U.S. Transportation Command will likely leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enable autonomous logistics in the years ahead, U.S. Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, the head of the command, said on June 6.
“I think the future for autonomous capabilities in logistics is wide open,” she told a Brookings Institution virtual forum. “I think about, in the future, do we need to have a crew in an air refueling airplane or an aircraft that’s just carrying cargo? The future is here with respect to ships, as some of them are autonomous–barges that move Class 1 or Class 3 [cargo] around. The Navy is doing experiments with UAVs to do smaller package movements out to ships so they don’t have to come into port because coming into port has a series of threats on its own.”
“The manpower would be used as sort of a man-in-the-loop or over-the-loop–analyzing and doing the higher level of work, while the rote easier, laborious work is done by autonomous systems,” Van Ovost said.
At the top of the command’s concerns for future readiness are several dozen roll-on/roll-off ships that are “an average of 44 years old,” she said. “In fact, 17 of those [roll-on/roll-off ships] are over 50 [years old]. That’s way beyond useful life so we’re in a recapitalization program with them. As we’re moving forward with the [U.S.] Navy on that, we are purchasing foreign-built, used ships to replenish, just for readiness, our roll-on/roll-off ships. But our U.S. merchant mariners–we have a shortfall, I am concerned about the health of the mariners–so I’m working closely with the Department of Transportation Maritime Administration [MARAD] on the health of the mariners. That’s about recruiting, retaining, quality of life/quality of service so that we can recruit into this career field because, especially after COVID, they took a huge hit. There’s a lot of highly skilled areas in transportation I’m concerned about like railway engineers, truck drivers, and pilots, but the merchant mariners are the ones I’m the most concerned about.”
The roll-on/roll-off ships are part of MARAD’s Ready Reserve Force (RRF) to provide surge sealift for DoD.
In March, Crowley said that it is buying the M/V Honor and M/V Freedom from the American Roll-On Roll-Off Carrier Group to aid RRF recapitalization (Defense Daily, March 22).
In the June 6 Brookings forum, Van Ovost gave a shoutout to what she envisions AI providing in the years ahead as the U.S. looks to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.
“The best way to survive is to understand the battlespace,” she said. “We’re working very hard on that to command and control and iterate. Command and control is about that data–using responsible AI and machine learning to be able to pull in data feeds to try to sense the environment, where are the threats, sense where the assets are, where the needs are, and marry them up very quickly because I have to scale up 10 times to what I’m doing right now in a high-end conflict.”