Over the past six months, the 1st MDTF deployed 16 cells across 10 time zones to support five named joint or bilateral exercises, said Brig. Gen. Bernard Harrington, 1st MDTF commander. The cells are task-organized and can be as small as a three-soldier team and as large as a company or battery.

The 1st MDTF saw its first major use during the naval exercise Rim of the Pacific in 2018. Since then, they’ve added capabilities, personnel and equipment to play a role in Orient Shield and Talisman Saber in 2019.

Early exercises put into practice what had previously been merely concepts, Harrington told an audience on Wednesday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.

What that work has accomplished already is a way for the Army to establish its own “interior lines,” or forward presence, near China to push back against their protective anti-access/area denial bubble.

But they’re not doing that by massing tanks on warships along the coasts. Instead, they’re using a variety of measures — radios, radar, cyber and old-fashioned missiles — to highlight the reach of the Army and its partner forces.

Harrington noted that China has its advantages on its own turf. It has all its forces available and a deep magazine to fire offensively or in defense.

“It’s very hard to close that gap with mass and magazine depth,” he said.

In the old days, Harrington added, a unit would work up to a partner exercise, conduct the exercise and go home and wait for the next exercise. But new practices make a persistent forward presence the norm.

That presence helps build those interior lines and extend them over time.

Newly appointed commander of the 3rd MDTF, formed in September, Col. David Zinn, made a clear distinction between the MDTFs now versus the early years of their inception.

“We are not an experimental formation, we are an operational formation,” Zinn said.

Experimentation will still continue, as it did in Forager 2021, also a Pacific military exercise. That exercise saw the first synchronization of all assets — land, air, maritime, cyber, space and electronic warfare.

Then, at RIMPAC 2022 the task force fused the four things it must do to be successful — sink ships, shoot down missiles, neutralize satellites and jam an enemy’s command and control.

The force set its sights on a vessel off the coast of Hawaii during a joint ship sinking event.

Soldiers coordinated near simultaneous effects, using space assets, to shut down satellites. They used live electronic warfare attacks to jam communications. A cyber team isolated the vessel’s connection to headquarters. And then a long-range strike was launched, Harrington said.

And while they conducted that attack, a Mississippi Army National Guard unit ran air defense for the task force.

The Army has slated 1st and 3rd MDTFs for more than 15 exercises in eight countries with plans to add more than 1,400 personnel from 39 Army branches over the next year, Harrington added.

Those exercises include Project Convergence-Pacific, Northern Edge, Orient Shield, Yudh Abhyas, Tiger Balm, Balikatan and Talisman Sabre.

Also, next year, 3rd MDTF is expected to reach initial operational capability and the Army expects to field both its mid-range, 1,000 kilometer strike capability and a long-range hypersonic weapon in the region, Harrington said.

Australia is investing millions of dollars into research and development to close gaps in the country’s cyber defense apparatus, they told the Australian Defence Science, Technology and Research Summit in Sydney on June 20.

And while the talent pool for workers with for AI and machine learning in Australia is deep, Anton van den Hengel, director of the Centre for Augmented Reasoning at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, said their are simply not enough jobs and career opportunities in the country to keep them at home.

“We’ve made very little — very little — progress towards artificial intelligence,” he said.

The U.S. faces a critical cyber labor shortage, with some 700,000 cybersecurity positions open nationwide, according to estimates from the White House. More than 35,000 job openings are currently posted on the Indeed hiring wesbite using the search term “Artificial Intelligence.”

Van den Hengel, who also works as a director of applied science at Amazon, and other industry leaders at the summit pointed to the government’s inability to compete with tech companies as a major issue when expanding the country’s AI abilities. In both the U.S. and Australia, governments come up against the draw of private industry, creating high salary costs and other the hurdles to attracting and retaining talent.

“Defense no longer has the best tech,” he said, noting that private companies have committed billions of dollars to develop technologies and have the open positions to attract workers in the AI field.

The Defence Science and Technology Group, a part of the Australian defense department aimed at providing science and technology support to national security interests, hosted the summit.

Private-sector competition intensifies for AI talent

With high salaries and access to breaking-edge technologies, the private AI field has become increasingly lucrative. In recent years, many western counties, including the U.S., have turned to the private sector to compete with investments made by China.

Van den Hengel said outsourcing to the private sector only goes so far. Governments have to try and keep track of the technologies coming out of companies while also trying to understand them deeply enough to figure out their defense applications, he said.

In November, the Australian government said it would invest $10 million in innovative AI tech. The move followed the September announcement that Australia would partner with Britain and U.S. in a new working group, known by the acronym AUKUS, to share advanced technologies, including AI.

Kate Devitt, the chief scientist of Trusted Autonomous Systems, said Australia specifically needs experts in the field of deep learning and natural language processing compared to companies such as Google and Meta as well as specialists in reinforcement learning.

“We lack the digital infrastructure and investment required to enable the human capital with these skills to flourish in universities,” she said. “These gaps make Australia vulnerable and dependent on the choices of our allies and our rivals.”

Trusted Autonomous Systems is Australia’s first defense cooperative research center. It partners the country’s defense industry and research organizations with Australia’s defense department to develop autonomous and robotic technology.

While Devitt said the “obvious” answer is more investment in technical AI capabilities and infrastructure, she said that Australia needs to be decisive in its investments. As a medium-sized country, the government must use its limited resources to make “scrappy” decisions that yield outsized impacts, she said.

At the Nov. 28 Association of Old Crows’ International Symposium and Convention, Air Force Gen. Stephen Wilson, the service’s vice chief of staff, emphasized his branch’s increased focus on Electronic Ware (EW). As a result, the Air Force is launching the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT) to further research the subject, Breaking Defense reported.

However, Wilson said the Air Force must go beyond simply strengthening what has worked in the past. He emphasized the need for both efficiency and innovation for the team as the Air Force wants EW capabilities that not only have stronger performance, but also adapt to changing conflict environments.

[Read more about EW in our ebook: Electronic Warfare Cyber Convergence]

As a means to facilitate the Air Force’s newfound EW focus, the service awarded L3 a contract to develop the Gulfstream 550 Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft, aka EC-X, as an EW platform. Defense Tech reports that as of now, EC-X’s focus will be on jamming enemy command control communications, such as radio, computers and radar.

ECCT is the third such study the Air Force is undertaking as part of its efforts to better synthesize air, cyber, and space-based combat abilities for future conflict. C4ISRNET had previously reported that these newfound measures, collectively called MDC2, are to ensure that the Air Force is ready for the 2030s military environment, where the focus will be on stifling enemy defense capabilities through multi-domain electronics and cyberspace.