Part 6 – Implications for DefenceEngage
Alliances. Differences in cultural and legal approaches, as well as financial resources, will
lead to uneven uptake of human augmentation within alliances and this will complicate
the challenge of interoperability and integration. Human augmentation technologies will
have greater impact if they are adopted across alliances and therefore work must begin
now to prepare for their use. Bioinformatics will be vital for understanding how human
augmentation could and should be employed and interoperability in this area should,
therefore, be a priority. Protocols for sharing sensitive personal information with allies will
need to be developed; those that govern the sharing of intelligence could provide a useful
template.
New concepts. Thinking about war and how it is fought is unavoidably influenced by
the weapons and technology of the time. Some technologies – big guns and machine
guns – have changed the character of the battlefield while others – the bomber and the
Internet – have expanded our concept of what the ‘battlefield’ is. Human augmentation
will change both. In the next 30 years individual soldiers will create increased and more
varied operational effects and this will change how we fight, with implications for our
force structure, equipment programme and doctrine. Like the cyber and electromagnetic
domain, human augmentation has the potential to blur the boundaries between war
and peace, home and abroad, and this will exacerbate the difficulty of attributing acts of
aggression and maintaining credible deterrence.
Sustain
Human augmentation will require sustainment: power, software maintenance
and upgrades, engineering and medical support will all be needed. These will be
interdisciplinary in nature and require specialist skills and equipment. Some human
augmentation technologies will be dependent on a highly complex network of suppliers
and contractors – and managing them will be a challenge. The supply chain would
need to be secure to ensure that those skills would be available at any time to respond
to aggressive actions. Sustainment will also need to be delivered in austere, high threat
environments. Development of robotics and power-cell technology may mitigate some
sustainment challenges but not all of them. Future frontline medical technicians may need
to have knowledge of robotics, systems engineering and 3D printing to deliver adequate
care to injured personnel. It may not be feasible to deliver this care with only one person,
which will change the ratio of enablers to operators and introduce further sustainment
challenges.
Direct
Thinking of the person as a platform and taking a human-centric approach to capability
development will have significant implications for how Defence is organised. Our
current structures are the product of Industrial Age warfare where people were simply
the components of units or used to operate platforms. This made it possible to divide
personnel, training, equipment, health and management into separate organisational
functions. The interdisciplinary nature of human augmentation and the fact that the
individual is now a platform will render this approach ineffective and Defence will need to
reorganise.