NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on a visit to Kyiv that Ukrainian forces are "gradually gaining ground" in their counteroffensive against Russian forces. "Every metre that Ukrainian forces regain is a metre that Russia loses," he said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russia said it destroyed 11 Ukrainian drones overnight in an attack that saw one combat drone drop explosives on a power substation, cutting a local power supply in Russia's Kursk region. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree setting out his country's routine autumn conscription campaign, which will see 130,000 people called up for statutory military service. Adult men in Russia are required to do a yearlong military service between the ages of 18 and 27 or equivalent training while pursuing higher education.

"We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." American military recruiting is in dire straits. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently determined the Defense Department confronts its most challenging recruitment environment in 50 years, reporting the department "does not have sufficient plans, goals, and strategies to guide its recruitment and retention efforts." Recruiters for the armed services face a daunting task, especially amid a hot job market and polarized cultural landscape. Existing AI tools have the potential to streamline and focus their efforts, pre-identifying those most qualified and most likely to want to serve.

A robot from Gecko Robotics is being used to clean the exterior of a Navy vessel. Pennsylvania company Gecko Robotics has revealed that its hull-scaling robot, which can identify structural issues, has been adopted by the US Navy. The military force will now utilize the technology on the first amphibious assault vessel and one more destroyer from the Arleigh Burke-class. The CEO of the company stated in a press release that they are happy to use their advanced technology which has been evaluated and authenticated by Navy technical leaders and sustainment officials. The Navy has a crucial responsibility and Gecko will support them by ensuring they have the necessary tools to execute their tasks securely and efficiently in today's constantly evolving geopolitical scenario.

It may be difficult to predict how well a student will perform academically, but a new innovation can do so just by looking at their tweets - and with more than 93 percent accuracy. A computer model trained on thousands of test scores and one million social media posts to distinguishing between high academic achievers and lower ones based on textual features shared in posts. The technology, powered by artificial intelligence, determined that students who discuss scientific and cultural topics, along with writing lengthy posts and words are likely to perform well. However, those who use an abundance of emojis, words or entire phrases written in in capital letters and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving and military service tend to receive lower grades in school. The team notes that by'predict' they do not mean the system creates a future forecast, but rather a correlation between posts and real test scores students earned.

A new bipartisan congressional report calls for the Defense Department to get a lot more serious about the race to acquire artificial intelligence and autonomous capabilities, modeling efforts to become dominant in these spheres after the "Manhattan Project" initiative to test and develop nuclear weapons in the 1940s. On Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee released the results of a yearlong review, co-led by Reps. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Jim Banks, R-Ind., aimed at assessing U.S. military capabilities and preparedness to meet current threats. The 87-page Future of Defense Task Force Report contains some expected findings -- China and Russia are identified as the top security threats to the U.S. and modernization is described as an urgent need -- but there are surprising points of emphasis. The report leans hard into technological development and growth, particularly in the fields of machine learning and autonomy, going so far as to call for the Defense Department to evaluate an AI or autonomous alternative prior to every major future defense buy.

The U.S. Air Force is expanding its embrace of predictive analytics tools to keep pace with maintenance demands for its huge fleet of fighters, bombers, tankers, transports and helicopters. There is no shortage of U.S. military aircraft, with estimates ranging as high as 5,400 for the Air Force alone. The problem has been keeping that air armada flying. According to Air Force Times, aircraft readiness as measured as a percentage of planes able to fly has steadily decreased over the past decade. Hence, the service has been enlisting analytics and AI software companies to help get a handle on maintaining increasingly complex aircraft loaded with electronics gear.

Unit 8200 may or may not ring a bell, but you've likely heard of Viber, the popular instant messaging app or Wix, the cloud computing service. Viber, Wix, and hundreds of other high-tech startups have their origins in Unit 8200, the cyberware division of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The links are Talmon Marco and Avishai Abrahami, Viber's, and Wix' founders, both of whom did their mandatory military service at or worked for Unit 8200. Over the years, Unit 8200 has turned out thousands of tech-savvy entrepreneurs who, like Marco and Abrahami, went on to found their own tech companies or to occupy leading positions in established ones. In what has become the world's premier example of military innovation, Unit 8200 is credited with playing a key role in developing Israel's high-tech know-how, which has resulted in the country having the highest concentration of startups per capita in the world and consistently ranking as a global leader in innovation.

Editor's Note: As 2018 comes to a close, War on the Rocks is publishing a series of year-end reflections on what our editors and contributors learned from the publication's coverage of various national security topics. These reflections will examine how War on the Rocks coverage evolved over the year, what it taught us about the issue in question, and what questions remain to be answered in 2019 and beyond. Enjoy, and see you next year! What will advances in artificial intelligence (AI) mean for national security? This year in War on the Rocks, technical and non-technical experts with academic, military, and industry perspectives grappled with the promise and peril of AI in the military and defense realms.

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.