UP FRONT.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

Tweets Against Tanks in Ukraine

* Royal Air Force Air Marshall Ian Gale, directorgeneral of joint force development at U.K. Strategic Command, said the British armed forces intend to leverage the tweets-against-tanks tactic in Ukraine, where anyone with a phone can take a picture of a Russian vehicle, send it out, and provide targeting data to those who need it.

"You can get a social media sweeper that will geo-tag where tweets come, add a photo, and more recently, provide targeting-quality coordinates," he said at the IT2EC trade show in London.

"We're working ... to regularize that, but also to protect it from the interference that others have wished to put into it," he added.

Berger Has to Deal with Moving Targets--Literally

* Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger confided he was nervous when recently handed an M4 rifle and invited to take some shots at a new range, something he said he hadn't done in at least 17 years.

He was surprised to find that the targets were no longer stationary. Instead, robots were moving about the field, making it much more challenging,

"They were dropping down, standing up, over and over again," he said at the recent Modern Day Marine conference. "It's a small example of what we're doing in this realm," said Berger, a big proponent of automation on the battlefield.

"I didn't kill the first target, by the way," he admitted.

Gilday Casts Doubt on Medium Uncrewed Boats

* Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said he's unsure if medium unmanned surface vessels will have a place in the Navy's future fleet.

He changed his attitude about the size of unmanned vessels after seeing the work done by Task Force 59, which is designed to experiment and test the operational capacity of unmanned platforms.

"We may be able to close capability gaps with small, expendable unmanned off of any platform rather than thinking that we have to build a larger vessel," he said recently at a think tank. The end of medium-sized robotic boats has not been set in stone just yet, he clarified. The Navy is still studying how many would be needed and the potential payloads a medium vessel could carry.--Reporting by Mikayla Easley and Stew Magnuson

FURTHER READING

Digital Influence Mercenaries: Profits and Power Through Information Warfare

By James J.F. Forest Naval Institute Press

* The fact that...