EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF A MACHINE TEAMMATE

Artificial intelligence has been in use for decades. It is already deployed in manned formations and will continue to be fielded to military units over the next several years. Current strategies and operational concepts call for increased use of artificial-intelligence capabilities across the defense enterprise—from senior leaders to the tactical edge. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence and the warriors that they support will not be compatible "out of the box." Simply bolting an artificial intelligence into teams of humans will not ensure success. The Department of Defense must pay careful attention to how it is deploying artificial intelligences alongside humans. This is especially true in teams where the structure of the team and the behaviors of its members can make or break performance. Because humans and machines work differently, teams should be designed to leverage the strengths of each partner. Team designs should account for the inherent strengths of the machine partner and use them to shore up human weaknesses. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by submitting novel conceptual models that capture the desired team behaviors of humans and machines when operating in human-machine teaming constructs. These models may inform the design of human-machine teams in ways that improve team performance and agility.NPS_Cruser, Monterey, CA 93943Outstanding ThesisMajor, United States Marine CorpsMajor, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Breaking the cultural barrier : the evolution of professions in the United States Air Force

This study tackles a paradox of professions whereby standardization and bureaucratization of tasks seemingly ought to democratize labor pool participation, but instead reify barriers to entry. Through controlled comparative case study, I examine cases in the US Air Force that have pursued different labor pool strategies in response to apparently similar exogenous pressures. In each case, a suborganization within the USAF encountered resource dilemmas that motivated them to cut labor costs and adopted technological advances that routinized tasks such that lay workers could take on tasks once only performed by experts. Despite forces that seemingly drive organizations to open their labor pools to more junior workers, not all cases saw such an outcome. Instead, I argue that endogenous organizational culture determined how each organization managed its workforce. In the cases of USAF satellite operations and weapons direction career fields, jobs once performed only by officers were opened to enlisted practitioners. In two cases following fliers of in-person piloted aircraft and remotely piloted aircraft, no such labor pool expansion took hold despite experiments that demonstrated the capability of enlisted troops to perform officers’ duties. Through interview, document analysis, and artifact analysis methodologies, I found that cultural barriers prevented labor pool expansion in the latter two cases. Romantic ideals of labor roles, elitism regarding junior worker capability, and negative attitudes like sexism and racism guided labor pool decisions more so than did dispassionate cost/benefit analysis. This work speaks to the evolution of professions broadly. It develops a paradigm missing in the literature on professions: That professionalization not only standardizes specialized work; it also attaches social benefits—prestige, authority, status—to professional experts. Experts, then, are loathe to give up those benefits even when their expertise is no longer required to perform routinized tasks. My findings suggest similar forces are at play in diverse professions whose task environments are increasingly accessible to lay workers: from medicine and journalism, to library science and fashion, to cybersecurity and space exploration. Whether those industries will pursue the most efficient labor pool strategy, I argue, is not a matter of measured decision-making, but a matter of culture.Public Affair

An investigation into the validity and reliability of the AcciMap approach

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the validity and reliability of the AcciMap approach, a systems-based technique for analysing the causes of organisational accidents. This approach has been used to analyse accidents in a number of complex systems and to identify areas in which safety interventions should be directed. However, while the technique is implicitly assumed to be valid and reliable, the questions of whether or not it does, in fact, allow analysts to identify the causes of accidents correctly and whether or not the results obtained are consistent and replicable, have not been addressed. These questions are of critical importance when the findings of AcciMap analyses are used to determine the corrective actions to be taken after an accident, since the safety of the system may be jeopardised if problems are not correctly identified and remedied. In the investigation into the validity and reliability of this technique, a study was performed in which several participants independently analysed an accident, using AcciMap guidelines developed during this research. The aim of the study was to enable the validity of the participants’ results (assessed against results produced by AcciMap experts), the reliability of their results (assessed by comparing participants' findings with those of one another) and the nature and significance of any observed variations in these results, to be examined. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results obtained in this study revealed that, although similarities existed between their findings, each participant’s results differed from those of the experts and the other participants. Examination of the nature and significance of these differences indicated that some were insignificant with respect to the meaning portrayed or the potential outcomes of analyses, while others were significant in these terms but could feasibly be eliminated if changes were made to the analysis process. Several observed variations, however, were both significant in these respects and arguably unavoidable, stemming from parts of the analysis requiring subjective analyst judgement and areas in which human error or differences in interpretation were possible. The existence of such variations demonstrates that AcciMap analyses do not always produce entirely valid and reliable results

Finishing the job: How American presidents justify exit strategies in humanitarian interventions

Humanitarian interventions to stop mass atrocities are among America's most controversial uses of military force overseas since the end of the Cold War. While there is much research analysing justifications for and conduct of humanitarian interventions, there is very little scholarly investigation of how and why interventions end. Indeed, successive US presidents have struggled to implement exit strategies from humanitarian interventions with the outcome often dismissed as 'mission creep'. In this thesis, I use US presidential rhetoric as a way to understand exit strategy dynamics in humanitarian interventions. In particular, I explore how American presidents publicly justified their exit strategies in four interventions from 1991--2011---northern Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo and Libya. My normative concepts analysis of more than 700 texts shows how presidents craft exit strategies through practices of public justification and legitimation to their domestic audience. I argue a president's discursive engagement is constrained by three groups of normative expectations shaping the realm of imagined possibilities for how America should use force when responding to humanitarian crises; specifically the US should: (1) fulfil its moral responsibility to stop atrocities, fight evil and promote political transformation; (2) win its military engagements; and (3) avoid quagmires. These expectations frame justifiable uses of military force, but also exist in tension with one another, and are in turn affected by changing battlefield conditions, past intervention experiences, domestic and international pressures, and personal preferences. How presidents navigate these tensions affects their exit decisions, including failures to implement exit strategies. My thesis is the first comparative analysis of America's exit strategies in four of the most significant humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era. By using public justification analysis to illuminate decision-making dynamics, I overcome the shortcomings of applying extant victory, war termination and end state planning theories to humanitarian interventions. By identifying the normative constraints on exit strategy decision-making, I demonstrate how and why mission creep occurs. My thesis provides evidence for military planners and policy advisers, having decided to use force to stop a mass atrocity, to take normative expectations seriously in considering when and how troops will withdraw

Small Intrusions, Powerful Payoff: Shaping Status Relationships Through Interstate Intrusions and Responses

Intrusions are the intentional unauthorized violation of a state\u27s sovereign territory or claimed space (e.g., air defense identification zone, exclusive economic zone) by assets controlled by another state. Intrusions are one of the most common military interactions between major powers. Yet, intrusions are poorly understood by security studies scholars. To the extent that they are addressed in the literature, they are usually understood through the lens of coercive signaling. However, most intrusions lack the requisite components for this coercive signaling such as competing political objectives, associated demands, and the necessary risk to demonstrate resolve. As a result, most intrusions are left unexplained by the literature. This dissertation argues that states use intrusions and responses to intrusions to assert their relative status in bilateral relationships. Leaders that are dissatisfied with their state\u27s status in relation to another country are more likely to exhibit a pattern of escalated intrusions or responses to intrusions as a means of reframing the status relationship. The study tests these hypotheses using case studies centered on Chinese and Russian leaders vis-a-vis the United States. The cases were constructed using interviews with current and former senior officials as well as archival resources (some recently declassified). These findings are important. They provide insight on how states communicate and compete for status as well as the role of intimidation and deference in interstate relationships. The findings also help clarify how and why leaders today are using intrusions such as Xi Jinping in the South and East China Seas and Vladimir Putin\u27s resumption of long-range bomber patrols against the United States and other NATO countries