Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR): Disambiguated in the Telemedicine / Telehealth Sphere

The world is navigating through unfamiliar and incomprehensible times – COVID-19, international economic crisis, and crumbling healthcare systems. The United States (US) healthcare industry is grappling with an increased workload and advancing digitization technological concerns. The failure of organizations to offer suitable cybersecurity controls within the critical infrastructure leads to advanced persistent threat (APT) that could have incapacitating effects on organizations. A keen understanding of cybersecurity is vital for leaders and the need is referenced in US policy that advances a national unity of effort to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure. Akin to the Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 21 Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience, leaders’ goals should be to reduce vulnerabilities, identify and disrupt threats, minimize consequences and hasten response and recovery efforts related to critical infrastructure. To address the concern, it is necessary to review how AI and AR serve as co-technologies to support security of patient care and monitoring, examine impacts on individuals’ and overall healthcare organizations, address how enhanced comprehension of AI and AR could guide medical professional leaders’ decisions and boost the overall patient experience. Therefore, this literature review examines AI and AR connections to cybersecurity for the healthcare environment.

The end of the beginning?

What are the specific lessons of Europe’s contemporary history for its future defence and how does history illuminate the challenges of such a defence? From D-Day to the creation and development of NATO, the importance of sufficient and legitimate military power has been at the heart of credible defence and deterrence. Innovation and technology allied to strategic responsibility have been key to maintaining the unity of effort and purpose vital to upholding and expanding Europe’s freedoms. Ultimately, for Europe’s defence to be credible to its citizens as well as adversaries and allies, there must be a tight bond between defence, power, and leadership allied to structures that magnify security and defence, such as NATO and the EU. There must also be a demonstrable sharing of equitable burdens without which any defence effort withers and dies over time.

The Security Council's peacekeeping trilemma

The United Nations (UN) Security Council is stuck in a peacekeeping trilemma. This is a situation where the Council's three strategic goals for peacekeeping operations—implementing broad mandates, minimizing peacekeeper casualties and maximizing cost-effectiveness—cannot be achieved simultaneously. This trilemma stems from longstanding competing pressures on how the Council designs UN peacekeeping operations as well as political divisions between peacekeeping's three key groups of stakeholders: the states that authorize peacekeeping mandates, those that provide most of the personnel and field capabilities, and those that pay the majority of the bill. Fortunately, the most negative consequences of the trilemma can be mitigated and perhaps even transcended altogether. Mitigation would require the Council to champion and implement four main reforms: improving peacekeeper performance, holding peacekeepers accountable for misdeeds, adopting prioritized and sequenced mandates, and strengthening the financial basis for UN peacekeeping. Transcending the trilemma would require a more fundamental reconfiguration of the key stakeholder groups in order to create much greater unity of effort behind a re-envisaged peacekeeping enterprise. This is highly unlikely in the current international political context.

Command and Control for Cyberspace Operations - A Call for Research

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) declared cyberspace as an operational domain in 2011. The DoD subsequently formed US Cyber Command and the Cyber Mission Force to conduct operations to achieve national and military objectives in and through cyberspace. Since that time, the DoD has implemented and evolved through multiple command and control (C2) structures for cyberspace operations, derived from traditional military C2 doctrine, to achieve unity of effort across both the global cyberspace domain and with military operations in the physical domains (land, sea, air, and space). The DoD continues to struggle to adapt its C2 methods from the physical domains to the cyber domain. Applying traditional military C2 constructs to the cyberspace domain leads to several problems due to the uniqueness of cyberspace from the other domains. Cyberspace presents a very different operational environment than the physical domains, where time and space are compressed. In this paper, we describe the factors that make cyberspace different from the other operational domains and the challenges those differences impose on existing C2 constructs. We propose a campaign of experimentation, consisting of a series cyberspace C2 experiments, to address these challenges by conducting research into the taxonomy of C2 nodes, decisions, information, and relationships, which can be used to simulate and refine DoD cyberspace operations C2 constructs.

Homeland Security

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 caused a seismic shift in how the United States organizes and executes the mission of securing the homeland. The creation and growth of the Department of Homeland Security is the most visible manifestation of this change. However, the homeland security discipline contemplates shared responsibilities and a unity of effort among all levels of government, the private sector, and the general public. The wide array of stakeholders, alongside an expanding definition of what constitutes homeland security, presents complex challenges for policymakers. With the perspective of the more than fifteen years that have elapsed since 9/11, this chapter examines the evolution of homeland security from a near-exclusive focus on terrorism to a broader “all hazards” approach, the relationship between homeland security and national security, the roles of leading actors, and contemporary issues.

The National Security Process

Removing the friction of competing perspectives and bureaucratic interests by the various agencies of government (along with their supporters in the Congress and beneficiaries among businesses, interest groups, and the public) that would foster “unity of effort” and the ability to prioritize activity, budget accordingly, carry out policies crisply, and convey a consistent message by our government is chimerical. The interagency system cannot be structured to maximum efficiency in the United States. Efficiency is radically beside the point, because the purpose of the structure is to maximize consensus on the activity to be undertaken. The politics cannot be leached out of policymaking—nor should they be—because politics give policymaking its legitimacy.