In the trenchesU.S. Air Force's Technology Horizons highlights service's futuristic plans

With innovations seemingly plucked from the latest futuristic Hollywood movie script, Technology Horizons outlines the Air Force’s major science and technology objectives through the next decade, officials said last week.

Highly adaptable, autonomous systems that can make intelligent decisions about their battle space capabilities and human-machine brainwave coupling interfaces are but two significant technologies contained in the document, said Dr. Werner J.A. Dahm, the Air Force chief scientist.

“These are hands down, slam dunk, among the biggest findings in Technology Horizons; this is one of those ‘a-ha’ moments for the Air Force,” Dahm said. “If you come back 20 years from now, you’ll see an Air Force that looks substantially different than what you see today, and it will look that different, in part, because of Technology Horizons.”

Tech. Sgt. Amaani Lyle writes that Air Force Research Laboratory engineers will use the document to help plan technologies of the future, and have already begun implementing some of the key findings in Technology Horizons.

“We will be making greater use of autonomous systems, reasoning and processes in almost everything the Air Force does,” Dahm said. “This is not only in terms of increasing and enhancing remote-piloted aircraft, but in developing new ways of letting systems learn about their situations to decide how they can adapt to best meet the operator’s intent.”

He described how future autonomous aircraft would be able to sense battle damage and make intelligent decisions about their remaining capabilities. “Such adaptable autonomous systems will be able to automatically re-plan their mission to maximize their effectiveness,” Dahm explained. “In decision-making systems and processes, these systems can give us a tremendous operational edge over potential adversaries who are limited to human decision and control.”

He explained that in today’s combined air operations centers, for example, there are several hundred people involved in assembling daily air tasking orders. Adaptable autonomous decision-making systems can handle many of these steps, reducing the number of people who must be deployed.

Such advanced levels of autonomy, Dahm added, complement another key focus of Technology Horizons: human performance augmentation.

“Natural human capacities are becoming increasingly mismatched to the data volumes, processing capabilities and decision speeds that technologies either offer or demand,” Dahm said.

He said autonomous systems and advanced human-machine interfaces are among ways the service can meet this rapidly growing challenge. “To identify threats in full-motion video, we can outfit a helmet with literally hundreds of