Tanner Yackley - Former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
In this episode, we talk with former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert, Tanner Yackley .
Having supported over 1,000 combat missions and accumulated more than 3,400 flight hours, Tanner brings his first-hand experience of operating advanced autonomous systems, managing vast amounts of battlefield data, and making short-notice critical decisions in cognitively demanding environments.
We discuss the rapid evolution of uncrewed systems, the changing character of warfare, the role of AI-enabled capabilities, and how human-machine integration will shape the next generation of defence operations.
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Production, Design & Artwork: HIATUS ↗ The Defence Design & Communications Agency
Find Out More: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanner-yackley
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00:00:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hi, welcome to the Future Frontiers podcast from millilux.io.
00:00:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
In this episode, we talk with former MQ-9 Reaper instructor to an uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert, Tanner Yackley.
00:00:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Having supported over 1000 combat missions and accumulated more than 3,400 flight hours,
00:00:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Tanner brings his first-hand experience of operating advanced autonomous systems, managing vast amounts of battlefield data and making short-notice critical decisions in cognitively demanding environments.
00:00:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We discuss the rapid evolution of uncrewed systems, the changing character of warfare, the role of AI-enabled capabilities and how human-machine integration will shape the next generation of defence operations.
00:00:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey, Tanner.
00:00:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
00:00:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realise it's a very early morning for you, but how are you doing and how are things?
00:00:56 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Doing very well, very well.
00:00:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Enjoying some humid weather here, but can't complain.
00:01:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, right now I'm kind of like in northeastern Europe and it's a nice cool 12 degrees, you know, compared to like London, which at the moment is like mid-30s.
00:01:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'm kind of like slightly laughing and also slightly sheltering from the rain as well.
00:01:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Cut of everything.
00:01:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I guess just to kick us off, please can you give us a really concise sort of like one minute introduction to yourself and your background please?
00:01:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's Henry Ackley.
00:01:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So I served in the United States Air Force from 2010 to 2018.
00:01:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I operated on the MQ-9 Reaper for the better part of a decade.
00:01:37 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
both in the military and as a civilian contractor outside of it.
00:01:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
During that time, I went from a sensor operator to an instructor to an evaluator, amassed over 1000 combat missions, 3,400 plus hours in the aircraft.
00:01:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Taught at the schoolhouse, taught as an evaluator there.
00:01:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And like I said, went on and worked for companies like General Atomics.
00:01:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I also taught in university and academia
00:02:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
as a UAS professor at the University of North Dakota for multiple years.
00:02:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And now I run a kind of organization that helps capture the remote warfare experience called Remote Warrior.
00:02:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, brilliant, sir.
00:02:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Thank you so much.
00:02:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's so good to have, we were talking just before we got recording now, and it's saying it's so good when we get real experts onto the podcast who are able to share lived experience, but also just the theory as well.
00:02:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, I'm studying this mass and human factors at the moment and
00:02:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I kind of, when you talked about this, talked about it earlier, and I was sat there thinking, Oh my God, I wish I'd met Hannah this time last year when I was just started the journey and really very wet behind the ears.
00:02:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I hadn't really, you know, kind of known it, realised anything about human factors beforehand.
00:02:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But yeah, it was, it was, you know, the podcast really does help us introduce us to real expertise in this field.
00:02:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And the more we, the more we kind of like
00:02:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
more opportunities we do, the more we kind of realise actually the field is absolutely enormous.
00:03:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So it's been, it's been really fantastic.
00:03:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I thought given the fact that it's the NATO conference over in Turkey today, I thought the first question actually would be really quite a useful one.
00:03:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And that's to get your take on the NATO's rearming efforts at the moment?
00:03:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, absolutely.
00:03:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, it's one of those things, right, with everything, we kind of alluded to this earlier in the previous discussion.
00:03:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's like you've got this mass conglomerate of a lot of things happening right now, right, with across the country, with obviously, the war and everything kicking off earlier this year.
00:03:35 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's
00:03:36 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
everybody's trying to scramble and buy, buy, buy more, because of course, they see it as the technology that's going to advance this, right, and trying to figure out what works, what doesn't, right?
00:03:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So we're seeing a lot of, these traditional methods where even 10 years ago, right, with procurement, with different things like that, supply chains, they're long, right?
00:03:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
They take time.
00:03:55 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
There's so many approvals they have to go through.
00:03:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Now we're seeing the reduction in that, but it's not just the, and that's where that rearming effort ripples, right?
00:04:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because it's not just about the technology itself.
00:04:06 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's about now I have to then train people on this, right?
00:04:09 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I have to then also one thing that, you know, we learned in Reaper was, you know, we would get software integrations every couple months.
00:04:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
with it that would, and sometimes it would completely, I mean, we had one that completely reworked our entire console.
00:04:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Every button did something completely different.
00:04:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you wanna know how we got introduced to that?
00:04:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
10 minutes before shift that night, I got an academic presentation on it, looked at it, took the information, jumped into a GCS 5 minutes early,
00:04:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'd be able to really quick hit all the buttons, figure out what they do, and then do what we call figure out how to break it, i.e.
00:04:45 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
what's it, not literally break it, right?
00:04:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But what's with what I need to do with the system, you know, can it perform or is there limitations if I'm doing something, you know, tracking a car at 100 miles an hour or something like that, for an example.
00:05:00 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So we do things like that, right?
00:05:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I think that is going to play a piece into this.
00:05:05 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I don't think it's necessarily
00:05:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
gotten to fruition with what that landscape is exactly going to look like because the procurement, the training, all of these downstream effects are also going to have to happen, right?
00:05:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And when everything is this condensed,
00:05:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
those other pieces have to come behind them.
00:05:25 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Otherwise, you're going to have to, you're going to have a whole bunch of people sitting there with all this tech going, well, cool, this stuff looks great, but what do I do?
00:05:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Right?
00:05:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, how do I employ it?
00:05:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then also, what, you know, when we see this with Ukraine, right?
00:05:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We always talk about, you know, hey, they're getting the lessons learned back from the field, right?
00:05:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And they're compressing those timelines.
00:05:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's an important piece that not a lot of people, I don't think,
00:05:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
put as much stock in as they should, right?
00:05:50 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because that's what made us good on Reaper, especially in the early days.
00:05:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
we wrote the dang playbook for the entire system.
00:05:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Predator had been on for a decade.
00:05:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It was a great system, but it wasn't, it wasn't really, the heat wasn't cranked up on the burner for that until about 2012, at least, on the US side.
00:06:10 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then we see it, in the, I mean, good gosh, there's I think 10 plus nations or even probably 20 plus now that, have Reaper in their arsenal across the board.
00:06:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So it's definitely, especially in the last five to 10 years, I mean, I remember teaching the Brits, the Spaniards, all these different ones.
00:06:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
from Spain and stuff like that, Dutch at the schoolhouse too.
00:06:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So it's interesting to see, this stuff kind of bleed out into other areas, but the Ukraine piece and really having these small attributable drones is really interesting to see how, more than just getting the tech and supplying that to the front lines, right?
00:06:50 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's now I have to worry about the training and everything else associated with it as the tech evolves.
00:06:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, there's like you said, the associated costs, the training, the training costs, the opportunity costs, all the and the whole lifestyle, lifestyle, the whole lifetime procurement and the costs and the operating and the maintenance and all that sort of stuff, as well as the human operator who is
00:07:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
who is doing something very different maybe from the, maybe they joined the military in one capacity, they got injured or they came across for something else's capacity and that now you're having to kind of like manage the system and manage the operator as well with, increased difficulty as we rely more on those kind of systems for
00:07:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of like tactical effects, also the ISR piece as well.
00:07:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Fascinating.
00:07:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
and I think, too, one like small little pile on to that is that a lot of people are looking at those and it's like, Oh, well, we have, if you have like a, I mean, let's take an infantry man, right?
00:07:52 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you're like, Hey, well now we got a bunch of drones, let's just throw them at, you know, all the infantry guys and they can do it as an additional duty, right?
00:07:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's the hard thing, right?
00:08:00 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's you and I, completely different experiences in our military careers, right?
00:08:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But we both laugh at that because that's
00:08:06 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
so common.
00:08:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's just like, I just pile it on and keep going.
00:08:10 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's like, what?
00:08:13 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
and that's where it's like for us, we would fly 6, 7, 8 hours a night and then have additional, all the shop work, all the, paperwork, training, scheduling, standards evaluation, right?
00:08:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
All these different things we'd have to do on top of it.
00:08:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I can tell you, like, that's not the way to do it.
00:08:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because you're going to burn these people out, you know, completely.
00:08:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's
00:08:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's one of those two where I look at like platform manufacturers that say, hey, we got a platform and it can, it can go two to three crews for 20 plus hours.
00:08:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I'm going, no, it can't.
00:08:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, on paper, that looks great.
00:08:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But I'm like, you're not, you're going to have two, three, four years maybe that you'll get out of somebody running at that pace.
00:08:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, because I can tell you from sitting too many Ochos in the box, right, those eight hour shifts in the box, it's rough.
00:09:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
especially doing it for as long as we did, because there's a lot of people that have just, I mean, there's people with six, 7000 hours in this aircraft still running it, 15 years later.
00:09:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Real quick, if you want to hear when new episodes and articles are released, be sure to sign up to our newsletter at the Mililux website or find a link in the show notes below.
00:09:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now, back to the episode.
00:09:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, we used to hear, you know, back in the Marines, we'd hear
00:09:31 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of almost horror stories of pilots who would be crewing for that long inside of a, we call them ISO containers, I'm not sure what you call them, the shipping container set up, but I'm not sure if it was actually like that, but that was the kind of the version that would land back with us, you know, back in the Marines.
00:09:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it really did sound
00:09:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I don't know if dramatic is the right word, horrific.
00:09:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
we think you're kind of sat there in the darkened box watching the, live feed in real time.
00:10:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I know we did some work on vicarious trauma, kind of like post-military and kind of media, media security, media risk management.
00:10:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was just thinking that was just seemed to be like just the classic example of where vicarious trauma would probably be most
00:10:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
evident from, or acutely felt in parts of the military.
00:10:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, huge.
00:10:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That and it's, with those types of missions too, what people don't realize is you're one, you're maintaining so much context across screens, across other aircraft that are checked into the airspace, across other friendly aircraft, right?
00:10:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'm, and then, you know, for me as a sensor operator, I got to worry about the whole ground picture.
00:10:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I got to worry about the air picture.
00:10:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I got to worry about the data links.
00:10:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I got to worry about the engine.
00:10:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I got to worry about, you know, all these different pieces.
00:10:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So
00:10:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
serving that context, right, was really important for us.
00:10:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's something that, as this technology expands, I don't think it's a piece that gets enough attention and realization that, again, we can have all this great tech, but when we're not doing the, when we're not realizing that even something like a handing an aircraft from one operator to another mid mission,
00:11:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's not just like a, hey, that's a, administrative event.
00:11:17 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's an operational event because I have to then marry up what they've seen for the last six hours with what I know off of a mission brief, right?
00:11:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I need to know what's important.
00:11:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's the big piece is there could have been something that happened 4 hours ago that was completely irrelevant to the crew that happened.
00:11:37 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Like say they stopped at building A.
00:11:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Well say building A isn't relevant at all.
00:11:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's fine.
00:11:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But maybe 7 hours later, when they hit it again, now all of a sudden building A becomes super important.
00:11:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But if I swap crews in the middle of that, and I don't know about that piece of information about building A, you know, from hour 2, and now I'm on hour 16 that the aircraft's been airborne, that's an issue.
00:12:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
and that's what that's what we're really going to see though.
00:12:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's not going to happen loudly.
00:12:06 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's going to be just this small bleed, you know, where more and more context gets fragmented and we're seeing that across the industry anyways with just trying to ingest so much data.
00:12:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yes, yeah, fascinating.
00:12:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I guess the natural answer would be,
00:12:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
fill the problem with AI.
00:12:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm talking as somebody who doesn't think that would be a great idea, just plug that problem with AI, but I could imagine there'll be some people at some points between the commercial end who will just say, solve this problem with AI and throw AI at it, and that will solve it.
00:12:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's great, but that's only the brains of the system at that point.
00:12:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
AI can't make decisions.
00:12:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
AI can't maintain a mental model of a shared mental model of what's happening in a system across operators.
00:12:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's why AI never worked for making decisions.
00:12:57 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I fully believe, and I will die on this hill, that you're not going to have AI completely take over missions.
00:13:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's going to move up, right?
00:13:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're not going to have this stick and rudder and everything else, right?
00:13:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to have people that eventually, you know, once we figure out the user interfaces and different things like that, and maybe solve this handover issue for context reconstruction, that it's, you know, then it's going to just move everything up and you'll be managing, you know,
00:13:22 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
airspace via some command center or something like that is some type of direction that you see because you see a lot in first responder programs.
00:13:31 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
They're starting to use drones, police, fire, things like that.
00:13:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's kind of the direction they're looking to go as well.
00:13:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But I'm not
00:13:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't know.
00:13:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
if I'm fully convinced that that's fully the answer yet.
00:13:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, it's one of those that we just need more data points, but we need to be looking under the right rocks to begin with.
00:13:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's where I think we're not necessarily and it's going to cause a big bottleneck because of it.
00:13:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, got it.
00:13:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, very keen to kind of loop back around to this as well.
00:13:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think it will pop up in some of the future questions as well, because it's not one of those easily solvable
00:14:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of, problems, problem sets is how do you how do you solve this kind of handover when we're increasingly reliant on more on the uncrewed systems?
00:14:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, I mean, does get me on to my kind of my next question: what's the current picture of uncrewed systems across NATO at the moment, or you know, in terms of and by when I say NATO, I'm kind of including what's happening in Ukraine at the moment, what we're kind of what we're kind of seeing.
00:14:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, absolutely.
00:14:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, the biggest thing with that, right, NATO's got world-class capabilities, right?
00:14:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But they really need to improve the integration piece, right, with it.
00:14:37 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, we see that all the time, right?
00:14:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And he, I mean, heck, even if, you and I were working together, back in our heydays, respectively, it's, we're going to speak a little different, right?
00:14:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're still working off the same sheet of music, but you're still trying to, again, match that operational picture.
00:14:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
right?
00:14:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's something that, again, as we ingest more and more data, now you're getting, submarines that are, autonomous, you're getting, all these different domains.
00:15:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's just going to, cause more and more of this.
00:15:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We're going to get more capabilities, right?
00:15:09 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But the integration, the speed, and then the standardization, I think are really going to be the three biggest barriers to this and properly integrating this tech and properly,
00:15:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
being that, continuing to be that world-class capability.
00:15:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because if we can't share that common operating picture across all this data and all these sensors and all these systems, it doesn't matter how good our technology is and how much data we can capture.
00:15:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
If I can't put it in front of somebody and have somebody understand it in three seconds, it's completely worthless, you know, at the end of the day, because that's how fast those battle spaces move.
00:15:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I guess probably with the inclusion of more uncrewed systems across the land, air and maritime domain, I guess there's going to be pressure on sort of commanders to increase the speed of that battle picture, as in the amount, the sort of the time it takes to observe orientate side acts, the classic Boyd OODA loop.
00:16:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I guess the pressure is going to be make decisions faster with
00:16:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
here's more information, make a decision faster.
00:16:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Whereas I guess the so what from that would be is that they don't, the amount of cognitive load or cognitive overload on the commander when they're looking at so many data points and they can't see a clear direction to go in is that the analysis paralysis of what do I do in this situation, I can't
00:16:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
process all this data, and then you rather rely on AI to make it, essentially make a decision for you, in which case you lose the ownership of that decision because you've outsourced it to something else.
00:16:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How does that sound?
00:16:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
No, I think you're dead on there, right?
00:16:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's the thing is autonomy.
00:16:55 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Here's the biggest misconception with this, right?
00:16:57 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Everyone thinks, oh, we've got autonomy, we've got AI, right?
00:16:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That'll take care of everything.
00:17:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
No, it won't.
00:17:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
all we're doing is moving the down the effects of the human upstream or downstream from where they previously were.
00:17:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Autonomy doesn't remove the human.
00:17:13 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It changes what the human does.
00:17:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yes.
00:17:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:17:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's, I think that's the biggest thing, right?
00:17:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
The aircraft's not the hard part anymore, right?
00:17:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We figured out the aircraft, right?
00:17:22 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Autonomy is incredible.
00:17:23 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, we see videos every day of, you know, autonomous aircraft is doing incredible things with it.
00:17:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But the challenge is the human system integration.
00:17:31 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
not the platform performance.
00:17:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
it really needs to be able to marry those together correctly.
00:17:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so it's not, autonomous aircraft are going to be like the future of this.
00:17:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't, I think one, it's just, again, it's another tool.
00:17:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's really going to be the autonomous system supervised by humans.
00:17:52 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And they're, and then they're going to be able to provide things like intent, judgment, accountability, right?
00:17:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Things that we can't measure, things that you can't put into a system.
00:18:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, I can't teach it and say, all right, because of XYZ, you know, this is the judgment call you're going to make today AI system or software platform.
00:18:10 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Like, yeah, right.
00:18:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, and so at least not until we start actually being able to measure it, right?
00:18:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because a lot of things that we measure in human factors is visible.
00:18:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And we don't have a way to necessarily measure the hidden state of systems and the hidden state of intent, desire, accountability, judgment, that kind of stuff.
00:18:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So you know, we're always interested to hear from organizations that want to contribute their thoughts to our articles.
00:18:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If this is you, send to the e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on what we're working on.
00:18:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a link in the show notes.
00:18:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Otherwise, back to the episode.
00:18:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:18:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it got me thinking back to kind of like that transition where we went from sort of conventional, inverted commas, warfare of say the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s-ish before we then moved into this kind of war on terror.
00:19:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And we obviously went into Iraq and the Second Gulf War went to Afghanistan.
00:19:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And that's where you start to encounter
00:19:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
This concept like the $10 Taliban, for example, where you would have a farmer who would step into the aggressor kind of role for a very short period to go and fire on his patrol and then he would go back to being a farmer again.
00:19:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And all of a sudden it's like, well, where do the rules of engagement sit on somebody like that who sits on both camps, doesn't come into the field wearing a uniform and at which point is it self-defence or then it's
00:19:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
offensive action used incorrectly on that.
00:19:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That seems like the kind of the example to me on how this could may not work quite as well as it is envisaged.
00:19:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Well, and you, I mean, you might have you might have just summarized almost every one of my operations ever.
00:20:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, in all reality, like there's so many days, right?
00:20:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Especially, I did a bunch of different mission sets and when I was on the counterinsurgency stuff, right, which that was a lot more typical, especially in like 2011, where like you didn't know, right?
00:20:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I could have a farmer all of a sudden walk over and just decide to pick up an RPG and start firing it at troops, right?
00:20:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't know, you know, exactly that.
00:20:23 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then even
00:20:25 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I then moved over to the high value target side, right?
00:20:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Where you're doing a lot more like patterns of life, right?
00:20:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'm watching this person go in, feed their goats, you know, kiss their wife, go drop their kids off at school, and then go build a bomb.
00:20:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's like, you know, and so it's that piece, right?
00:20:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And, you know, there's lots of good, you know, research and stuff like that around that says like, hey, that's probably not the best thing for people, right?
00:20:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
To be able to, you know, operate in those environments because you're playing
00:20:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
One, I had to play mental gymnastics in that case, right, of where I'm at with what's happening in front of me on the screen.
00:21:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But oh, by the way, I'm physically sitting in a time zone that's 12 hours off from where I'm sitting.
00:21:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I could have just had an HOA, you know, HOAs.
00:21:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
with the homeowners association, put the rules in place, things like that, right?
00:21:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
For whatever you deal with, everybody's got different versions of it.
00:21:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But, I could be dealing with that, right?
00:21:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
If someone like HOA, like freaking out on me, like you left your trash can on the curb, right?
00:21:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then I got to go in and then I got to deal with this mission and I got to deal with a very complex mission where exactly that, right?
00:21:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I could have the farmer that they pick, they pick up a long, cylindrical object, right?
00:21:36 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I'm going, is that a rake or is that an RPG?
00:21:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, You know, and then you're trying to make
00:21:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
make that decision.
00:21:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's the pieces, right, that gets lost in translation when we talk about autonomous systems, AI, and especially warfare is you can try, but that is not a simple decision to make in the moment, and especially when you're the one responsible for the lethal authority and potentially making that call of either taking that life or not.
00:22:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then you have to deal with the downstream consequences of it at the same time.
00:22:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think I was thinking actually in some ways, my background as a Marines officer, in some ways it was it's slightly easier because you have less shades of grey.
00:22:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If you're there patrolling, whilst there's also a different level of danger, it's also easier because you then start to become
00:22:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What's the kind of right term, like ingratiated into an environment, you start to understand the pattern of life, things start to become more intuitive, your system, system one brain, the subconscious then starts to pick up on what is, what normal looks and feels like, and then it gives you those kind of like warning signs if things aren't normal.
00:22:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
This sign in the, or this side, this term in the British military had was the
00:22:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the absence of the normal, the presence of the abnormal, which is a way to kind of describe that mental cognitive dissonance between your subconscious and your conscious brain.
00:23:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But when you remove somebody from, like yourself, where you put somebody in their home environment, they're not deployed in a conflict zone, but for 8 hours per day, you go into a darkened room and control
00:23:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
a reaper 12 hours away from an operational theatre and you're making life or death decisions that could be between the life and death of enemy combatants or civilians or your friendly troops is I can imagine actually that's not something you just put down and just kind of walk away from at the end of the day, you know, whereas whereas say our operational tours would be 6 or 9 months at a time and it would be a case of you would once that was done you it would be
00:23:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
it would be done.
00:23:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
6 months, you're immersed in the environment, you're then done, move on to the next thing.
00:23:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So mentally, it's easier to kind of segment the two rather than every day step into a very different set of stressors, step out of it again and behave like around your wife or your children or your normal family life.
00:24:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And you can't really share the complexity of that thing you've had to deal with.
00:24:11 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Chris, like you read my book.
00:24:15 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, no, you shacked it dead on.
00:24:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, that's the biggest thing, right?
00:24:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Is I have to go in, be in a mindset half a world away
00:24:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then, we always called it flipping the switch, right?
00:24:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I had to go from home to work, work to home, right?
00:24:31 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And sometimes that switch gets stuck on, right?
00:24:36 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you can't shut it off when you get home and, that type of thing.
00:24:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because it's easy, right?
00:24:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's, I think that's also the other piece that nobody realizes is like home life is freaking difficult.
00:24:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
There's a reason the deployed structure exists in the way it does, right?
00:24:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's to get people away from that.
00:24:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So that way they can be immersed in what they're doing, their job, day in, day out, right?
00:24:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And they don't have to really, you know, yeah, you've got different times, right?
00:25:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Calls, things like that.
00:25:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But for the most part, you have that, you know, and also the other piece is you have physical discharge when you're deployed, right?
00:25:11 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you have a physical separation between the two as well.
00:25:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So
00:25:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
again, makes for a very complex environment that I don't think we did a very good job understanding a lot of lessons learned from the last 20 years in.
00:25:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I think now, unfortunately, we're going to pay for it with AI because there's going to be this massive bottleneck, and I hope that, there are organizations out there that are shifting towards it because like I said, there's a lot of impressive tech out there, but at the end of the day, none of it means a thing.
00:25:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
If that, if that human, context can't be transferred correctly across domains.
00:25:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:25:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We come to, we come to run and the.
00:25:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Certainly from the UK perspective, we've just released the Defence Investment Plan, which sees more of a hybrid Navy, more reliance on uncrewed systems.
00:26:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, so I guess the deduction you can make from that is, how are we training and developing and supporting our people to use these systems, you know, if we're pivoting away from investing in, you know, infantry or lines holders to this remote system?
00:26:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Is that there's got to be that
00:26:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
whole holistic development of the capability, not just buying the platform and assuming that people will figure it out, they'll understand that, they'll learn how to use it.
00:26:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And like that instance you mentioned earlier where you were given, a whole new set of way to operate the platform 5 minutes before you step into and use it operationally, where yeah, I kind of imagine that, literally blows my mind with thinking about how stressful and pressure that would be.
00:26:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's, the hard part is you got a lot of companies that are looking in the software side of this and their whole thing is just how quick can we deploy it?
00:26:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
How quick can we deploy it?
00:26:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's like, I'm like, that doesn't mean a lick.
00:27:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, I'm like, you know, yes, it's a big part of it.
00:27:05 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Being able to get it to the war fighters is important, right?
00:27:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it was, we had some really great technological capabilities that came out, you know, came through Reaper, you know, the four years I was doing combat missions.
00:27:15 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it was, you know, to see those changes and things like that and feel them really quickly was great, but it also, you know,
00:27:22 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
when everybody knows, right, you go from the engineer to the operator, things get a little lost in translation.
00:27:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Right.
00:27:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's where I think we need to, if we're going to rapidly increase, these chains and especially across NATO and things like that, we need to do a better job of incorporating the end user into the planning process of the system.
00:27:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So that way we're cutting down on
00:27:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
the downstream effects and the kickback with, hey, this thing doesn't work, or hey, I found a bug in your system, or, hey, I walked in and the bar's on fire, for that example.
00:27:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But yeah, it's just, so it's interesting to, again, see, we've made a lot of progress.
00:28:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We're focusing on some of the right things, but I think we've got a long ways to go as far as really pulling apart what's important, especially with increased demand
00:28:17 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
supply chains and the biggest limiting factor being the human performance.
00:28:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, got it.
00:28:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think this is going to be something that's, this is going to be a subject which I think is going to pop up time and time again as NATO does move towards more of a hybrid or kind of autonomous ungrewed system.
00:28:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So autonomous is probably the wrong term for this, uncrewed system.
00:28:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
reliance.
00:28:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I'm really interested to get your take on the level of sophistication of our potential adversaries kind of UX.
00:28:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You kind of, I mean, I know you'll be looking at how they're tackling it and things, problems they're coming across.
00:28:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Anything you can share with us that might shine light on it?
00:28:57 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, again, the hard thing is, from my perspective, it looks like everybody's hitting the same glass ceiling, right?
00:29:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
With this.
00:29:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And, they're fielding the tech, they're coming out with really impressive things, right?
00:29:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think of like Andril's incorporation with NASCAR, right?
00:29:11 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that seems like the most, that seems like the most like strange thing ever.
00:29:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But when you look at it from like my lens, coming from, you know, a lot of our foundational training was built off of
00:29:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
the F-16 training pipeline, as well as the weapon school.
00:29:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We did a lot of close work with them.
00:29:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We had weapon school graduates in all our units.
00:29:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so one thing I noticed with that was like, I'm like instantly my weapon school debrief style brain went, wow, that's a really cool feedback tool, right?
00:29:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So it's being able to shorten those timelines.
00:29:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I know this isn't necessarily the adversary piece, right?
00:29:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But it's more so looking at
00:29:50 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
this technology and that we're able to capture other pieces that we weren't necessarily able to capture before.
00:29:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So again, some of these underlying parts that we saw as very important on Reaper, right, and really were the foundational aspects of it that we're making advancements in, but again, to be able to not necessarily capture the why someone did that, and I keep going back to that context reconstruction of it.
00:30:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's the part where
00:30:18 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I see a bunch of people that are throwing are making things in one area move faster, but nobody's necessarily pinpointed.
00:30:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
hey, how do we make this either, integrate across multiple systems, right?
00:30:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think of counter UAS for that discussion, right?
00:30:36 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You've got all these different variety of systems out there.
00:30:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
They've got different interfaces.
00:30:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
They've got different, you know, ways to work, right?
00:30:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So it's complicated because it's such a massive undertaking, right?
00:30:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so there's obviously still holes in that ship when it comes to what, you know, we can actually capture and how to, and then you add in all the different environments that like counter UAS.
00:30:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
operate in.
00:31:00 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
there's no silver bullet for the whole thing with it.
00:31:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So and I think same thing is said for even the war efforts and things like that.
00:31:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think there's a lot of cool flash in the pan things that are coming out.
00:31:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But overall, I don't see anybody tackling truly, I think we're again, we're hitting that glass ceiling of AI and autonomy with where it can kind of hit.
00:31:23 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And until we figure out this other piece of
00:31:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
integration through context reconstruction, I think we're going to continue to kind of keep hitting that, where there's going to be nice things that come out of it, but it's going to be too down low, if you will, for truly moving the system to the next level.
00:31:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, so that's kind of like across the entire globe, then kind of we're all roughly on the same plateau
00:31:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
is kind of like the influence I'm kind of hearing from you there.
00:31:52 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, absolutely.
00:31:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I really think, because that's the other thing is like people don't realize how many countries have US capabilities and have group 3, 4, or five, not just, one, two, three, right?
00:32:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's like you got, you got, Africa's got some pretty, big drones and that's not, that's not a country that you think of, right, immediately to have
00:32:11 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
different size ones out there of that scale.
00:32:15 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So, that's I think that's a piece to it as well that we could do better, we could do a better job, especially across NATO, with sharing those lessons learned, understanding that this isn't just platform lessons learned, right?
00:32:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's if we can dig into how the operators are working, how their workflows are coming up, what friction points they're hitting, I promise you, can map it way higher and improve the system overall.
00:32:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:32:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So it's almost taking it.
00:32:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So rather than taking a top down approach for developing sophistication of the platforms actually is taking combining it with like a bottom up.
00:32:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Works from the target backwards, right, Chris?
00:32:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, because I get honestly, yeah.
00:32:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
From the target backwards, right?
00:32:57 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's anything in war.
00:32:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Anybody that's ever freaking, you know, done anything in war in any way, that's always your plan, right?
00:33:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
When you strip everything away, it don't matter what pub we're working off of or anything like that.
00:33:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's what's my target and how do I get to it there.
00:33:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so, you know, that's where, that's really where I think my mindset, you know, hinges on is that
00:33:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
theory.
00:33:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:33:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We were talking before the podcast as well.
00:33:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I've just started my master's in human factors and initially at first I was thinking, where does this fit into defence?
00:33:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Because it wasn't, because I'm not a traditional, traditional kind of human factors kind of enthusiast from the part I came from.
00:33:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now even, even talking to you today is I'm understanding it even more in that defence is moving towards is how do we make the system, the working systems better for
00:33:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
because we're moving towards tech, is there still going to be that, like you say, that gap between the human operator and the system, which is if you don't fill it and ensure it's smooth, then you're going to create a vulnerability for yourself
00:34:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
for these capabilities through it.
00:34:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah.
00:34:07 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That's the big driving factor to the whole point of this, right?
00:34:10 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
As you see, like in Ukraine is another good example.
00:34:13 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's just adaptation speed can absolutely, you know, outweigh the technical sophistication of the platform itself.
00:34:23 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's a big piece to this that, you know, I don't think is
00:34:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
is recognized, at least in the not the right necessary scope to do to make it make an impact, if you will.
00:34:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, that's something we're hearing quite a lot from a lot of our guests is actually is the adaption speed these days is now down to hours, in terms of the sophistication, but also how they're being utilized.
00:34:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And even hearing from a guest earlier today, said actually like FPVs, are kind of going out the window because
00:34:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It takes more than one operator to crew that drone, even at the tactical level.
00:35:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was thinking, Wow, this is changing almost before our very eyes, you know, we're in danger of developing the thing that was already redundant or out of, you know, out of scope, you.
00:35:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Know.
00:35:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I think that proves the point right there of that whole everything's moving up.
00:35:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's because they're realizing, right, exactly like you said, what does everybody want?
00:35:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Oh, one to many, right?
00:35:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
we're going to have one operator that control 10 drones.
00:35:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
No, you're not.
00:35:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're not.
00:35:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's not going to work.
00:35:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'm sorry.
00:35:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But the second one of those drones does something it's not supposed to, and the operator has to manually step in.
00:35:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then #2 decides to not do what it's supposed to.
00:35:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then the operator goes, oh crap, what do I?
00:35:45 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then #3 decides.
00:35:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's not going to work.
00:35:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to, the, and that's where I say like the, I think of the software integration built into the systems themselves, that they're going to have to get, better at the prediction, the autonomy piece, those types of things, which again, you're going to have to understand the intent of the war fighter to truly do that.
00:36:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because an engineer is not going to be able to properly lay out what that looks like and what that is.
00:36:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:36:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it does get me on to my next question.
00:36:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it is a bit of a contentious one, so I apologise in advance.
00:36:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you see the future of kind of AI and ungrewed systems going in the near future?
00:36:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I realise that's could be a big prediction, I guess, just your kind of like your unedited thoughts.
00:36:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, like I said, I think it boils down and eventually, you know, you're not going to have people
00:36:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're not going to have the person, with the classic picture of holding the drone up, on their hand and things like that anymore, right?
00:36:52 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because you're going to have, I think like Skydio there, what is it?
00:36:55 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't remember what the ground boxes are called that they launch and land out of, right?
00:37:00 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I see that.
00:37:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to have a bunch of pill boxes everywhere.
00:37:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to have a bunch of, you know, stations with, you know, who knows, semis, you know, that just roll in and 100 drones come off of and you got somebody, you know, operating in that way.
00:37:12 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But
00:37:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because again, that's the whole point of all this, right?
00:37:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
At the end of the day, the whole point of this is to get the human away from war, and not be in that direct threat anymore.
00:37:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so we're in a really interesting time where you see a lot of different, a lot of different people trying to solve that problem, with it.
00:37:35 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's just going to keep moving everything up and up.
00:37:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And who knows, maybe
00:37:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And this is my, you said unedited, right?
00:37:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Maybe in 20 years, we won't even have a soldier on the battlefield anymore, period.
00:37:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
with the way everything's going because of everything moving to more networked architecture than one person manipulating one specific platform.
00:38:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating, Jeff.
00:38:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:38:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I think we've definitely seen that across
00:38:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
recent conflicts in terms of Ukraine and what the classic example that jumps out to me is when they drove, was it like a flatbed lorry, I think, halfway across Russia and the top, top, yes, yeah, the top came off and the, just the sky lit up with, drones flying off and it was technically
00:38:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, out of this world, barely scratches the surface.
00:38:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It was such a masterpiece of planning, logistics, risk appetite, so many, so many different layers of things going on there.
00:38:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it was videoed.
00:38:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It was like a level of nice cinema.
00:38:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was thinking, wow, you guys didn't just like make this up on the back of my backpack.
00:38:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:39:03 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Through everything they had at that.
00:39:06 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But no, that's a perfect example, right?
00:39:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's one that is so funny because it happened and then not a lot of people are continuing to talk about it.
00:39:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
At least, at least, not on the US side, at least from that scope.
00:39:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But you're dead on, right?
00:39:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It's, you're going to, I absolutely see that it doesn't matter if it's a submarine, if it's a ground vehicle, if it's an autonomous platform, eventually
00:39:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
they're all going to come down to the conglomerate, right?
00:39:35 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because right now we're figuring out the internal wiring.
00:39:37 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We're figuring out what can they truly do, what can't they truly do, what are the limitations of the platforms and AI with them.
00:39:45 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But the biggest piece we're missing is taking into account that human that is going to drive all of this because at the end of the day, that's who's going to be operating this thing.
00:39:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, And he's and the president's responsible for it as well.
00:39:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And
00:40:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of that's got a definitely a level of complexity to figure out, at what point is a human in control versus the human in the loop and that responsibility, yeah.
00:40:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I mean, this is a question, this next question is what I'm particularly interested in.
00:40:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And that is kind of getting your take on systems that are particularly impressive at the moment.
00:40:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, because we, because to the, I'm referring to myself as the uneducated here, is I see a lot of kind of hype in the public space and it's kind of hard to distinguish, okay, what is genuinely good and novel and interesting versus what is just kind of got a bit of a spin on it.
00:40:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, I mean, obviously, and this is the interesting part, right?
00:40:43 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Is when it depends on where you want to set these bounds.
00:40:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's the one thing I love about working with AI and working in this space is, you can branch this out and it's not that you're, looking at this like overarching, it's that a lot of these theories with AI and how it's being really the end product that's being developed by them, I think is following a lot of similar frameworks in the way that they're developed.
00:41:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So
00:41:09 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You've got incredible things, not only in the military space, but on the commercial side too.
00:41:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's just figuring out, all right, what can we do with this?
00:41:17 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Where can we go with these exact platforms, capabilities?
00:41:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, you've got things like obviously the F-35 program there is just getting more and more robust with what they're doing.
00:41:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, collaborative combat aircraft alone, I think that one is super fascinating.
00:41:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think that's probably one of the most
00:41:35 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
interesting pieces because that's the piece too, right?
00:41:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Is everybody thinks like, oh, one system is going to take over another one, right?
00:41:42 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Or it's going to completely wipe out, the manned aviation or anything like that, right?
00:41:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think it's all just going to kind of live in this layered system within it.
00:41:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, you're going to have, you might have Reapers out of the edge, you might have Reapers doing maritime, but then you're going to have more autonomous systems towards the front lines, right?
00:41:59 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you're going to have this kind of strategic
00:42:02 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
layer of lasagna, if you will, of where the human is.
00:42:05 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And, that's where I say we're going to see that move up within that supervisory control piece because of systems like, what they're trying to do with the F-35 and collaborative combat aircraft.
00:42:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And like I said, that one, to give you a straight answer, I think that one is probably the most intriguing, just because from, my perspective, especially working in congested airspace, other aircraft, stuff like that, like I'm really curious about the cognitive load with that one.
00:42:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because again, the system itself is impressive, just like, I brought up like Andril earlier, right?
00:42:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Their hive mind stuff is insanely impressive, but at the end of the day, are we just shifting where the human is on the, scale or are we truly, taking
00:42:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
truly accounting for what the cognitive workload that they're dealing with.
00:42:56 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But I think the CCA is an interesting one because it's really going to set the framework for where autonomy goes next, especially for the fighter generation aircraft, right?
00:43:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because you're going to be able to collect a bunch of data.
00:43:06 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, you think about it alone, being able to track, you know, the flight plans, the progress, where it's going, you know, when, you know, and I don't know the internals of that system, but it's one that
00:43:19 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I'm interested in, if all of a sudden, when the sky comes falling, right, what happens with that, other aircraft, when that pilot is just so cognitively overwhelmed because of, they got somebody on their tail, whatever.
00:43:35 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And what happens to that aircraft?
00:43:37 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Does it just keep sitting there and following them around, because then that's going to be cause of liability.
00:43:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, having worked in, super short stack airspace, that was always our biggest thing was like worrying about, all right, lateral and, lateral deconfliction for us there.
00:43:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So it's one that, and that just plays into UTM, that plays into everything.
00:44:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I would argue, it doesn't matter if it's part 107 commercial applications, counter UAS, military UAS, they're all going to have to work together to make this successful.
00:44:14 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because everybody's trying to hit this at different points and try to solve this issue on their own, where again, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what it is.
00:44:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't care if it's a flight, if it's a surgeon, right?
00:44:27 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
At the end of the day, you're worried about context reconstruction.
00:44:31 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And if and the so to bring all this right back around, the tech, the advancements, everything are great, right?
00:44:40 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But until somebody figures out how to do that correctly, we're going to stall within this ecosystem.
00:44:46 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I truly do believe that.
00:44:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating stuff.
00:44:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realize it's time is getting on now and taking up a lot of your morning now.
00:44:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'll jump on to my final question before we adieu, but so this one is and you've probably covered parts of this, I think you've covered all the part of this already, but I'm interested to kind of like understand what the future looks like for encrude systems.
00:45:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You've kind of inferred about this glass ceiling, the cognitive load on the pilot, and that clearly everyone's working off a bit of a plateau at the moment, but so I realise it's a tough question to end on.
00:45:22 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, it's, I think again, it's going to be this distributed system management, right, in some way, shape or form.
00:45:29 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It doesn't matter, again, and this is where I just said my point of all these systems are going to have to talk, right?
00:45:34 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because it doesn't matter if it's a farmer that's going to go out and water their field.
00:45:38 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
It doesn't matter if it's a person that's just trying to fly their drone for fun and get some good footage, or if it's a military drone conducting an airstrike.
00:45:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to have these distributed systems that are going to move the kill chain up.
00:45:51 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
within it and you're going to have less and less physical people, right?
00:45:56 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And you're not going to remove the person, right?
00:45:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're not going to remove the responsibility, their authority, right?
00:46:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
All you're doing is just shifting where they're going to operate within that chain.
00:46:05 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So you're going to have a lot more distributed systems, a lot more, you know, I would say probably a lot more, you're not going to have the typical, you know, fighter pilot walking out to the aircraft, right, with their helmet bag and stuff like that, right?
00:46:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You're going to have a bunch of people working, in operation centers.
00:46:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And, I'm sure there's, I mean, who knows what happens with like maintenance autonomy and stuff like that, down the road.
00:46:32 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, we could get to a point where there's nobody, there and it's just you got a bunch of, well, distributed robots that are out there shifting aircraft around on, automated platforms.
00:46:45 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I don't know, with it, but
00:46:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I, we'll see.
00:46:50 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But at the same time, just like anything with UAS, right, it's also the friction point of the public's perception and opinion that's a big piece in this.
00:46:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I talked a lot about that when I was teaching at the university is that's the one thing you can't rush.
00:47:05 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
right with any of this is it doesn't matter how quick the tech advances and things like that.
00:47:10 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You also have to deal with the public's perception of it and navigating that because the regulations and the legislative pieces that come into play with that as well are going to be your bigger hurdles to get through.
00:47:23 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And that's one again where I don't know if we're necessarily looking at it from afar zoomed out enough view
00:47:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
for the regulatory pieces, for the legislative pieces, because we're going to have a bunch of people trying to solve arguably the same problem in their own domains.
00:47:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then everybody comes up with a different document and says, well, this is what I want to do here.
00:47:44 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so that's a big hurdle to this that I do see.
00:47:48 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I mean, look at the US and trying to integrate into the national airspace.
00:47:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We've been trying to do that for 10 years.
00:47:57 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I mean, there's progress, don't get me wrong, but we're still a long ways off, when it comes down to it.
00:48:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So I, like I said, I think it's going to get a lot more distributed.
00:48:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I think it's going to move a lot more up and you're going to have a lot more like ops center, ops cell type environments that these aircraft are going to be run from.
00:48:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:48:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And they're going to introduce a whole load of new, say new problems, but they're also problems we've been tackling for, like you say, for the last 20 years from when you're operating Reapers from Vegas, you know, an airspace, an operations space that is 12 hours in a very different place.
00:48:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And then you're dealing with a very different problem set of how do I
00:48:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
compartmentalise my work, the work stresses from the home stresses, like the, and all the other competing factors as well.
00:48:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it requires, like you said, it requires a public educational piece as well.
00:48:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
like one thing we're seeing across Europe at the moment is obviously the disparity in the defence spending for across, for different European countries.
00:49:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and how the public perceives the spending on defence versus the spending on welfare or other sectors that are equally in need of it as well.
00:49:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And these more technical sectors actually, by and large, are more expensive to develop and maintain than having a troop of Marines, for example, who we know how much it costs to train, how long it takes, the whole life costs of
00:49:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
look after those people, those soldiers, rather than anchored systems which we don't know what they're, if we purchase something for that's going to last 10 years and all of a sudden it's redundant within five years because we've got a new counter UAS system that defeats it already, you know, is a what to do next to go back to re-procure new things and procurement, you know, as you probably remember, is a bit of a, you know, is an in-house joke.
00:49:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:50:00 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Exactly.
00:50:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then even one step further past that, we're not setting ourselves up as far as like the veteran populations and those things to accurately measure what these populations go through, even while they're in service, out of service, right?
00:50:16 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
We have no metrics, at least in the states, like we have no metrics to measure any of that.
00:50:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So then the care and things like that, right?
00:50:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So your experience walks out the door, right?
00:50:26 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because they get burnt out and everything else with it.
00:50:28 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And then they don't want anything to do
00:50:30 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
with any of these other systems anymore, right?
00:50:33 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And so then it causes downstream fragments and effects, not only from just the personal side of what it does to the operator themselves, and that there's no support post walking out of that environment, which is insane because like Canada recognized it two years ago that remote warfare veterans should be uniquely recognized, right?
00:50:53 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Ukraine is studying it right now from the US, which doesn't
00:50:58 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
That one, I have a lot of question marks in my head with that.
00:51:01 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But it's again, if you're going to enable this technology and you want to maintain the lessons learned from it, and especially from those operators that literally sat in the furnace of it, and we developed the TTPs, we developed the tactics, we developed a lot of these things that can help progress this stuff further,
00:51:22 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But we have to look at it holistically and quit looking at it as just like, oh, well, it's just, let's just use them for their knowledge instead of, hey, let's take care of them throughout.
00:51:31 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
So that way they can continue to bring, these lessons learned and things like that back into the ecosystem, back to the war fighter, into these, because everybody knows, right?
00:51:39 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
When you go from the military, what do you do?
00:51:41 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You get out, usually probably work for the government in some way, right?
00:51:45 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, and you know, you're doing something with it, right?
00:51:47 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Because it's the mission, right?
00:51:49 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You want that, you know, I want to do something
00:51:52 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
important, impactful, right?
00:51:54 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
But again, when there's fragmented care across the board, no recognition, 20 years later, still people don't even understand what an MQ9 Reaper is, right?
00:52:04 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Or what the operations entail.
00:52:08 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
You know, that's a fail, you know, across the board.
00:52:11 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And it's something that we need to do a heck of a lot better putting that information out there, talking about it and asking again, the end user, what do you need?
00:52:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
right?
00:52:21 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
What would benefit you?
00:52:24 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
And I think if we do that from that top-down approach, we're going to make this move a heck of a lot better in a smarter direction than just throwing a bunch of money in tech at the problem.
00:52:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:52:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And my thought kind of around that as well is losing that really valuable IP, that intellectual property through not poor management of it is a dereliction of duty, isn't it?
00:52:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Because
00:52:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the cost to develop that knowledge through hard experience and those long challenging problems that you're solving is that you can't afford to let it just leak out and not and keep it out because you're never going to get to a point where you then build up a density of that talent and knowledge enough to progress the system to be better, to be more
00:53:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
supportive of the user, the community, and we're just not developing that capability in the way that is best set up to be used.
00:53:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, brilliant stuff.
00:53:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, I mean, oh my God, like an hour has just disappeared in the blink, like I generally an hour.
00:53:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm looking at the clock going, wait, what?
00:53:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How has an hour just disappeared?
00:53:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm like, we've only been talking 10 minutes, I'm sure.
00:53:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realise it's still morning for you and so like you've got a whole day ahead of you to work.
00:53:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'm going to say thank you again so much for your expertise and bringing your lived experiences to the podcast for this defence innovation because this is such important stuff that we want to get across NATO
00:53:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the US, the UK, the EU and allied partners as well, so that actually we don't keep making the same mistakes.
00:54:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We actually make this stuff better from day one and we make this more efficient.
00:54:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'm going to say thank you again so much for bringing your expertise to the party and wish you a very good day.
00:54:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Tanner, thank you very much.
00:54:17 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
Yeah, thank you so much for the platform, Chris, and the great discussion.
00:54:20 Tanner Yackley, former MQ-9 Reaper Instructor turned uncrewed systems, human factors and autonomy expert
I really enjoyed it.
00:54:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It was really great talking to Tanner and getting his insights and predictions.
00:54:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
you want to find out more about his work check out the show notes below and we'll see you next time
