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Speak to the business, master Secretary, why are we met in council? Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Prime Minister Boris Johnsonsdecision to appoint his chief EU negotiator and former special adviser as the next national security adviser(NSA) was a surprise. Coming in the middle of the Integrated Review, this sudden change has prompted debate about David Frosts suitability for the role and what it means for Johnsons approach to this vital area of policy.

Underlying these questions is a more basic one what does an NSA actually do? As with any job at the heart of government, the precise shape and weight of the role will reflect the priorities and working style of the prime minister of the day. But the broad parameters will not have changed much since David Cameroninvited me on his arrival in Downing Street in 2010 to become the UKs first NSA and to organise a National Security Council(NSC).

Theintroduction of an NSC systemwas not a revolution. Since the Committee of Imperial Defence wasestablished by the Balfour governmentin 1902, Britain has had a highly effective system for war planning and coordination. This was honed in two world wars and, in the postwar decades, all prime ministers had a Cabinet committee dealing with overseas and defence affairs. But by the time Tony Blair made the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, there was a perception that the system had become less rigorous and more informal. That was, at least, the conclusion of the Butler inquiry into the handling of intelligence in the run-up to that fateful decision. The inquiry reported that they were concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the governments procedures reduces the scope for informed political judgement.

When he became leader of the opposition in 2005, Cameron pledged that, if elected, he would introduce a fully fledged NSC system. His aims were to tighten up decision-making and improve coordination across government in response to the widening array of national security threats, including mass-casualty terrorism, cyber attacks and disruptive events such as floods and public health emergencies.

That was how I found myself walking across Downing Street in May 2010, having packed up my office in the FCO, to set up a new national security apparatus. Although not a revolution in terms of Whitehall organisation, Cameron was determined that the NSC would mark a clear change in approach. He insisted on regular meetings and used them to make real decisions, in the presence of senior advisers including the intelligence heads and chief of the defence staff, and in an atmosphere of challenge and open debate to avoid groupthink.

The NSA role had and in my view should still have three main elements. First, to act as secretary to the NSC, analogous to the Cabinet Secretarys role organising the work of the Cabinet. The NSA is responsible for setting the agenda including persuading the prime minister to accept a balanced diet of subjects on the NSC agenda. This includes not just the most urgent crises or the prime ministers pet projects, but issues that are a priority for other ministers on the NSC as well.

I saw the role as being notjust the prime ministers national security adviser, as the announcement of Frosts appointment termed it, but working for the whole council, ensuring that all members got some air time and always avoiding coming between the prime minister and individual ministers. Having decided on the agenda, the NSA has to ensure that the NSC gets well-prepared papers, and that action points from meetings are followed up. I convened a group of the permanent secretaries of all departments represented on the NSC to ensure quality control of papers and proper implementation of decisions. This collegial role was important in getting the NSC embedded into the Whitehall system and minimising friction.

The second role is to be the prime ministers closest adviser on foreign, defence and security issues, at their side at all the relevant meetings, doing the overseas travelling with the boss and representing the UK in the international club of NSAs. That meant building relationships with all the key foreign counterparts, starting with the US NSA.

The third element was to lead the sizeable National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Apart from running the NSC apparatus, there were small teams to give the prime minister ideas and advice across the range of NSC business, and a unit to provide a central focus for the intelligence community, particularly when it came to assembling a collective budget bid to the Treasury. An important innovation, which had been part of the Conservatives plans in opposition, was to bring the Civil Contingencies Secretariat responsible for resilience planning into the National Security Secretariat as part of raising the profile of this issue. One of the top four national security priorities we set out in 2010 was the risk of a pandemic.

I found that this added up to (more than) a full-time job. That is why I considered it a mistake for Sir Mark Sedwill to keep the NSA role when he took over as Cabinet Secretary in 2018. Its against the background of this job description that the appointment of Frost should be considered.

Three problems should be taken into account:

Gove was right. Those advising ministers on national security do need the mastery of deep knowledge at a time when the government is formulating a new national strategy in a dangerous world.But the message of Frosts appointment is that the prime minister accords absolute priority not to expertise and experience, but to political loyalty among his closest advisers.

That is not a reassuring conclusion.

Lord Ricketts GCMG GCVOwas the UKs first National Security Adviser, as well as, previously, British Permanent Representative to NATO, and subsequently Ambassador to France and Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office. He is a Trustee of RUSI.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

BANNER IMAGE:Courtesy of Smuconlaw / Wikimedia Commons.

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Speaking Truth to Power: The Problem with Prime Minister Johnson's New National Security Adviser - RUSI Analysis

The national hockey team has appealed to the National Sports Authority (NSA) to redeem the promise it made when they won bronze and silver medals in Stellenbosch, South Africa, during the Tokyo 2020 Africa qualifier.

The Director General of the NSA, Prof. Patrick Twumasi, in September 2019 pledged to pay per diem allowances to the national male and female hockey teams as a motivation when they excelled in that tournament.

A member of the female national hockey team, Elizabeth Opoku, in an interview with Accra-based Starr FM last Saturday said they had not received any money from the NSA yet.

People think we are enjoying but within us we are suffering. Since the NSA promised us that money we have not received any penny from the authority, which is very bad.

I can tell you that the hockey players are losing interest in the game because we have been neglected. We are only playing the game because of the love and passion we have for the sport, she revealed

We come home with nothing anytime we travel outside to represent the country in tournaments. We have to borrow money for transportation before we can get to our individual homes. The issue is very pathetic and its a shame to sports, she lamented.

She further revealed that during the qualifiers, the country did not even provide basic equipment here for the team as the players used their individual shin guards, mouth guides, sticks and boots.

She called on the NSA to live up to its promise to encourage athetes to play their hearts out.

She appealed to corporate organisations to consider involving hockey in their sponsorship packages, instead of spending all their sponsorship money only on football.

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Source: Daily Graphic

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Members of the Midland Lady Explorers 18U team which finished second at the NSA state tournament in Grand Blanc this past weekend are (front, from left) Jillian Krawczak, Summer Stone, Gabby Schloop, Mady Snyder, Hailey Leister; and (back, from left) assistant coach Fred Kelly, manager Casey Kristin, Addison Cooley, Katie Bickham, Lakin Fryzel, assistant coach Tim Gilbert, Krista Moe, Ashley Roper, Markie Hooton, scorebook keeper Gillian Schloop, and assistant coach Jodi Mayan.

Members of the Midland Lady Explorers 18U team which finished second at the NSA state tournament in Grand Blanc this past weekend are (front, from left) Jillian Krawczak, Summer Stone, Gabby Schloop, Mady

Members of the Midland Lady Explorers 18U team which finished second at the NSA state tournament in Grand Blanc this past weekend are (front, from left) Jillian Krawczak, Summer Stone, Gabby Schloop, Mady Snyder, Hailey Leister; and (back, from left) assistant coach Fred Kelly, manager Casey Kristin, Addison Cooley, Katie Bickham, Lakin Fryzel, assistant coach Tim Gilbert, Krista Moe, Ashley Roper, Markie Hooton, scorebook keeper Gillian Schloop, and assistant coach Jodi Mayan.

Members of the Midland Lady Explorers 18U team which finished second at the NSA state tournament in Grand Blanc this past weekend are (front, from left) Jillian Krawczak, Summer Stone, Gabby Schloop, Mady

Kelly: Return to softball action was awesome

This past weekend, I had the joyful opportunity to experience something which I didnt think Id be able to experience all summer. As I told numerous people Saturday, I didnt think that that day was going to come.

After months of speculation and uncertainty, the travel softball team for which Im an assistant coach (the Midland Lady Explorers 18U team) finally got to play an actual game of softball ... on an actual outdoor field ... in an actual tournament ... with actual fans in attendance. Honestly, if you had asked me as recently as mid- to late-May if I thought we were going to have any softball this summer, I wouldve said sadly that, no, I really dont see it happening.

A lot has changed in the past few weeks, though. With the easing of restrictions on outdoor gatherings, we were able to start practicing as a team four weeks ago in the hope that the tournaments we had registered for would still be held. Since we coaches and players had not seen each other since our last indoor winter tournament in mid-February and since these girls, the vast majority of them being high school seniors, had been robbed of their final prep season it was wonderful just to get together, step onto a softball field, and go through some light workouts.

That first day of practice was awesome. After doing some catching up socially and inquiring as to how everyone was faring amid the twin tribulations of the coronavirus crisis and local flooding, we took the field for the first time in months and attempted to shake off the considerable and inevitable rust.

Those first couple of practices in early June were not a thing of beauty, to be sure. There were booted grounders and wild throws galore and not many solidly-hit balls, but that hardly mattered. It was a pleasure just to be back on the dirt and grass, feeling the sun on our faces, and practicing the game we love so deeply.

As we continued to practice throughout the month of June, the girls skills in the field got sharper, their contact at the plate got meatier, and their confidence slowly but surely began to build as did our anticipation for the first tournament of the summer. As Saturday, June 27 crept ever nearer, the reality began to set in: we were really going to be playing ball after all!

And what a glorious weekend of softball it was. Competing in the NSA state tournament in Grand Blanc, we won twice on Saturday to advance to the winners bracket semifinal, then walloped our next opponent 18-3 bright and early Sunday morning to move on to the winners bracket final later in the day.

The rest of the day Sunday was a blur of drama and big hits and great pitching and key plays.

We played four more seven-inning games in quick succession, falling 5-2 to a very good Caledonia Chaos team in the winners bracket final, beating the defending state champion Hurricanes 4-1 in the losers bracket final, then edging the Chaos 3-2 in a gripping championship game to force an if-necessary rematch with the Chaos for all the beans.

Our debut tournament came to an end with a 4-2 loss to the Chaos in the second championship game, and we had to settle for runner-up rings, which was admittedly a tad disappointing. We have a great team with great players, and I, for one, was expecting to win it all.

But lets face it: winning a state championship, which definitely wouldve been nice, was not the most important thing. Getting out on the field and just playing ball was the most important thing. For all of these girls not only ours but girls from all over the state who had been forced to sit at home spinning their wheels, watching the weeks of what shouldve been their senior season drift away and wondering what mightve been, finally getting the chance to play again was a small measure of redemption for opportunities lost.

And thats what I truly enjoyed most about spending an entire weekend in the blistering heat just watching our girls enjoy the moment. Competing. Smiling. Laughing. Having fun again, for heavens sake. Yes, winning five of our seven games was rewarding, and taking second in the state was great. But watching the girls excel on the field and enjoying every minute of it thats the good stuff.

And every single one of our players, still somewhat rusty though they may have been, made positive contributions to our runner-up finish. Some struggled to hit at times but played excellent defense, some pitched their butts off against terrific competition, a couple hit the daylights out of the ball all weekend long, some did little things well at the plate and/or in the field to help us win games, one fought through a heat-induced migraine headache to make some great plays in the title game, and one even missed her high school graduation commencement to play ball. We coaches were as proud of our players as we were delighted just to be back on the field.

In case youre wondering what it was like to participate in a tournament during our ongoing health crisis, I will admit that, in some regards, the experience was a bit strange. For instance, spectators were required to sit beyond the outfield fences and not in close proximity to the teams, and opposing teams were not allowed to engage in the traditional postgame handshake line. Those nuggets of protocol seemed odd and unnatural, but they in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the tournament.

Other precautions included requests for teams to disinfect balls regularly, social distance in the dugouts, avoid crossing paths with other teams, sanitize dugout benches before and after games, and avoid huddling together for team chats or cheers. These regulations were sometimes adhered to and sometimes not.

For the most part, I think that most people tried to do the right things to make it a relatively safe environment. It should be noted that it is virtually impossible to participate in a team sport and not be within six feet of each other. Apparently, thats a risk that all of us present were willing to take, and, hopefully, the regular sanitation of balls, dugouts, and hands was enough to keep everyone safe. Time will tell if we were wrong, and I sincerely hope we were not.

Personally, I felt blessedly free from fear. Was I cautious? Yes. I sanitized my hands countless times during the weekend and wiped down the balls and dugouts routinely. Was I concerned? Of course. I dont want to get sick, nor see anyone else get sick. But was I fearful? Not really. Ill try to keep myself clean and pray that God keeps me healthy, but I wont let fear steal my joy for a game I love. Besides, living in a perpetual state of fear to the point of paralysis isnt really living in the first place.

Next up for us is a tournament right here in Midland on the weekend of July 10-12, hosted by the Midland Line Drive Express, after which we have two additional tourneys in Davison and Battle Creek. Will we win one or all of those tournaments? I dont know that, but I do know that I like our chances.

And as we prepare for these last three tournaments, I am nothing if not acutely grateful. Grateful to have these opportunities. Grateful that people like Line Drive President Doug Hill and others like him are willing to host tournaments during an admittedly trying time in our history.

Most of all, Im grateful for our players, who are striving to make the most of a truly bizarre 2020. To get to watch them compete and test their abilities, their desire, and their mental toughness and to get to enjoy the company of some of the nicest young ladies you could ever meet I cant imagine a better way to spend the summer.

Fred Kelly is a sportswriter for the Daily News.

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Artificial intelligence is overhypedthere, we said it. Its also incredibly important.

Superintelligent algorithms arent about to take all the jobs or wipe out humanity. But software has gotten significantly smarter of late. Its why you can talk to your friends as an animated poop on the iPhone X using Apples Animoji, or ask your smart speaker to order more paper towels.

Tech companies heavy investments in AI are already changing our lives and gadgets, and laying the groundwork for a more AI-centric future.

The current boom in all things AI was catalyzed by breakthroughs in an area known as machine learning. It involves training computers to perform tasks based on examples, rather than by relying on programming by a human. A technique called deep learning has made this approach much more powerful. Just ask Lee Sedol, holder of 18 international titles at the complex game of Go. He got creamed by software called AlphaGo in 2016.

For most of us, the most obvious results of the improved powers of AI are neat new gadgets and experiences such as smart speakers, or being able to unlock your iPhone with your face. But AI is also poised to reinvent other areas of life. One is health care. Hospitals in India are testing software that checks images of a persons retina for signs of diabetic retinopathy, a condition frequently diagnosed too late to prevent vision loss. Machine learning is vital to projects in autonomous driving, where it allows a vehicle to make sense of its surroundings.

Theres evidence that AI can make us happier and healthier. But theres also reason for caution. Incidents in which algorithms picked up or amplified societal biases around race or gender show that an AI-enhanced future wont automatically be a better one.

The Beginnings of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence as we know it began as a vacation project. Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term in the summer of 1956, when he invited a small group to spend a few weeks musing on how to make machines do things like use language. He had high hopes of a breakthrough toward human-level machines. We think that a significant advance can be made, he wrote with his co-organizers, if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

Moments that Shaped AI

1956

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence coins the name of a new field concerned with making software smart like humans.

1965

Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT creates Eliza, the first chatbot, which poses as a psychotherapist.

1975

Meta-Dendral, a program developed at Stanford to interpret chemical analyses, makes the first discoveries by a computer to be published in a refereed journal.

1987

A Mercedes van fitted with two cameras and a bunch of computers drives itself 20 kilometers along a German highway at more than 55 mph, in an academic project led by engineer Ernst Dickmanns.

1997

IBMs computer Deep Blue defeats chess world champion Garry Kasparov.

2004

The Pentagon stages the Darpa Grand Challenge, a race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert that catalyzes the autonomous-car industry.

2012

Researchers in a niche field called deep learning spur new corporate interest in AI by showing their ideas can make speech and image recognition much more accurate.

2016

AlphaGo, created by Google unit DeepMind, defeats a world champion player of the board game Go.

Those hopes were not met, and McCarthy later conceded that he had been overly optimistic. But the workshop helped researchers dreaming of intelligent machines coalesce into a proper academic field.

Early work often focused on solving fairly abstract problems in math and logic. But it wasnt long before AI started to show promising results on more human tasks. In the late 1950s Arthur Samuel created programs that learned to play checkers. In 1962 one scored a win over a master at the game. In 1967 a program called Dendral showed it could replicate the way chemists interpreted mass-spectrometry data on the makeup of chemical samples.

As the field of AI developed, so did different strategies for making smarter machines. Some researchers tried to distill human knowledge into code or come up with rules for tasks like understanding language. Others were inspired by the importance of learning to human and animal intelligence. They built systems that could get better at a task over time, perhaps by simulating evolution or by learning from example data. The field hit milestone after milestone, as computers mastered more tasks that could previously be done only by people.

Deep learning, the rocket fuel of the current AI boom, is a revival of one of the oldest ideas in AI. The technique involves passing data through webs of math loosely inspired by how brain cells work, known as artificial neural networks. As a network processes training data, connections between the parts of the network adjust, building up an ability to interpret future data.

Artificial neural networks became an established idea in AI not long after the Dartmouth workshop. The room-filling Perceptron Mark 1 from 1958, for example, learned to distinguish different geometric shapes, and got written up in The New York Times as the Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser. But neural networks tumbled from favor after an influential 1969 book co-authored by MITs Marvin Minsky suggested they couldnt be very powerful.

Not everyone was convinced, and some researchers kept the technique alive over the decades. They were vindicated in 2012, when a series of experiments showed that neural networks fueled with large piles of data and powerful computer chips could give machines new powers of perception.

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While AI often invokes images of the sentient computer overlord of science fiction, the current reality is far different. At its heart, AI uses the same basic algorithmic functions that drive traditional software, but applies them in a different way.

A standard warehouse management system, for example, can show the current levels of various products, while an intelligent one could identify shortages, analyze the cause and its effect on the overall supply chain, and even take steps to correct it.

Artificial intelligence can be allowed to replace a whole system, making all decisions end-to-end, or it can be used to enhance a specific process.

For example, analyzing video footage to recognize gestures, or replacing peripheral devices (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) with a speech to text system., giving the impression that one is interacting with a sentient being.

Just as philosophers debate the nature of man and the existence of free will, computer science experts debate the various types of AI.

Capable of performing only a limited set of predetermined functions; think, autonomous cars, retail kiosks, etc.;

Said to equal the human minds ability to function autonomously according to a wide set of stimuli;

Which will one day exceed human intelligence (and conceivably take over the world).

At the moment, Narrow AI is only beginning to enter mainstream computing applications.

Can only react to existing situations, not past experiences.

Relies on stored data to learn from recent experiences to make decisions.

Capable of comprehending conversational speech, emotions, non-verbal cues and other intuitive elements;

Human-level consciousness with its own desires, goals and objectives.

A good way to visualize these distinctions would be an AI-driven poker player. A reactive machine would base decisions only on the current hand in play, while a limited memory version would consider past decisions and player profiles.

Using Theory of Mind, however, the program would pick up on speech and facial cues, and a self-aware AI might start to consider if there is something more worthwhile to do than play poker.

AI is currently being applied to a range of functions both in the lab and in commercial/consumer settings:

Allows intelligent systems to convert human speech into text or code.

A subset of speech recognition, enables conversational interaction between humans and computers.

Allows a machine to scan an image and identify it using comparative analysis.

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of AI, however, is that it allows software to rewrite itself as it adapts to its environment.

Unlike traditional upgrade programs that take years and are often buggy, or even newer DevOps processes that push changes quickly with less disruption, AI allows a given program to optimize itself to highly specialized use cases.

This should not only lower the cost of software licensing and support, it should provide steadily improving performance and the development of unique processes that deliver crucial advantages in an increasingly competitive economy.

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