CNA Talks: A National Security Podcast

On November 28, thousands of people across China took to the streets to protest the country’s ‘zero-COVID policies and censorship and to call for democracy. These demonstrations were an unprecedented show of dissent against the government in the era of Xi Jinping. How has the government responded to these uprisings, and how will they affect Beijing’s COVID strategy going forward? To answer these questions Heidi Holz and Josiah Case, analysts from CNA’s China Studies Program, join the podcast.   Heidi Holz is a Research Scientist in the CNA China Studies Program. Her research interests include China's media environment, Chinese military doctrine and operations, as well as U.S.-China military-to-military relations. Josiah Case is a Research Analyst in CNA's China Studies Program. His research at CNA has focused on PRC media and Beijing's global activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. CNA InDepth: Bejing's Zero-COVID Dilemma  CNA Report: Telling China's COVID-19 Story Well Propaganda, Disinformation, & Other Influence Efforts

Video Link to this Podcast: https://youtu.be/Aly90z-1-eI https://www.cna.org THE 20TH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY: FOREIGN POLICY, TECHNOLOGY AND MILITARY DIMENSIONS A SITUATION SPOTLIGHT Part of CNA’s National Security Seminars series November 17, 2022 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST Featuring: Dr. David Finkelstein, Vice President, CNA and Director, China and Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Division, CNA (https://www.cna.org/about-us/leadership/center-for-naval-analyses/david-finkelstein.xml) Dr. Elizabeth Wishnick (https://www.cna.org/experts/Wishnick_E.xml), Senior Research Scientist, China Studies Program (https://www.cna.org/centers-and-divisions/cna/cip/china-studies), CNA, and Senior Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Dr. April Herlevi (https://www.cna.org/experts/Herlevi_A.xml) Senior Research Scientist, Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Program (https://www.cna.org/centers-and-divisions/cna/cip/indo-pacific-security-affairs), CNA For a recent analysis of the CCP Congress report see our InDepth blog posts by David Finkelstein and Brian Waidelich.

Analysis of the impact of the women-led protests since the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police. Is this a new Iranian Revolution led by women? Featuring: Dr. Michael Connell, Principal Research Scientist, Strategy, Policy, Plans, and Programs Division, CNA Nazee Moinian, Non-Resident Scholar, Iran Program, Middle East Institute Moderated by: Nilanthi Samaranayake, Director, Strategy and Policy Analysis Program, CNA With Introductions by: Halleh Seyson, Vice President/Director, Institute for Public Research, CNA A Virtual Seminar by CNA’s Inclusive National Security & National Security Seminar Series October 25, 2022. Full Event: The Crackdown in Iran: A Women, Peace, and Security Situation Spotlight  

The Pacific Islands region is a massive and diverse region, and one with strategic value to both the United States and China. What challenges do the people of the Pacific Island Countries face and how can they navigate strategic competition between the great powers.  April Herlevi and Chris Cairns from CNA’s Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Program, sit down to discuss the latest from the Pacific Islands, and how China and the United States are engaged in the region. Further Reading Army War College: Enabling a More Externally Focused and Operational PLA CNA: Mapping the Information Environment in the Pacific Island Countries CNA: PRC Vessels Detained for Illegal Fishing in Vanuatu EEZ  CNA InDepth: China and the Solomon Islands: Drivers of Security Cooperation"  CNA InDepth: ​Pacific Connectivity and Tonga's Volcanic Eruption CNA InDepth: Tonga Aid

Brazil is currently amid a contentious presidential election between incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. President Bolsonaro has consistently claimed that Brazil's election system is vulnerable to fraud, sparking fears that the peaceful transition of power could be threatened. Ralph Espach, from CNA’s Strategy and Policy Analyses Program, joins the show to discuss the Brazilian election, the threat to democracy in the country and what this could mean for U.S. interests in South America.

For the past 80 years, the Center for Naval Analyses has been the Navy’s partner and an essential resource for agencies across the federal government. In this episode, Executive Vice President of the Center for Naval Analyses, Andrew Mara sits down to discuss the Center’s accomplishments over the past fiscal year and where the organization is headed in the coming one.

It’s been just over a year since the Taliban seized control of Kabul and established themselves as the government of Afghanistan. What has changed in Afghanistan in that time and what is the status of the major factions in the country? CNA’s Jonathan Schroden is joined by three experts on militant groups in Afghanistan, they discuss the status of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS-K in Afghanistan and the relationships between these groups. Jonathan Schroden is the director of CNA’s Counter Threats and Challenges Program. Twitter: @JJSchroden Amira Jadoon is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University. Previously she worked at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Twitter: @amirajadoon Asfandyar Mir is a senior expert in the Asia Center at USIP. His research interests include the international relations of South Asia, U.S. counterterrorism policy and political violence — with a regional focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Twitter: @asfandyarmir Andrew Watkins is a senior expert on Afghanistan for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He joined after serving as the senior analyst on Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group, where he published in-depth reports and analytical commentary on the country’s conflict and efforts to initiate a peaceful settlement. Twitter: @and_huh_what

In July, the eyes of the world were fixed on Sri Lanka, when protesters stormed the Presidential Palace, demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. But while the headlines have since faded, the story is far from over. In this episode of CNA Talks, Nilanthi Samaranayake stops by to fill us in on what has happened in Sri Lanka since the protests and how the new President can address the crisis.  Nilanthi Samaranayake (@nilanthis) directs CNA's Strategy and Policy Analysis Program, her recent analysis of Sri Lanka has been published in Newsweek and Lawfare. Further Reading Newsweek: China's Not to Blame for All of Sri Lanka's Woes Lawfare: How Has Sri Lanka’s Crisis Impacted Indian Ocean Security?  

This content was originally published on BMNT's YouTube Channel. You can find the original video here. In this follow-up conversation to BMNT’s June panel "The Race for Autonomy: Navigating a New Battlefield," A'ndre Gonawela talks to Dr. David Broyles, Research Program Director at the Center for Naval Analysis and co-host of "AI with AI", on the challenges facing the Department of Defense when it comes to developing and leveraging autonomous systems and capabilities. Dr. Broyles digs into why he (like our prior panelists) believes the state of autonomy today is ‘brittle’, and why the end goal for many is ‘general AI’ – the ability for artificial intelligence to behave and adapt like human intelligence can. We discuss Dr. Broyles’ belief that an ‘AI Winter’ may be approaching, where momentum in the development of systems is slowed or even halted. We then dig into where the Department of Defense is on the racetrack, dissecting the lingering confusion that underlies the differences between unmanned systems and autonomous systems, and how we can better equip DoD leaders in understanding how autonomous systems can operate. Dr. Broyles highlights opportunities to build trust in autonomous systems with the warfighter, in addition to addressing the edge cases and ‘fat tails’ that can impede the success of autonomous vehicles.   You can read about our first panel here: https://www.bmnt.com/post/the-race-for-autonomy-is-here Notes from Episode General consensus of state of autonomy is that it is brittle, and still in infancy when it comes to DoD Bigger debate in AI community – end state is general AI, equivalent to human intelligence, adaptable to environment, and process things like a human can. What are the tools to go about this? Two camps that disagree with each other: Neural network reward: Can employ larger neural networks, dump more data, put more processing power, and have reward schemes. Symbolic logic camps – need ways to encode information in symbols that machines can manipulate at higher levels of aggregation. Still trying to figure out the things we really need to make these things work and get rid of the bugs. AI Winter? There have been periods where the momentum in AI development stopped – last one in early 2000s, influenced by availability of graphical processing capabilities (large computational power being dumped on the problem) Are we coming to the limits of the tools and capabilities we’ve developed? Margins of incremental improvements are diminishing. AVs are a bellwether of progress – if progress isn’t delivered in tangible ways, market could lose interest, meaning less financial investment. AI Summer? Alexnet winning image recognition competition in 2014 was first real success of neural networks, motivated community at large, many developments between 2014 through 2019. People were trying many different tools. Where’s DOD with developing/leveraging autonomous systems? It’s hard to pinpoint where they are on the racetrack. Confusion between unmanned and autonomous systems – can be communicated unclearly, sometimes unmanned systems are mistakenly attributed as autonomous when they aren’t. First major step is for DoD to employ more unmanned systems – it’s been slow, but CNO actually incorporating uncrewed systems into their force structure direction is a significant step. Lots of little things here and there are going on but there’s nothing being coordinate in a big way. CDAO (Chief Digital AI Office, former JAIC), is trying to play a role here but there’s more ways in which they can step in. Ensuring trust for warfighters? You can either not have enough trust, or you can overtrust, and the latter gets less attention – the example here is Tesla’s autopilot system being overtrusted and then getting involved in deadly crashes. Need to get autonomous systems into the hands of the warfighters – biggest priority. Need to communicate the capabilities better to an operator, need to ensure that the operator can have other cues and/or ways of interacting with the system. Do our DoD leaders understand how autonomous systems can be used/leveraged and how they work? Can we work to educate them quickly? Area of high concern, and cyber discussions are indicative of the difficulties that could be faced as senior leaders have taken some time to embrace and understand the technologies. Very small number of senior leaders who have a good idea of what’s going on, and larger number with staff who know what they’re talking about, but there’s issues with proposals promising to develop tech that simply won’t happen. People in approval chain may not understand that these things won’t work Arming senior leaders with the key questions, but that’s a bandaid – we need more people with basic understandings of how these technologies work. This does not necessarily mean we hire computer scientists, but DoD can work internally to raise the floor on level of understanding – and these areas are beginning to slowly come up to speed. Addressing edge cases? Fat tails – distribution of things that you may run into, most of the stuff is going to fall into a general bin, but there’ll be edge cases that’ll extend. What happens if a plastic bag runs into a screen of an AV? Uber and others couldn’t just throw hundreds or millions of hours of driving data to fix this. Solution is General AI – we can’t throw fat tail problems into same bucket. Running simulations still runs into the same problem, and throwing info won’t solve it. There really is no good answer, there’s not been a good articulation of the answer. We’re trying to minimize the edge cases as best we can. However, alternatives like smart roads and sensors can provide added information to help prevent accidents or minimize disruptions in environment. Experimentation – What’s Commercial doing that DoD is not doing? Mechanics around how to do things are the primary thing that can hinder experimentation. There’s a strange acquisition ecosystem that isn’t always friendly to innovative ideas going through standard program office processes. Policy Lagging Behind on Autonomous Systems? There are some new technologies falling under clear regulation – and as long as it doesn’t cause any other problem, but because these technologies are so wide ranging they can cause issues. You can forecast some of these things, but there’s always an unexpected bit. Is there a general philosophy on how to handle this? There’ll always be questions on privacy and safety. Is DoD adequately reaching out to small businesses? It is happening, but biggest barrier (in his view) is DoD contracting and being able to decipher postings, requirements, forms, and etc. Need to take a quantitative approach to assessing effectiveness of this.

As the Navy transitions to the new Detailing Marketplace Assignment Policy increased demand will be placed on its detailers. In today’s episode, we discuss a new tool from CNA which could help expedite the assignment process and help detailers execute their mission. Biographies Warren Sutton is a Senior Research Scientist in CNA’s Navy Human Resources Program. Further Reading Navy Enlisted Detailing Marketplace Assignment Algorithm