Reoptimization for Great Power Competition

GPC Key Decisions

USAF Case for Change

SecAF Memo

Air Force FAQ for Reoptimizing Great Power Competition

“We need these changes now; we are out of time to reoptimize our forces to meet the strategic challenges in a time of great power competition.”

~ Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall

The United States faces a time of consequence marked by significant shifts in the strategic environment. To remain ready, the U.S. Air Force must change.

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

Today, the Air Force once again finds itself at a critical juncture—an era of Great Power Competition marked by a new security environment, a rapidly evolving character of war, and a formidable competitor. This new era requires understanding its challenges and the attributes needed to succeed.

Embracing change is not a choice; it is a necessity. The Air Force must “reoptimize” into an enterprise prepared for high-end conflicts and long-term strategic competition.

Lila Davachi - Temporal Integration and Separation of Sequential Events in Memory

Air Force Research Laboratory

Video by Kevin D Schmidt

May 3, 2024 | 01:10:36

Abstract:

Lila Davachi is currently a Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Yale University. She then conducted her post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in the Brain and Cognitive sciences department. She started her research group at the New York University in 2004 where she was Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and served as the Director of the Center for Learning, Memory and Emotion at New York University before moving to Columbia University in 2017. Her scientific contributions have shed light on how dynamic experiences are transformed into lasting memories and how they update knowledge. She places an emphasis on behavioral and neuroimaging investigations into how humans encode and consolidate their experiences and her work has led to several discoveries, including in the area of sequential event representations and the impact of post-encoding neural activity on memory. Lila is a recipient of the prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2009, Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, a Provost’s Senior Faculty Teaching Scholar and she is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) and the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS).
"I will talk about how sequential event representations are formed, de novo covering our work in this area since our seminal paper in 2011 called 'What is an episode in episodic memory?"

Key Moments and Questions in the video include:
Introduction
Experience is like a flowing river…
What about reflecting backward?
What is an ‘episode’ in episodic memory?
Temporal organization of experience
Ezzyat-DuBrow-Davachi (EDD) Paradigm
Hypothesis
What are the neural mechanisms?
Sequential event integration and separation
Mnemonic chunking
Dual mechanisms?
What neural mechanisms support episodic chinking?
Boundary segmentation
Ramping activity within events predicts mnemonic chunking
Next Steps
Person, action, object
Spatial context
Temporal context
Sequences in context
Same event / Across events
Non-Boundary / Boundary
Neural Similarity
Neural similarity related to mnemonic proximity?
LO cortical working memory representation?
Are these sequential items now a single ‘memory’?
Recency Memory
Memory Conditions
No switch
switch
Boundaries reduce recency memory
Do the intervening representations bridge the gap?
Reactivation during recency judgements?
Classification results
Reactivation of intervening representations
Trial by trial BOLD response within and across events
Questions More