February 11, 2022 | International, Aerospace
October 15, 2020 | International, Naval
Defense spending up in San Diego, counteracting pandemic, report finds
The report found increases in spending and jobs in the defense sector has helped stabilize the local economy
Defense spending across San Diego County bolstered the local economy during the pandemic this year and now accounts for a quarter of the county's gross regional product, according to a new report released Tuesday.
According to the annual Military Economic Impact Report, more than $33 billion in direct payments — via payroll, defense contracts, and retirement and veterans benefits — went to people and companies in the county during the 2020 fiscal year.
That spending, along with spillover that researchers call a multiplier effect, equates to a total economic impact of more than $52 billion — 25 percent of San Diego's gross regional product.
The numbers show an increase of 5.7 percent in direct spending and a 7.7 percent increase in jobs that pencils out to 342,486 jobs.
Numbers in this year's report differ from last year's in part because Rady School of Management at UC San Diego compiled and analyzed the data, using modeling that was more conservative than prior calculations, said Mark Balmert, CEO of the San Diego Military Advisory Council, which commissions the annual report.
Almost 60,000 active duty sailors and 50,000 active duty Marines make up the largest factions of employment, the report says, with more than 30,000 local civilians also employed by the Defense Department. Indirect employment linked to defense contracts adds roughly 190,000 jobs — about 15,000 more than fiscal year 2019.
The presence of the military and defense industries has softened the economic blow of the pandemic, Balmert said.
“The Rady School team did a great job of independently confirming what many of us already know, that the Defense budget provides an incredible stabilizing force during economic downturns such as we are experiencing during COVID19,” Balmert, a retired rear admiral, wrote in an email.
The report singled-out the impacts of three Nimitz-class aircraft carriers that call San Diego home — the USS Carl Vinson, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Each ship, the report notes, brings more than 3,000 sailors, making the three together a top-10 employer in San Diego. Each carrier contributes about $767 million to the region, the report says.
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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