Sea Control - Sea Control 231 - Not So Disruptive After All with Dr. Ian Bowers & Dr. Sarah Kirchberger

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Links:1. "Not So Disruptive After All: The 4IR, Navies and the Search for Sea Control," Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Sarah Kirchberger, Nov. 25, 20202. "Advancing Autonomous Systems: An Analysis of Current and Future Technology for Unmanned Maritime Vehicles," Bradley Martin, Danielle Tarraf, Thomas Whitmore, Jacob DeWeese, Cedric Kenney, Jon Schmid, and Paul DeLuca, 2019.

Hello, listeners. It's your SimSec co-host, Andrea Howard, checking in from Guam. This week, I'm ecstatic to share the conversation where Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Sarah Kirshberger outlined how 4IR technologies may impact, although not totally revolutionize, maritime domain awareness. If you've not done so yet, please check out the upgraded SimSec website, which offers you a more reliable, streamlined interface to access your favorite content. While we hope that you've enjoyed all the contributions from your newly assembled SeaControl team, You should also check out the new Bilge Pump episodes, numbers 37 and 38, respectively. The first was prompted by applying the Age of Sail ratings to modern ships,

and the second covers the Section 22 research team's findings on electronic warfare during World War II. As always, this content is supplied by volunteers, and we hope that those in the SimSec community who value our free, no-ad model will consider supporting us with monthly donations or via Amazon Smile. And with that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. you're listening to sea control hosted by the center for international greetings sea warriors let's dive dive back into sea control i'm andrea howard and today we're discussing what has often been framed as an ominous existentially threatening topic the

impact of fourth industrial revolution technologies in the maritime domain. Our conversation will focus on a November 2020 article in the Journal of Strategic Studies entitled, Not So Disruptive After All, The Four IR Navies and the Search for Sea Control. The link will be provided in the episode footnotes. We are so lucky to be joined by the authors of this tremendous article, Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Sarah Kirshberger. Dr. Bowers is an associate professor at the Center for Joint operation at the Royal Danish Defense College, having earned his PhD from King's College London in 2013. Dr. Kirshberger is the head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy at Keele University, an alumna of University of Hamburg

for her PhD. As a reminder, all opinions expressed are personal opinions and are not representative of any institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, having us. yeah sure thank you fantastic before we kick off our discussion i would love for our listeners to hear a bit about you ian when did you first meet sarah well i first heard of sarah probably 2000 well i was writing my phd i think i i read her book on the on the chinese on the chinese navy and i cited it but then it took a few years before i met her and it was actually 2018 at a conference in singapore was when i first met her and then it was that conference that

actually led to this article so that was the first time uh the first time i met her yeah sarah do you agree with that timeline and what really inspired you guys to work together and generate this article yeah i can corroborate that story so apart from him reading my book which he claims to have done, which I cannot actually verify. But anyway, we met indeed in Singapore, and it was a fascinating conference organized by RSIS in Singapore about fourth industrial revolution technologies in the military. And we were both presenting on different maritime topics.

And so Ian was actually the one who came up with this idea of maybe putting both our topics together and create some sort of joint article out of this, because the outcome of this conference in Singapore was supposed to be a special issue in the Journal of Strategic Studies. And this is exactly what it became. And yeah, it was basically Ian who came up with the notion that we could tackle this problem of fourth industrial revolution technologies and sea control. And he also developed a framework for the article, how to go about tackling this problem. Awesome. Then we'll pick up from there. So you talked about what inspired you to write about this topic and this great collaboration between the two of you. And as a starting point, can you define the 4IR and how it differs from previous industrial revolutions, Sarah?

Well, I would say the 4IR basically differs from previous revolutions because it is so vast and so speedy. And the digital revolution that came before it, the third IR, you could say, was basically the precursor to this. And what we now see is what's now new is that we have these advances in machine learning, big data, huge computational power, for instance, through quantum computing. This ultimately gives rise to artificial intelligence applications and robotics and autonomous driving and all these things. And this has really potentially huge impact in every sphere of life and civilian life just as much as in the military. So this is, I think, what makes the fourth IR so important, especially in military studies. That is a fantastic precursor for this next question for Ian. We're going to start talking a little bit more about how these technologies impact the current sea control regime. there's a lot of analysis for whether these sensors computers weapons platforms or systems

they're deemed cost effective and possibly game changing but the actual effect on naval operations isn't fleshed out so ian how does your methodology attempt to rectify this lack of analysis you're absolutely right so when sarah says that you know the fourth industrial revolution creates, you know, like kind of game changing developments that are happening at exponential speeds, almost, as some people would argue. The previous analysis tended to focus on, you know, oh, this technology is coming, and it's going to do this and this and this, but it hasn't been that in depth so far. And this article and a few other good ones that are coming out now are seeking to kind of see where specific military applications of 4IR technologies will impact

actual military operations so we kind of had a number of starting starting points I think for the methodology for how we would go into this and the best naval innovation literature always acknowledges that technology is kind of only one part of a wider equation so you have technology But you also need to find a way of looking at how technologies are integrated into wider warfighting systems and then how procedures and doctrines are created to kind of effectively deploy these new technologies in terms of creating new or better mission capabilities. So you have a kind of longer or a more complex set of variables to look at rather than just saying, well, this technology is going to do this, this and this. so then we needed to kind of narrow the scope because it's such a massive topic and when you're writing a journal article you only have you know 10 000 11 000 words so we decided to say okay what's an important operational outcome or goal and we picked sea control because it's a kind of

core operational requirement for many of the world's larger navies particularly the united states but anyways addressing power projection is looking at sea control so we thought okay so how will these technologies, when they're deployed, help or change how navies achieve sea control? So essentially, we're looking at one particular sharp end of naval operations. And that was kind of the goal. And I think at this point, it's worth kind of emphasizing that we're looking at sea control, but I think the 4IR can be analyzed through multiple different lenses. And there's lots of you know scope for more research for example how will it disrupt you know manning and personnel and naval and naval organizations or the structures and naval organizations themselves

which may be disrupted in a different way than the sharp end of naval operations so that was the methodology we we were we're trying to use which was to to narrow and kind of get to one specific question about how these technologies can be deployed and integrated into into into navies and then how they would be used well as the only member of this conversation who does not have a phd it sounds like you've given me some fodder for for thought maybe for the future there thanks for the homework assignment there ian and that you're right it takes a while for these technologies to actually be translated into doctrine and that highlights the barrier that we're going to discuss for our next question for sarah given the highly classified nature of this

technological integration and development, can you describe the challenges of conducting research on this topic and what sources you predominantly relied upon? A lot of the documentation and strategies that you're looking at are going to have, you know, quote-unquote secret versions of them. So how did that hinder your analysis? Yeah, you're right, Andrea. It's indeed a challenge if you're working in such a field. And I would say it takes a bit of sifting and some extraordinary also activities for a scholar, perhaps. I will describe that a little bit.

So in terms of open source intelligence, you can find a lot of stuff, actually. Even in the internet, there's lots of news reports and reports and technical journals out there on individual developments in unmanned systems development, for instance, or AI, quantum radar, quantum computing, and so on. And the government and also NATO studies that you mentioned, of course, some are not accessible at all, some are accessible in some slimmed down form. But I personally find industry sources particularly interesting.

So I should perhaps explain why I have an industry background myself, worked a couple of years in the naval shipbuilding industry and had to attend industry events such as defense exhibitions and so on, conferences. In my function then, and I find that is a good habit for an analyst in military affairs to regularly attend such events, industry exhibitions, and specialized conferences that target military operators and industry people. Because at such events, you can really be sort of in the loop about what is being talked about what are the latest trends who is working on what and you can go there and meet people and ask specialists who are actually working on these systems a lot of questions many are happy to explain the unclassified aspects and they can

explain them better usually than some journalist who maybe gets a couple of facts wrong or can't really make out what's important, what's not important. So I highly value the contacts to the technical scene, and I try to maintain them. And of course, one can pick up brochures and printed materials on the systems. One can look at models in some cases or animations, visualizations. So that's really a good venue for an analyst to attend. And other than that, there are sometimes on the more difficult countries that we're working on. So when it comes to developments in China or Russia, North Korea, Iran, it's very, very

difficult, of course, to find good information in the open domain. But sometimes these countries have an interest of sort of leaking some information. So they want actually some developments to be known and they will have their channels of how they leak it. And then you have a bunch of specialists, not too many, who are pouring over photographs or videotape evidence that surfaces somewhere in some military forum and then you will have threads of people discussing what this could mean or what this signifies and this is really a little bit like forensic work and it takes of course a lot of skill to to get information from just a blurry photograph but with this like hive mind approach lots of people combining their knowledge you can

sometimes get interesting interpretations out of very limited information. So that is basically how we work. And I should perhaps add there's risks involved also in doing this type of work. Western analysts, for instance, try to work on classified technologies regarding China. Chinese authorities would certainly interpret this as an attempt to steal state secrets, which is a punishable, of course, offense that can get you in really bad trouble. So it's really risky to go to these countries and try and get information on that. So I avoid doing that, actually, because I don't want to put anyone at risk, neither myself nor other people, and rely on remote, you could say, OSINT analysis. That's basically in a nutshell how this works.

Thank you so much for outlining that process for us and highlighting the different ways that nations sometimes will leak out those secrets to bolster their own deterrence. You know, then there's other countries like Russia where President Putin will go on in March of 2018 and give you a full smorgasbord of different technologies that they're trying to develop. But, you know, everybody has their different tactics. And very much so is interesting to hear from the military side, the work that's being done by our civilian counterparts to do some of that hive mind work, like you said, to generate articles like this. I'm going to pivot and give you a huge challenge and I'll actually field this to both of you so Ian and I both actually studied at King's College London and I did a course with Dr. Andrew Lambert on naval history of various navies around the globe and the elusive question for us was always to define sea control which you guys do attempt to do and and with a flavor you know catered towards your article. But Sarah, how would you define sea control for our listeners? And I can

at least make it an easier task and say, as it's relevant to your article. Right. So I do not have a highly original personal definition of sea control to offer. Unfortunately, I would just define it for the purposes of our article as basically the attainment of naval supremacy in a particular area for a specific time frame relative to one's opponent. Not something absolute, not something durable. It's usually, I think, not perfect control either. And if it's in the littorals, of course, it would mean you would also need air supremacy to have actually sea control. Because if you're in reach of shore-based artillery or shore-based aircraft and you don't have air supremacy, then it's not going to be

sea control, right? So this is how I would define it for our purposes. But Ian may have more to say on that. No, like it's quite a controversial definition. I don't know if it's controversial, but, you know, there are many different definitions of sea control. And I think the two elements that Sarah kind of brings up was it's in a specific space and usually it's a specific time and it's extremely unusual that sea control is permanent there's very few examples out there where you can find a navy's kind of grabbed sea control and and maintained it permanently some would argue that during the 1991 1990 gulf war that the us gained sea control pretty much in that region but that's up for debate i think the other way of looking at it

is you know do you have the ability to use the c for what you wanted for that specific task at that specific time and if you can do that then you have you have c control or in effect you have c control and if you you look at those combine those two definitions then we're we're kind of at a place where if you look at u.s navy you know document c control has a very prominent position in what they do because it kind of sets the stage for all the other kinds of uses of the sea that large navies do. Fantastic. You both tackled that very gracefully. And Ian, I'm going to keep pressing up on you, though. So focusing on the unmanned systems and maritime domain awareness components of sea control, MDA being maritime domain

awareness, you claim there will not be a disruption of how navies attain sea control, although their operations may alter how they are conducted. Ian, can you describe this concept of disruptive innovation at sea especially as it pertains to hardware-based and architectural innovations the concept of technological disruption uh you read about it all the time it's prominent in like business magazines and technology magazines but not many people actually know what it is so i think if we can kind of go back a little bit and go back to the original people who describe technological disruption is these two academics or bauer and christensen and they were talking about the business world and what they did was they defined or the theory

they came up with divided innovation into two categories disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation and the latter sustaining innovations what they do is essentially improve performance along understood metrics of success and how they decided is they give the customer and this is is their quotation something more or better in the attributes they already value and i think that's a pretty good way to describe sustaining innovation but disruptive technologies you know create new metrics that the customer or the user didn't expect to have to measure success against so these technologies become disruptive when they like they're building on experience usually in smaller markets, and then they overtake the performance of the old market leading product.

So it's kind of like they change how we understand the market itself. And one of the problems in the use of the term disruption is that people say something disrupts, but they don't particularly are clear what is being disrupted. So in our case, we looked at sea control. And we said, okay so what is naval disruption then and we came up with or we kind of built on previous work done by one or two other academics who have looked at disruptive or we use disruption to to look at naval technology particularly someone like Ross or Terry Pierce who's a former or current U.S. naval officer and they've all looked at how technology has changed naval operations themselves So on the Navy side, what we talked about was a kind of technological disruption.

And, you know, would that be sustaining or disruptive, these technological developments? And in the article, we used two examples. One is HMS Dreadnought, which was obviously built by the British prior to World War I. And what that did was combine a large number of new technologies into one warfighting system that essentially made all previous battleships obsolete overnight, the minute it sailed. And you can make that argument that that was a disruptive technology. It changed the metric of how we understood what a battleship could do, essentially. whereas a kind of incremental technological development and i will use the example in the article is the the ford class aircraft carrier which is obviously on nearly every level better

than the prior nimitz class but it's essentially doing the same thing just doing it a little bit better and so that would be more of a sustaining technological innovation at sea so that's on the technological side and then obviously there's architectural or system innovations and that's when you start combining technologies to create some sort of war fighting effect and what we used in the article is uh you know carrier warfare where over a period of time going from world war one into world war two you know the technology aircraft technology was gradually perfected carrier technology was gradually made better as were the procedures to operate aircraft and then doctrine to utilize aircraft effectively and combining all that together what you had was

a significant change in warfighting at sea where the aircraft carrier and the aircraft on it kind of replaced the battleship as the primary surface tool of naval warfighting so that wasn't just one technology but multiple technologies working together to change how we understood warfare at sea and that would be described as a kind of architectural innovation or disruptive innovation so i don't know if that was a complicated answer but that's basically how we have how we came up with a described describing uh naval innovation disruptive innovation so that was a an excellent delineation of those different types of innovation on the mda side of the house sarah How is that perspective revolutionizing force in the surface and subsurface domains?

Yeah, that's a very good question, I think. And maybe just to add to what Ian just so splendidly explained, I think we had all these concepts in the past of network-centric warfare that were in some respects only concepts. So some parts of it already worked. But I think the fourth industrial revolution really brings the technologies to the forefront that can actually realize that concept of network-centric warfare in the way it was originally envisaged, intended. So in that way, it's maybe incremental

because something that already existed is finally being brought to fruition. But the new and perhaps revolutionary development, as you just mentioned, may be in maritime domain awareness and data processing, really. And I think it is the most noticeable and most revolutionary developments may be occurring in the subsurface domain. So relevant also to your work, Andrea. And I think the reason is the subsurface domain was more or less opaque in many ways in the past

and still today. And there was just no real-time situational awareness available really in the subsurface domain. And on the other hand, if you could have that, if you could have real-time situational awareness in the maritime domain, undersea, also on the surface, and in the air above the sea, that would be a precursor or something necessary to obtain the fullest possible type of control. So for exercising perfect sea control, you would need that.

You would need this perfect situational awareness. And what we're now seeing in terms of technological developments that enable a partial, you know real-time maritime domain awareness we have a multitude of unmanned systems aerial and maritime unmanned systems that can be deployed continuously to gather data all kinds of data from oceanographic data about salinity and so on but also imagery radar sig in what whatever and we can also of course look at these developments in b and multistatic sonar and if we combine all these types of sensor data that can be gathered continuously over an extended area all the time what we need is we need the capability to get all these data fused in real time and this is what

some of these mda technological developments really aim to achieve to have all these individual data gathering systems connected via data links up links for instance to satellites to communicate the data to a supercomputing center on land that has such vast computing power that is able to process all that in near real time and sift through it and actually find the patterns like finding the needle in the haystack that human analysts are just not capable of finding and this is actually already working on a smaller scale, I think, in some countries. So we have NATO countries and EU countries working together to enable that sort of anti-submarine warfare capability. And we have in China also a vast effort in the South China Sea to combine all kinds of systems that

I just mentioned with that supercomputing power. And I think that is really the thing that Submariners especially need to watch because it could end up making submarines much more vulnerable in some areas to some players, maybe only for some of the time, than they have ever been in the past. And that would really change the way perhaps that submarines can afford to place themselves at risk, which in the end could end up making unmanned submarines, robotic submarines or XLUUVs, sometimes the better, the more viable choice for some deployments, because they are just, you know, more losable in a way you can afford maybe to lose them where you would not risk a submarine. So this is what I think, personally, I'm not sure if Ian even agrees with that assessment, but I think this is perhaps the most potentially revolutionary development that we might be seeing that could really end up giving some players an edge in terms of attaining sea control. I certainly will agree with your analysis it is undoubtable that the content you write about in this article could revolutionize and change the way that submarines are operating in certain domains where we are trying to achieve that elusive sea control Ian would you agree with Sarah's definition as well and analysis absolutely I think we are seeing these these you know

developments coming and i think there is kind of qualification that for certain players in certain areas is a kind of very important important one i think maybe we'll talk about this a bit later but you know what states and countries can effectively operationalize this kind of subsurface mda is particularly interesting to look at and for me actually it is one thing operationalizing this kind of mda in peacetime but then when we turn into a contested near peer or peer competitive wartime environment how easy it is to do this mda i think might be a different question particularly when you're in a in a denied electromagnetic warfare environment where you don't have access to satellites potentially or your communications are disrupted or certain

networks that you're used to relying on at peacetime are gone then i think this becomes much more complex question and we talked earlier about the difference the difficulties of looking at you know this classified stuff this is when it becomes very difficult to assess how resilient these systems are because we just don't know because some of this classified and also we don't have many examples of this kind of warfare, if any, in a kind of near peer-to-peer environment. So, you know, Sarah, it's 100% right, but I think we should be a bit careful about saying this is going to be this way all the time. We don't know what it will look like, particularly in wartime. Right. Everything that you're saying strikes a chord with my submarine

heart and the fact that the focus is going to be on processing data on autonomous operations of systems and how well they are able to process that data. There might be still some human in the loop factors. And, you know, this is constantly in flux right now, at least with the United States Navy and with many of our of our peers and potential adversaries. So specifically looking at UUVs and USVs, so unmanned undersea and surface vehicles respectively. Ian, can you outline the timeline that it takes to actually get these technologies to mature and to be fielded? Sure. Timelines are difficult to narrow down because we don't have a

lot of examples of, you know, these systems that are fully operational at the moment, particularly publicly. But what we do know is that I think a lot of members of the public will look at UAVs and say, okay, this technology is rapidly diffusing, it's advanced, it's active, and we'll naturally think that this is also the case for, you know, USVs and UUVs. And we make the arguments in the article that this is not the case yet, and that the barriers for entry are much higher, and that the technological limitations to USVs and UUVs are much more complex. And, you know, they're complex in lots of different ways,

And particularly the distance between the operational area of the platform, the operational base, and then the operator present creates greater challenges at sea than it does at air. Essentially, the sea is a difficult environment to operate in. And, you know, it's a complex thing to get UUVs and UAVs working to the extent that some of the commentary suggests it will do in the future. you know there are issues over power requirements and not just for uh you know propulsion but also for use of sensors and weapons communications and these power requirements can be solved by battery technology but also like the size of the platform itself has to get bigger to accommodate bigger power platform power systems sorry and when you start getting bigger power systems and bigger ships my naval officer colleagues say well then you need people on board to maintain them because

things break at sea very easily and you know you this is a problem that probably hasn't been uh been resolved yet um communications particularly in the underwater environment what we know publicly are extremely difficult so we talk about this real-time transfer of of uh like mda data but from what we know at least you know uh uvs can't transmit through water easily significant amounts of data which means containing which means um you know maintaining a constant picture is quite complicated particularly one that's resilient this is what we know publicly at least and then also what you talked about andrea like the autonomy side of There was a really good study, I think it's from 2019, by Rand, which suggests that we are still quite a long way from having a kind of very autonomous operating, you know, these systems operating in autonomous ways because the numbers of tasks they have to do are, you know, so large that, you know, the technology just isn't there yet, but will be at some stage in the future.

I think also, you know, what we're seeing now on unmanned surface vehicles, you know, we have Israel had a smaller platform. I think Singapore operates it as well. We have one report in our article that Israel actually stopped using this surface system because it's just not effective in heavy waters. You know, it just doesn't operate particularly well. So there are still significant challenges that we can see for these to the kind of this technology to diffuse and become common in the future beyond the kind of limited capabilities that we're seeing now that keep on popping up in the South China Sea, the Chinese survey glider thing that the Indonesians found or vice versa, the American and other capabilities that pop up every now and again. And so to sum it all up, I think we're looking at a bit of an extended timeline still before what we can imagine the potential of UUVs and USVs, you know, to be fully operational. Beyond, you know, Norway now or a lot of the European navies, I think the US Navy as well operates a kind of mine warfare system that is closely connected to a surface support vessel. And I think that's where we are now in terms of technology.

so Ian that was a perfect synopsis of where we are in this process of development and some of the barriers that are being faced in your study you too chose to focus on the Baltic Sea in the South China Sea for analysis of of the progress and timelines for these domains so Sarah can you outline how 4IR technologies are impacting a potential conflict in the South China Sea yeah sure I can try at least so basically when you look at the situation in the South China Sea we have one very large player and very advanced player, which is China, that is faced with a number of smaller littoral powers that contest China's extensive claims there. And China tries to impose control basically over that maritime area. And China actually tries to do that by

creating a maritime domain awareness capability that covers basically the entire area. There's even a planned dedicated space infrastructure a satellite constellation dedicated to monitoring south china sea all the time on different frequencies so radar and optic and infrared so it can pierce the clouds and day or night is not an issue so that is is the ambition the level of ambition that china has but so far china is not able of course to exercise sea control in that area. We know that United States and also France have regularly been sending warships into the South China Sea, very close actually to Chinese claimed territories. Aircraft carriers have been operating there. And very recently, we've heard that the French have operated a nuclear attack

submarine in the South China Sea. So that is what China hopes to put a stop to. And And littoral countries, on their hand, have started to bolster their submarine capabilities, I think, to have a sea denial capability against the potential threat from China. So what we're seeing is this very fascinating attempt by China to use 4IR technologies extensively to create this vast maritime domain awareness capability that we've been talking about previously in a theoretical sense. So they are trying to build this up in practice. So we've been seeing everything that was already mentioned and even more. So they have created swimming platforms for the data gathering purpose. They have vast sonoboy arrangements. They have these deep sea cables that are connected to hydrophones.

And some of these systems that they use are connected to buoys on the surface of the water that have a satellite uplink. They have these dedicated satellites that are already mentioned. And they use all kinds of unmanned systems, aerial as well as maritime, to gather data and to exploit the data with supercomputing centers on land. So what we're seeing is we're seeing a practical application of all these concepts that we've been talking about. And I think there's actually no other area in the world where we can see in real time what it looks like if one of the great powers tries to utilize 4IR technologies to such an extent at such speed. Because China is really funding this generously, so they can even focus on highly experimental technologies, such as a deep sea station run by an AI as a base for robotic submarines. This is actually a concept that they're working on, as we know from some press reports. This is something that most countries would find just too expensive and too experimental to even think about.

But in China, these things are just done and tried. And though some of them may come to nothing, ultimately, a lot of progress is nonetheless probably going to be made. Definitely affirm that the South China Sea is one of the most difficult operating environments for our navies. Ian, how does this compare to the Baltic Sea? Well, the Baltic Sea is kind of fundamentally different, I think. We picked the Baltic Sea and the South China Sea because they're both kind of enclosed seas, but also they're both relatively contested seas. but they're also significant contrasts. So you talked earlier, Andrew, about Putin coming out and saying,

we're going to develop these technologies, but Russia essentially struggles to operationalize a lot of these 4IR technologies or realize their goals for our realm, but they just don't have the resources to do it. The strategic situation in the Baltic Sea is kind of characterized by what is essentially significant Russian weaknesses. People have looked at Klingengrad and said, well, Russia can operationalize something that the West has imposed,

this concept of a bastion defense out of Klingengrad. But the best research coming out of Denmark and Norway on that is that, well, that probably is not going to be that effective over the longer term if war fighting happens because NATO capabilities can degrade the Russian systems in Kaliningrad gradually or relatively easily. They just run out of weapons to deploy. So we looked at the Baltic from a kind of NATO perspective and how the 4IR could help NATO in a time of crisis.

And the Baltic Sea is going to be, unlike the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea is going to be a kind of secondary theater. you know the like the main war fighting is going to be on land in europe it's not going to be at sea so the baltic sea for nato is important because it's a it's a route through which nato could deliver reinforcements onto the land theater so for nato you know maritime domain awareness ensuring they know where russian capabilities are it's extremely important and while they're not there yet this is where 4ir technologies can come into play in terms of making sure they control and understand the subsurface environment even though it's extremely difficult to operate submarines in the Baltic Sea from what we understand but ensuring they know

where Russian capabilities are at all times so if war does break out they can easily manage that problem and obtain sea control in order to ensure a kind of smooth transit of reinforcements into the european operational theater so that's for nato where the four army becomes quite advantageous and i think at the end of our article our section on the baltic we do make an argument that you know larger usvs and uuvs would strike capabilities could you know assist in degrading russian capabilities essentially sailing unmanned systems close to clining rad and then using or We're launching a large number of strike capabilities at Kaliningrad. But essentially, that's just, you know, doing what other systems could do anyway.

So, like, that's, you know, it's sustaining the warfight concept. Whereas if NATO can get its act together and operationalize some sort of 4IR MDA system within the Baltic, well, that could change the game or make it significantly easier to obtain sea control in the Baltic should a conflict break out. Absolutely. So two pretty dynamic domains with different challenges that the parties at play are going to have to conquer. Where to wrap this up, I would really highly encourage our listeners to go look at your article and make their own conclusions as well as about they think these 4IR technologies are going to be challenging the balance of power at sea or affirming. you guys mostly say you believe it'll affirm the existing order based off you know as sarah outlined the rapidity of a player like china vice the level developments in the baltic sea so i want to give you each one last question and you can also just tell us where you are online

what so to speak is keeping you up at night about these topics that you wrote on and like i said how can we keep in touch with you sarah can you go first sure well what is keeping me up at night And personally, even though the Russians do not have the same level of funding available in their arms development, I think they're creating some pretty scary systems. And those are literally keeping me up at night sometimes. So what I'm particularly worried about are these autonomous nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed doomsday drones that they're creating, such as Poseidon, the torpedo-sized thing, the UUV, and then the Skyfall cruise missile that is also nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed. And we have seen that these systems, which would have an unlimited range and would be able to cause really catastrophic destruction, they are just as capable as at causing, you know, devastating accidents with radiation pollution while they're being tested, as we have seen. And even that seems not to deter the Russians from pursuing these technologies, even when other countries have long abandoned such programs because they're just not, you know, you can't just control that. So this is what I'm really, really scared about, that some countries are really pursuing systems that I think should not be built. And so I'm sorry, but they are being built and they are being developed and they are being tested.

That is something that we really need to think about. In terms of how can I be found online, I'm on LinkedIn, not on Twitter, I'm afraid. Though I hear they sometimes talk about me on Twitter, but I'm blissfully ignorant of it. So go on talking if you want. I won't hear about it. Yeah, that's it. But I'm easy to find online with lots of talks and info. And our institute also has a website.

Great. Thank you so much, Sarah. And same question for you, Ian. what keeps you up and how can we find you what keeps me up uh probably two things one not particularly naval related but it is related to what we talk about which is the kind of increasing advancement of conventional weapon systems and naval weapon systems and their increasing precision and how they're interacting with nuclear weapon systems i i find this quite scary so there's a lot of good work being done on this but the kind of interaction between nuclear

deterrence and conventional capabilities i find a little bit scary these days and then the other thing that is keeping me up or i think about a lot is when we do get to a level of autonomy what does that look like in contested naval environments so when you have different you know autonomous systems operating around each other you know what does that mean for escalation dynamics what does that mean for conflict at sea and particularly as you know someone from the west where, you know, the US, NATO, all these countries have kind of confirmed that they want to keep a man in the loop within the decision making chain. And with our opposition or potential opposition, do the same thing. And will that give them significant advantage in the future?

That kind of worries me. And what that looks like, not in the next five years, but 10, 15 years down the line. I think that's something that needs to be thought about a lot. and I'm hoping it is being done behind closed doors that people are doing that but that's keeps me up at night and I can be found on Twitter and on LinkedIn and on Facebook and then yeah my institute also has a website you can find me too. Fantastic I hope our listeners keep in touch that's unfortunately all we have time for today I'd like to thank my guests Dr. Ian Bauer and Dr. Sarah Kirshberger for joining us and Sea Control is produced by Ed Salo and William McQuiston. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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