Reoptimization for Great Power Competition

“I’m extremely proud of the Space Force and all the good it has accomplished. But, as good as we are, as much as we’ve done, as far as we’ve come, it’s not enough. We are not yet optimized for Great Power Competition.”

~ Chief of Space Operations
Gen. Chance Saltzman

The establishment of the U.S. Space Force was a direct response to threats arising from Great Power Competition in the space domain. Nevertheless, our legacy roots leave us sub-optimized for the security environment confronting us today, and we must finish fine-tuning the service to continue meeting its National Defense Strategy responsibilities

In early 2024, the Department of the Air Force unveiled sweeping plans for reshaping, refocusing, and reoptimizing the Air Force and Space Force to ensure continued supremacy in their respective domains while better posturing the services to deter and, if necessary, prevail in an era of Great Power Competition. Through a series of 24 DAF-wide key decisions, four core areas which demand the Department’s attention will be addressed: Develop People, Generate Readiness, Project Power and Develop Capabilities.

The space domain is no longer benign; it has rapidly become congested and contested.

We must enhance our capabilities, develop Guardians for modern warfare, prepare for the high intensity fight, and strengthen our power projection to thrive and win in this new era of Great Power Competition.

Video by Kevin D Schmidt

QuEST Discussion - Memory Athletics Speed Card Methods

Air Force Research Laboratory

Feb. 2, 2024 | 01:00:41

In this edition of QuEST, following our discussion last week with the organizers of the USA Memory Championships Tony and Michael D., this week we will fine-grain our description of the methods used to prepare for and compete in the Speed Cards event in memory competitions, based on the subjective report of World Memory Championship Grandmaster Nelson Dellis.

We will begin with a review of the relevant QuEST lecture material (e.g., link game, chunking, etc.), and then continue to explore the reported experiences of mental athletes through the Simulated, Situated, and Structurally coherent Qualia (S3Q) framework of artificial consciousness, in order to propose a set of neuroscience and cognitive modeling experiments to help further understand the boundaries of expert memory performance.

With the psychology and neuroscience mechanisms successfully mapped onto Speed Cards and the S3Q theory, we will then describe approaches to computational modeling of these phenomena for use in implementing novel artificially intelligent agents.

Covering these topics in-depth over several weeks, the conversation could naturally transition to discussing the "types of qualia," as well as a potential thread on discussing "basal cognition..."