific units

    October 30, 2024 | International, Land, C4ISR

    US Army buys long-flying solar drones to watch over Pacific units

    Kraus Hamdani Aerospace has won a Pentagon contract to provide K1000ULE solar-powered unmanned aircraft to the Army and Joint Special Operations Command.

  • Space Development Agency satellites poised to track first missile test

    April 14, 2024 | International, Aerospace

    Space Development Agency satellites poised to track first missile test

    Tranche 0 tracking satellites have been collecting and transmitting, but their position has yet to align with the timing of a missile launch.

  • Fully autonomous ‘mobile intelligent entities’ coming to the battlefields of the future

    September 7, 2018 | International, C4ISR

    Fully autonomous ‘mobile intelligent entities’ coming to the battlefields of the future

    By: Kelsey Atherton WASHINGTON — A killer robot by any other name is far more palatable to the general public. That may be part of the logic behind the Army Research Laboratory Chief Scientist Alexander Kott's decision to refer to thinking and moving machines on the battlefield as “mobile intelligent entities.” Kott pitched the term, along with the new ARL concept of fully autonomous maneuver, at the 2nd Annual Defense News Conference yesterday, in an panel on artificial intelligence that kept circling back to underlying questions of great power competition. “Fully autonomous maneuver is an ambitious, heretical terminology,” Kott said. “Fully autonomous is more than just mobility, it's about decision making.” If there is a canon against which this autonomy seems heretical, it is likely the international community's recent conference and negotiations over how, exactly, to permit or restrict lethal autonomous weapon systems. The most recent meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems took place last week in Geneva, Switzerland and concluded with a draft of recommendations on Aug. 31st. This diplomatic process, and the potential verdict of international law, could check or halt the development of AI-enabled weapons, especially ones where machines select and attack targets without human interventions. That's the principle objection raised by humanitarian groups like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, as well as the nations that called for a preemptive ban on such autonomous weapons. Kott understands the ethical concern, drawing an analogy to the moral concerns and tradeoffs in developing self driving cars. “All know about self driving cars, all the angst, the issue of mobility... take all this concern and multiply it by orders of magnitude and now you have the issues of mobility on the battlefield,” said Kott. “Mobile intelligent entities on the battlefield have to deal with a much more unstructured, much less orderly environment than what self-driving cars have to do. This is a dramatically different world of urban rubble and broken vehicles, and all kind of dangers, in which we are putting a lot of effort.” Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2018/09/06/fully-autonomous-maneuver-coming-to-the-battlefields-of-the-future

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