Friday, October 23, 2020

DOD Posts Webpage to Aid in Reporting Civilian Casualties

Oct. 23, 2020 | BY Jim Garamone , DOD News

The U.S. military goes to extraordinary lengths to protect civilians on the battlefield, but sometimes casualties occur.

The department has now created a website so people can report information on civilian casualties.

The webpage lists the email and postal mailing addresses of the combatant commands so those with information on civilian casualties can contact the commands. Currently, the website language is only English, but officials are looking at ways to and broaden the reach of the effort.

A screenshot shows a webpage with written information as well as a world map.

Killing or wounding civilians is never the intended outcome of war, defense officials have repeatedly stressed. It goes against the ethos of the military as well as the laws of war. It's not at all consistent with U.S. tactical, operational or strategic objectives. The U.S. military is always looking to mitigate the potential for civilian harm of any kind, when conducting military operations. 

"I know firsthand from my own experience that — beyond losing one of our own in battle — a commander feels nothing more painfully than the accidental loss of civilian life," said Anthony Tata, who is performing the duties of the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. "We are therefore actively working to advance our ability to mitigate civilian harm, and to respond when it occurs. As part of these efforts, it is critical that we ensure that members of the public are able to provide the Defense Department with information regarding incidents in which U.S. military operations may have [resulted in the injury or death of] civilians."

"Civilians often endure intense suffering in war," said Stephanie Hammond, the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability and humanitarian affairs. "It is a tragic and sobering fact that we take very seriously. That is why the U.S. has continued to demonstrate leadership in employing the latest technologies to mitigate civilian harm, and continues to advance our ability to prevent civilian harm when possible and to respond when it occurs."

But civilian casualties are a part of conflict. In the past, weapons were crude and not that accurate. During World War II, if bombers got their weapons within the same grid square as the target, it was considered extremely successful.

Today, the United States has the guided munitions and the intelligence apparatus to hit targets precisely. This lessens the risk of civilian casualties. It does not, however, eliminate them.

Killing or injuring civilians today is usually the result of incomplete or faulty intelligence. It could also be because of a vague or wrong description of a target.

"It is important that we assess the outcomes of U.S. military operations, including inadvertent effects on civilians," Tata said. "This helps us to understand the outcomes of our operations, acknowledge when our operations result in civilian casualties and learn from our experiences to reduce the likelihood of future civilian harm from our operations."

No other country goes to these lengths to prevent civilian casualties, said defense officials. Close allies operating with the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are taking note of U.S. efforts in this realm.

The webpage is just a start. The Defense Department is developing a comprehensive department-wide policy on civilian harm mitigation and response. It will be the first of its kind, Hammond said. 

The website can be found at: https://policy.defense.gov/OUSDP-Offices/Reporting-Civilian-Casualties/.

Defense Secretary Esper Travels to India and the Region

 Oct. 23, 2020


Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper will travel to India and other countries in the region, October 25 – 29. 

In New Delhi, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Secretary Esper and their Indian counterparts will lead the third annual U.S.-India 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue to advance the U.S.-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership and expand cooperation to promote stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and the world.

Pensive Pilot

 

Air Force Capt. David Cotter, a pilot assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, sits in the cockpit of a U-2 Dragon Lady at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., Oct. 14, 2020.

Flight Watch

 

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Muneeb Ajlouni watches a CH-53 Sea Stallion take off with a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System during training in Okinawa, Japan, Oct. 19, 2020.

Unboxing Boxes

 

Air National Guard Spc. Carlos Gracia unloads boxes of food during COVID-19 response efforts in Tucson, Ariz., Oct. 22, 2020.

Soaring Sam

 

Air Force Senior Airman Theresa Braak and military working dog Sam negotiate a window obstacle in the obedience yard at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Oct. 8, 2020.

Funeral Honors

 

Soldiers assigned to the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” and members of “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band conduct modified military funeral honors with funeral escort for Marine Corps Reserve Pvt. 1st Class Charles Miller at Arlington National Cemetery, Va., Oct. 23, 2020. Miller was killed in 1943 during the World War II Battle of Tarawa. His remains were recovered in 2009 and positively identified in 2020.

Radio Ready

 

A soldier attaches long-range radio equipment to a Humvee at Fort Greely, Alaska, Oct. 22, 2020.

Readout of Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper's Remarks at Day Two of the NATO Defense Ministerial

 Oct. 23, 2020


Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper provided remarks during the second day of the NATO Defense Ministerial today. His remarks focused on NATO’s ongoing missions, readiness, the importance of presenting a credible deterrent, and ensuring the Alliance can fight and win should deterrence fail. 

On Afghanistan, the Secretary offered our thoughts and prayers for the Romanian soldiers who were wounded outside of Kandahar Airfield on October 21 in an IED attack, and noted that the attack is under investigation by Resolute Support. The Secretary thanked Allies for their continued commitment to the mission, and expressed encouragement by the progress in the peace process despite the challenges. The Secretary noted that the high level of violence by the Taliban jeopardizes this historic opportunity for peace.  Secretary Esper assured the NATO defense ministers that the U.S. will continue to consult with Allies and partners on changes in force posture to ensure the Alliance can adjust together, and when the time is right, leave together.

On Iraq, the Secretary reiterated the U.S. commitment to the enduring defeat of ISIS and long-term regional stability. He welcomed an expanded role for the NATO Mission Iraq, and noted the importance of the safety and security of our diplomatic and military personnel.

Viper Fuel

 

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Austin Carroll refuels an AH-1Z Viper during training at Marine Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Calif., Oct. 16, 2020.

Army Financial Management Office Partners With DOD for AI Solutions

 Oct. 23, 2020 | BY C. Todd Lopez , DOD News

The Army has multiple enterprise financial management IT systems, some decades old, that account for the majority of the service's financial, acquisition, and logistic transactions. These systems communicate transactions in a variety of ways through a complex architecture, but that communication is far from perfect. When a financial system communicates inconsistent or no data to another system, it creates a problem that requires human intervention.  

"One of our consistent issues within Army financial management is caused by our large portfolio of legacy systems executing hundreds of thousands of transactions per week with one another,'' said Jonathan Moak, who serves as Army's principal deputy assistant secretary for financial management and comptroller within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Financial Management and Comptroller (ASA (FM&C)). ''Incorrect information is often generated or reflected in a system during these constant transactions, which can create the issue called an unmatched transaction.''

A computer-generated face is rendered in blue lines.

Army's Financial Management and Comptroller

The Army experienced somewhere between two and three million of these unmatched transactions (UMTs) in the 2019 fiscal year, driven by its multiple enterprise system, each built with different requirements. These UMTs, all of which need correcting, have included inaccurate data of obligations for financial payments and issues with the mismatching fields between a financial and logistics supply system.

"It's a big problem...with a total value of several billion dollars,'' said Moak. ''These mismatches lead to a general lack of accountability, funds control, and have a negative impact on buying power – all of which are critical to auditability."

Before the Army can be deemed auditable, a majority of these UMTs must be resolved. Resolving just one UMT is a labor intensive process that can take multiple hours. Since there are currently millions of UMTs that need resolving, the problem cannot be solved by manual labor alone.

The Army is building the requirements to field a core enterprise system where UMTs are not created in the first place. In the interim, Moak said that a team led by Chase Levinson in ASA (FM&C) has implemented robotic process automation, or RPA, to help resolve UMTs as they occur.

RPA is an automation tool where RPA ''bots'' follow the strict business rules given to them by developers. "RPA relies on conditional statements that say if you see this, then do this, which requires a well-defined process with very clear rules to fix a UMT,'' said Levinson. 

However, Levinson said that some UMTs do not always have a clear path to resolution, which means that when the RPA bot can't resolve the UMT, humans still have to fix them manually. 

According to Moak, continuing this process with UMTs is not an optimal use of manpower, which can be redirected to higher-level financial management operations and analysis by implementing a more effective solution.   

''Our priority is to give the right tools to our workforce to accomplish the mission at the greatest level of efficiency,'' said Moak. 

Silhouetted people stand near each other.  A computer-generated face is superimposed over them.

Artificial Intelligence

To further add to its capabilities to solve the UMT problem within its financial management enterprise, the Army turned to the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the Defense Innovation Unit.

While the Army was already using robotic process automation as a partial solution, a new solution, driven by artificial intelligence, could be even better. A well-trained AI-driven solution would better be able to deal with the variety of nuances that crop up due to the large number of financial systems the Army uses and the wide variety of transactions that take place.

"The Army came to us with this issue, saying that they had tried to do some initial modeling to automatically resolve these errors without human intervention, but hadn't been successful" said Rachael Martin, Mission Chief for Business Process Transformation at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

Martin said the Army wanted to know if there was anything JAIC could do to help them not only build out a capability to help resolve problems with UMTs, but also have the capacity to do a better job in the future building predictive models and unburden human analysts from unnecessary work. 

Martin said JAIC worked with the Defense Innovation Unit to identify existing best practices in the industry that might help the Army fix the problem with UMTs. She also said that at the same time, the Comptroller within the Office of the Secretary of Defense became interested in the effort, as OSD had problems similar to those of the Army.

"We were able to leverage the resources we allocated to support the Army to bring in a similar use case from Comptroller, and do some really innovative industry competition," Martin said. "We awarded contracts to two different companies with different approaches to building a UMT model so that we could test both and find the most promising solution.''

It was DIU that put out a request for industry solutions. The DIU, with headquarters in Silicon Valley, maintains relationships with best-in-breed vendors focused on solving similar problems for commercial customers from across the country and can quickly bring the best of what's happening in the commercial world to the Defense Department.

A graphic depicting a human hand touching a computer-generated image of a hand.

"When DIU put out requests for solution briefs, we received over 50 from commercial AI companies. And from there, they were down-selected through a couple of different rounds, and used demonstrations to help us down-select and interview them," said Eric Dorsey, the government contractor who is the project manager on the DIU team. "It finally came down to two companies to award what's called prototype contracts."

 Now, each of those companies has been assigned to work with either the Army or the OSD comptroller to find an AI-driven solution to solve problems like the Army has with UMTs, Dorsey said.

The two companies will have about six months to accomplish their work, Dorsey added.

"Using machine logic, which is more sophisticated than RPA — the goal is to solve up to 70% of these UMTs automatically and correct them," Dorsey said. "The result is we could save millions of labor hours for the Army and the DOD each year."

After six months of work, around mid-March 2021, both companies will have completed their work with the Army and the OSD comptroller and will have working prototypes. The Army and comptroller will then go into field trials and decide, ultimately, if they want to go into production with the product, Dorsey said.

"We're hoping to take lessons learned with these efforts and scale to the other branches of the military — Navy, Air Force, Marines — to also help them solve some of their unmatched transaction problems in their accounting system," he said.

While the work of the JAIC and DIU may eventually help multiple services and the OSD, Moak said bringing in AI assets for financial work is going to be a necessity for the Army going forward. 

''Our collaboration with DIU and JAIC on this effort is a tremendous opportunity for Army financial management, and will hopefully inspire others,'' said Moak. ''Applying these innovative tools now allows us to shift our focus to optimize our systems environment, and building a core enterprise system — a sustainable solution for improving financial operations.''

6-Ship Formation

 

The Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s flight demonstration team, perform a 6-ship formation over Oklahoma, Oct. 22, 2020, over Oklaho

Bumping Fists

 

Air Force Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Pennington, Fourth Air Force commander, greets two airmen following training at the Tactics and Leadership Nexus, Dover Air Force Base, Del., Oct. 17, 2020.

Disinterment Ceremony

 

Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Austin Blocker and Army Sgt. 1st Class Richard Walton, service members attached to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, place a flag on a casket during a disinterment ceremony at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Oct. 19, 2020. The ceremony was part of the agency’s efforts to disinter and identify the remains of unknown service members lost during World War II.

Food Delivery

 

Air National Guard Spc. Carlos Gracia and Staff Sgt. Ronnie Lazar unload food to be distributed to residents in Tucson, Ariz. Oct. 22, 2020, while supporting COVID-19 response efforts.

Needle Know-How

 

Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Sheila Laungrath, a hospital corpsman, prepares to administer the flu vaccine to a Marine at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., Oct. 22, 2020. The station’s medical clinic has COVID-19 mitigation measures in place while providing the flu vaccine.

Alpine Outlook

 

An Army CH-47F Chinook sits atop a mountain in the Alps in Germany, Oct. 21, 2020.

Friendly Force

 

A soldier interacts with a child while meeting with villagers in northeastern Syria, Oct. 15, 2020. The soldiers are supporting Operation Inherent Resolve.