
The revolving door…


They look like they were cast straight from an episode of Black Mirror, and eventually, their mission could be similar in some ways, but for now, robot dogs are stretching their legs in the big test exercise environment for the United States Air Force.
Last week, the U.S. Air Force hosted the second demonstration of its new Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a digital battle network system designed to collect, process, and share data among U.S. and allied forces in real-time. The ABMS has already undergone several tests, including a live-fire exercise earlier this year conducted with data and communications provided, in part, by SpaceX Starlink satellites.
The highlight of last week’s demonstration was the use of multiple distributed sensors to detect and shoot down mock Russian cruise missiles. The system involves 5G and 4G networks, cloud computing systems, and AI systems to provide an unprecedented level of situational awareness and course of action decision making. ABMS is a top modernization priority for the Department of the Air Force, which is dedicated $3.3 billion over five years to develop and deploy the architecture and related systems. Senior Air Force leaders cite the system as one of the most pressing capabilities for success in several key theaters of operations.
This latest ABMS demonstration was described as being one of the largest joint experiments in recent history, involving 65 government teams from every service including the Coast Guard, 35 separate military platforms, and 70 different industry partners. The exercise spanned 30 different geographic locations and four national test ranges.



One of our readers reached out early this evening—September 1st, 2020—letting me know he saw a formation of four MH-6 Little Birds flying in tight formation over Interstate 5 near downtown Los Angeles. I joked at the time that it will be just a matter of hours until people start freaking out due to the urban training operations they were likely about to execute. Just like clockwork, a few hours after the sun had set, the social media posts began emerging. People couldn’t understand what they were seeing, and how can you blame them? Watching blacked-out little helicopters, most of which usually run with no lights, ripping low over rooftops, landing on tall buildings and quickly departing, and even flying down city streets, is certainly concerning—any action movie will tell you that. But the reality is that it’s only the world’s best helicopter pilots that are tasked with the hardest missions practicing to fight future wars and to respond to terrorist incidents in what the Pentagon has dubbed ‘megacities.’


Edgar Mitchell, who rocketed into space as part of the Apollo 14 team to become the sixth man on the moon, claims that members of the U.S. Air Force saw UFOs flying over U.S. missile bases and the White Sands facility in New Mexico preparing to disarm the United States if a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia became imminent.
Mitchell grew up near the New Mexico sites, telling Mirror Online:
You don’t know the area like I do. White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons – and that’s what the extraterrestrials were interested in. They wanted to know about our military capabilities. My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth.
Mitchell said the officers whom he spoke to mentioned frequent sightings during the Cold war, adding, “They told me UFOs were frequently seen overhead and often disabled their missiles. Other officers from bases on the Pacific coast told me their (test) missiles were frequently shot down by alien spacecraft.”
With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones and autonomous submarines.
So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.
Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency. Every component of a modern general staff — including battle planning, intelligence-gathering, logistics, communications, and decision-making — is, according to the Pentagon’s latest plans, to be turned over to complex arrangements of sensors, computers, and software.
All these will then be integrated into a “system of systems,” now dubbed the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control, or JADC2 (since acronyms remain the essence of military life). Eventually, that amalgam of systems may indeed assume most of the functions currently performed by American generals and their senior staff officers.
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