Collectively known as extended reality, or XR, these tools offer a new take on situational awareness. “Now you’re no longer having to look at a map. You can immerse yourself in a virtual or augmented world, and you’ll be able to learn things just by looking,” said Lt. Col. Todd Arnold, a cyber officer and research scientist with the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.

A pair of research projects help to show what that XR-informed world might look like.

In one project, researchers are exploring ways to show soldiers at a glance the whereabouts of electromagnetic sources.

“You look to the right side and see: There’s a [Wi-Fi] access point in use, or there’s a radio, or there’s a cell phone,” said assistant professor Col. Stephen Hamilton. “If you see a whole bunch of stuff going on, and you know what kind of devices are in there, you can get a better picture of what’s happening before walking into that building.”

That information would be displayed on a headset, with the soldier able to see the electronic activity overlayed on top of the actual physical scene. The team is experimenting with Microsoft HoloLens smart glasses as a potential delivery device.

In a second project, the institute is developing a virtual sand table.

“It comes from the idea of taking a stick and drawing the battle plan in the sand,” Arnold said. “I can tell you I want you to go down this road and do this, but in a virtual reality environment I can actually show you. I want you to kick in thatdoor. Nope, not the first door on the left, the second door on the left. And you can actually practice that in virtual reality before going in.”

As a training tool, a virtual sand table would have a number of potential advantages. For one thing, the researchers note, geographically disconnected troops could train together on the same model, in real time. That would help to ensure a certain continuity of experience and expectation.

In addition, an XR training experience could bring a higher level of realism to the training exercise.

“Suppose you’re going to have some plan of attack,” Hamilton said. “Depending on how detailed the model is, you can actually put yourself there and walk through it. You can have the soldiers actually practice the scenario inside that building, in that virtual space.”

The road forward

Right now, the researchers said, real-world implementation is five to 10 years away. A number of factors will need to come together to make virtual training a commonplace Army experience.

Hamilton pointed to issues with the hardware, as an example. Commercial headsets don’t yet offer a wide-enough field of view, an effect he described as “looking down a hose.”

Army investment in an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) could help move the needle on that issue. That program aims to integrate key XR technology systems into one device to provide a single platform for soldiers to fight, rehearse and train.

“They’ve got the funding to do that, and it will be a big step forward,” Hamilton said. “They’re working on getting something that’s hardened and ruggedized and that a soldier can actually use.”

Another Army Cyber Institute researcher, Jan Kallberg, points to mechanical and cultural hurdles that still need to be overcome before XR can go mainstream.

On the mechanical side, systems need to be made more robust. “Systems like this work perfectly in a national training center where they may be tested for 12 hours or 18 hours,” he said. “But a great power conflict is not going to be a 12-hour event. It can be a drawn-out conflict. We will need to consider things like battery life and wear-and-tear.”

On the cultural side, the Army will have to win buy-in from soldiers who will be asked to entrust their safety to virtual renditions.

“As humans, we trust our own senses first,” Kallberg said. “You need for them to trust the pixel: They will need to believe in the data integrity. There will be a trust issue that has to be addressed.”

If these hurdles can be overcome, though, the researchers say there is much to be gained by an XR approach.

“It’s not easy to share situational awareness,” Arnold said. “This has the ability to share information so much faster than what you could possibly have, if you were getting it any other way.”

With a training course in Arizona, as well as a mobile training capability, the Joint C-sUAS Office is teaching war fighters about their options to counter the rising battlefield threat of drones that interfere with operations, conduct intel or carry weapons. The tools developed the various military branches span radio frequency disruptors to vehicle-mounted sensors to find and more accurately target UAS.

“It is a system of systems approach,” said Col. David Morgan, Joint C-sUAS Office division chief for requirements and capabilities. “There’s no one silver bullet that is going to address this.”

Once trained on these various systems, “any joint warfighter — any soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine — should be able to do the very basic things needed to counter a particular threat,” Morgan said.

At a small UAS academy at Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona, war fighters from across the military get classroom training and hands-on experience with a range of counter-drone tools.

In addition to that two-week, on-site class, five-person mobile training teams also make that learning available to deployed units around the country.

“JCO develops a joint training program in order to ensure that the war fighter has the ability to employ capabilities effectively against an evolving enemy,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Hester, the office’s capabilities integration branch chief.

Defensive tools in the mix include the Dronebuster family of radio frequency jammers, which aim to interrupt the control of the drone by overwhelming the control frequency and taking over the drone’s wireless control link. This can force the drone to stop and hover, or to return to the operator.

Another tool, the Smart Shooter, is a fire control system used to significantly increase the accuracy of small arms. A targeting aid, it makes conventional rifles precise enough to hit a moving drone.

The training also incorporates a simulation component. Soldiers hone their skills on a simulation of the Mobile-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Integrated Defeat System, or M-LIDS: A system of sensors and shooters mounted on a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. Other defensive components include radar and infrared cameras, as well as direction-finding sensors, and wireless encrypted communications to tie it all together.

Those threats can vary widely: There are lots of small drones in play, and the technology is evolving rapidly. Hence the need for a system-of-systems approach, which brings multiple defenses to the table, Morgan said.

To make the training effective, JCO is giving special attention to the interoperability of these various systems.

“One of the things that we really focus on here is ensuring that there is a good integration of all those individual systems,” Morgan said. “We’ve put a high emphasis on command and control, to make sure that all those systems are able to talk effectively to each other.”

In making interoperability a top priority, the JCO is able to deliver training that brings together to most current counter-UAS strategies from across the military.

“The services individually are doing great work on this, and part of the JCO’s charge is to find those best practices and then promulgate that information across the department,” Morgan said. “That’s what we need to do in order to keep pace with the technology in a field that is growing very fast.”

Coders — who create software for anything from streamlining warehouse operations to improving soldiers’ battlefield performance — take advantage of the cloud’s shared storage, databases and networking that make computing resources more powerful and flexible than those available in on-site data centers.

With cloud, “you can dynamically spin up more instances or compute power as needed,” Cho said. “A lot of the toil you would have in managing an on-prem solution for this is abstracted away, and it reduces the amount of work we have to do scale these applications for deployment across the Army.”

The software factory isn’t alone in this approach. Across the Defense Department, senior leaders are looking to use the scale and computing power of the cloud to bring new software to service members more quickly and cost-effectively.

They’re looking to turn cloud into a kind of software assembly line, putting in place the key components — development tools, cybersecurity testing, quality assurance checks — and making them readily available to developers across the armed services in a common operating space.

“Cloud makes that baseline more readily shareable, and then you don’t have to have so many software engineers, at a time when they are already in short supply,” said Brad Curran, defense industry principal at Frost & Sullivan market analysis company. He noted that the military branches all have been pursuing cloud-based development strategies as a way to close that talent gap while also speeding deployment of new software tools.

Within the DoD, the Cloud Computing Program Office at the Defense Information Systems Agency is building that shared repository of software development capabilities. With repeatable, reusable processes in the cloud, “mission owners developing many different applications can ingest and use that, without having to create the pipeline upfront,” program office Executive Director Sharon Woods said.

Cloud and DevSecOps

Air Force Chief Software Officer Nicolas M. Chaillan is among DoD officials seeking to accelerate the pace of software production by pairing repeatable processes with a DevSecOps approach, a software methodology that combines development, security testing and operations in a seamless production process.

“When you combine the elasticity of the cloud with the rapid feedback loop of DevSecOps, you get real return on investment,” he said. “Instead of waiting years and months to test the software and cyber-scan the software, we do that multiple times a day, so that security and the reliability are built in.”

He’s seen this approach drive practical outcomes. He noted one instance in which developers were able to deploy in just 45 days a new artificial intelligence tool to assist pilot decision-making.

With cloud, “developers can scale up and down based on the compute and memory needs,” Chaillan said. “That elasticity makes them more agile: You can try things out and then turn them off very quickly.”

Commercial cloud offerings for government are supported by security certifications such as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, and by guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Given these guardrails, defense leaders say, development in the cloud is highly secure and can lead to more secure software releases.

The military benefits from competition among major cloud providers to deliver secure cloud environments for government work, Woods said. At the same time, the massive computing power of the cloud makes it possible to automate security-assurance processes within the software development pipeline. Many of the time-consuming manual checks to ensure software is properly patched can be carried out by machine, not just once but repeatedly throughout the development process.

“Security check points, quality check points: All of that is automated,” Woods said. “That’s very transparent for the entire development team. They’re able to review the quality and security of that code before it’s merged to the [military] branch.”

Flexible approach

As the Defense Department looks to expand cloud software development, Chaillan urges military leaders to avoid potential vendor lock-in.

“What if one day Amazon doesn’t like a war and decides they don’t want to do business with the military?” he said. Instead, developers can use open-source tools, such as the Kubernetes development platform, that work across cloud environments. “Then you don’t have to rewrite software in order to move to a different cloud provider. It gives you flexibility so that the things you are building can operate in any environment.”

Military leaders say they will continue to lean heavily on cloud as an application-development space, as they seek to deliver new capabilities and timely updates to meet battlefield goals.

Cloud-based development “allows us to put soldiers front and center” at the Army Software Factory, Cho said. “It reduces the manual overhead on the application development team so they have more time to focus on outcomes, to focus on soldiers and solider problems.”

“5G offers high speeds, quicker response times and it can handle many more wireless devices than 4G technology. Ultimately, 5G will provide ubiquitous connectivity for people and devices,” said Joseph Evans, technical director for 5G in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

Evans described the specific plans for testing 5G capabilities at the four initial installations. At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, planners will be look at ways in which 5G can support augmented reality and virtual reality. At Hill Air Force Base, they’ll be looking at the ability to support dynamic spectrum sharing, a tool for switching between 5G and existing 4G assets.

At Naval Base San Diego and at Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, they’ll be looking at 5G’s speed and bandwidth as a means to support “smart warehouse” functionality.

Telecom experts said it makes sense for DoD to play a leading role in exploring the possibilities surrounding the emerging network protocol.

“Hosting development and testing on government sites solves a couple of problems,” said Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst with IDC’s network infrastructure group. With front-line experimentation, “the U.S. government remains in the loop to any new innovations. The government also can retain some control over what innovations are kept in-house, or allowed to creep into the broader defense market.”

Defense officials said these initial tests will help to position the military to adopt 5G as these networks become more readily available. “DoD needs experience in 5G if we are going to take advantage of 5G’s ubiquitous connectivity,” Evans said.

At the same time, early experimentation by defense experts could help industry to accelerate deployment of 5G. “DOD controls electromagnetic spectrum and real estate on military installations, which will allow industry to roll out technologies quickly and conduct robust experimentation,” Evans said. “This gives industry the opportunity to mature technology in a low-risk environment and accelerate deployment of commercial capabilities.”

It will take a few months to ramp up the testbeds. “Right now, we’re doing site surveys and assembling project management teams. Installation of equipment needed to conduct testing and experimentation won’t take place until the spring of 2020,” Evans said. “The type of equipment will depend on the type of experiment on the base.”

Evans said he expects the lessons from this initial round of testing to provide critical information to defense and industry on how to build the 5G ecosystem. “We will learn what works and what doesn’t, and that will inform how to do the things we want to do better going forward,” he said.

In the long run, the outcomes of these tests could drive enhanced connectivity and superior performance across a range of defense functions.

“Ultimately, 5G will provide ubiquitous connectivity for people and devices. We believe that the military that masters ubiquitous connectivity will maintain overmatch,” Evans said. “That mastery will require the ability to fully leverage 5G’s power for our mission, while ensuring that we are able to spoil any attempts by our adversaries to use it against us.”

Getting there will require a team effort. The Pentagon plans to collaborate with the Federal Communications Commission, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and other government agencies. The long-term plan is “to collaboratively produce a 5G architecture with commercial industry that will ultimately connect everyone and everything,” Evans said.

In an interview with C4ISRNET’s Adam Stone, Maj. Gen. David Isaacson, the Army’s director of networks, services and strategy, described the service’s path forward on the new technology.

C4ISRNET: How will the Army be bringing 5G to military installations?

ISAACSON: What we want to avoid is situation where the Army and the other services have 1,000 flowers blooming — a promising technology that all of the services would want to potentially adopt, but that could also get unwieldy and potentially pricey as we all go in our separate directions.

So even though we’re near the beginning of this journey, we’re nested within [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] in the larger sense, with the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering really spearheading the department’s collective drive. As we develop our plans long term, we will have a unified plan that is informed early by all of the services, interests and positions.

C4ISRNET: And where is that process taking you?

ISAACSON: We’ve identified a series of use cases; we have done some examining of what the technology potentially offers, we’ve lined up against some use cases.

I think 5G offers an opportunity to pair with already existing technologies such as 3-D printing. In the hands of the logisticians, I could potentially build and prepare parts based upon the demand signals that my network is telling me. We can use it to reduce the exposure of soldiers, sailors and airmen on the battlefield, or to facilitate autonomy. We’re now looking at it and we’re trying to figure all that out. We’re trying to figure out exactly what we want to do with it and how we’re going to do it.

C4ISRNET: How might 5G make military installations themselves more effective?

ISAACSON: This idea of putting 5G on an installation is attractive when you look at the amount of information that is there. Look at how we conduct training: Imagine the opportunity to do a synthetic training environment by moving a significant amount of information in near real time, in a way that would simulate the actual ground and capability.

There’s also the physical security component, the way that posts, camps and stations physically protect the gates. There’s an opportunity to automate much of that capacity.

C4ISRNET: What new technology infrastructure will 5G require on military installations?

ISAACSON: There are some posts, camps and stations that are well connected from a fiber connectivity perspective. They have the ability to absorb a higher capacity. Some are not as advantaged as others in terms of those connections. So that’s one area where we’re going to have to make sure we examine, that the interconnectivity on the campus itself, whether it has the capacity to move this kind of information around.

The other component of the infrastructure is physical, the way that 5G operates. It’s different from cellular. You don’t get a lot of penetration, you have to have a larger number of towers and antennas, all positioned in such a way that they are more closely aligned and closer together. The disadvantage with 5G is that you don’t propagate and you don’t have the distances covered.

It would be really cool if we could just climb aboard some existing infrastructure and towers and hang more antennas on it and just kind of deconflict. But there are challenges to penetration: Things like foliage and weather can affect it. We’re going to have to get some experience under our belt, working with our industry partners so that we can better organize and engineer these kinds of capabilities.

C4ISRNET: Assuming you can work through the engineering issues, how big of an impact will 5G have in the long run?

ISAACSON: From a capacity and low-latency perspective alone, I think we’re going to find that extraordinary amounts of data are going to be able to be maneuvered. The opportunities at posts, camps and stations are boundless. I think it’s going to be successful because of the partnership with our industry partners. They are going to help us to get it rolled out.

“We can’t afford to spend seven years thinking about a requirement,” Army Undersecretary Ryan D. McCarthy said during a 2018 visit to Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

“If it is going to take that long, you are probably not going to get it. So, we need to get these capabilities sooner.”

To that end, the Department of Defense has increased the number of engagements with industry, launched alternative contracting vehicles, and taken other steps to streamline innovation more effectively. Industry officials are often clamoring for that interaction, but some say the Pentagon’s efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

‘Big change’

One area where those changes are most visible has been in the Army’s modernization of its battlefield network. David Huisenga, president and chief executive at Klas Telecom Government, said he has noticed a marked difference in the quality and quantity of engagements between industry and the Department of Defense.

After more than two decades in the business, “I have seen a really big change in the past two years with how the Army is adopting technology,” he said.

“They are really focused on rapid-insert capabilities. I had heard that talked about a lot in the past, but it’s only recently that we have really seen that put into action.”

The Army’s establishment of cross-functional teams has helped to focus energy around priority areas within the C4ISR realm.

Those areas include the Synthetic Training Environment Team (STE); the Network, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Team (NET); and the Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Team (APNT).

“They have really clarified their priorities within that here are the top five or 10 things they want to do and they have released actual timelines for implementation of those priorities,” Huisenga said.

Klas has taken advantage of the technical exchange meetings, supported by the cross-functional teams and Program Executive Office Command Control Tactical, where both industry and military leaders together work through all of the practical details of emerging requirements.

“Now you have the CFT with the charter to identify and rapidly field the technology, and you have the program executive office that procures and sustains that equipment, working together with industry, all at the same time,” Huisenga said.

For Klas, those engagements helped lead to a recent contract supporting Army’s Security Force Assistance Brigade with an initial trial deployment of advanced networking equipment components. Those are slated for service officials to quickly test and refine those components before a final acquisition. Army leaders have said they plan to upgrade the network with new capabilities approximately every two years.

“The PEO made these purchases rapidly, probably the fastest acquisition I have ever seen, and now we will be getting real feed-back on that product,” Huisenga said.

“We, as industry, know that they will refresh every two years, so we can really focus our engineering on those requirements.”

‘One-stop’ model

Rosemary Johnston, senior vice president of operations at Savi, a maker of geospatial-enabled logistics solutions, likewise gives the military high marks for its efforts to accelerate tech buys.

“The services are doing a phenomenal job of trying to hasten the acquisition process,” she said. She pointed to the Air Force’s emerging “one-stop” model as an example. “They encourage vendors to come to a pitch day and if they like what they are hearing they can go ahead and execute a contract right away.”

Another helpful tool for Savi is the Pentagon’s blanket contract for logistics solutions, under which vendors can be pre-vetted for price and suitability, thus allowing end users in the military to effectively buy direct and bypass the usual prolonged procurement process.

Savi recently took advantage of its place on that list to help secure a contract with the Defense Logistics Agency, under which the company will supply 23,000 sophisticated tracking devices to help DLA manage vast inventories of vehicles and equipment stored at multiple distribution sites.

That opportunity arose in 2018, with just two months to go before the close of the fiscal year, when there was pressure on the agency to get a deal done before the clock ran out on the 2018 money.

Thanks to the rapid acquisition process, “they were able to place the order with us, obligate those 2018 funds, and take delivery before the end of calendar year 2018,” Johnston said.

Tools and tactics

Officials from both PEO C3T and the network cross-functional team told C4ISRNET these are exactly the type of outcomes that the military is looking for.

While it is difficult to gauge the specific outcomes of these early efforts, and many acquisitions departmentwide still drag, officials point to early metrics that suggest industry is responding well. Take, for instance, those technology exchange meetings.

“We are averaging 400 people per meeting representing more than 120 companies, from large defense contractors to small businesses and startups,” said Maj. Brian Wong, chief of market research for the network cross-functional team at Army Futures Command. “I don’t think we could have seen something like this in the past.”

Another tool that officials say has proven useful is the Middle Tier Acquisition authority: Granted by Congress in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, it gives the military the ability to make small purchases for rapid prototyping.

“If we see innovation coming out of industry, whether it’s server infrastructure or radio waveforms, we can use rapid prototyping and see how that fits in our network design in order to make better decisions,” said Paul Mehney, who helps manage the office’s industry affairs.

Rapid Innovation Funds offer another means to keep the department ahead of the technology curve. With projects worth as much as $3 million per project, Mehney said, these dollars have been used to explore ways that soldiers can communicate when their first line of communications fail.

The funds have also supported advances in dismounted blue force tracking. Rather than require soldiers to access vehicle-mounted equipment for identifying their status in the field, the Army is testing prototypes of handheld variants that could make soldiers jobs easier.

On the contracting side, the increasingly popular OTA — or Other Transaction Authority — has freed military planners to buy small quantities of emerging tech solutions for prototyping and testing.

The military also is deepening its market research

“We are taking a wider look — beyond the traditional defense contracting space — to include startups and smaller companies,” Wong said.

“We have discussions with incubators and with the venture capital community to see what may be in their portfolios that could be of interest to government.”

The close ties between the CFTs and PEOs help ensure that streamlined buys are targeted to actual military need. PEO C3T leaders point to the fact that they’ve held four technology exchange meetings with the network team and other program offices.

For the vendor community, the fast-track environment presents new opportunities but also new challenges.

Klas, for instance, outsources production of its core product. In order to meet new demand for accelerated deployments, Huisenga said, the company must keep up through more frequent and more specific communications with its manufacturer.

Johnston said her firm’s biggest challenge lies in ensuring that military procurement professionals understand the emerging rules of the road.

“We still get requests from contracting officers who aren’t familiar with these contracts,” she said.

“They’ll ask for a quote, they’ll send a statement of the work, and we have to let them know that a lot of this has already been negotiated. We need to explain to them the process we have already gone through to get to this point.”

Military officials, meanwhile, say their challenge lies in ensuring industry is up to speed on the emerging requirements. Especially in the rapidly evolving C4ISR environment, the military can only meet its accelerated objectives if industry is already up to speed on emerging needs.

“It’s up to us to make sure industry is informed about what our network design looks like currently, what we anticipate our network design goals to shape up like for future capability sets, and to ensure that industry knows what our architecture looks like so they know how to plug into it,” Mehney said.

“We aren’t totally there yet. We still owe industry a better lay-down on those three critical components.”

To achieve its AI vision, the military will need to gather, move and process vast tracts of data. That means new network and compute infrastructures, much of it delivered at the tactical edge. The promise of predictive analytics will require an evolved hardware and software architecture.

Big vision

Responsibility for that infrastructure falls first to the recently formed Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) and its emerging JAIC Common Foundation (JCF). That effort aims to develop data acquisition tools, unified data stores, libraries, standards and reusable tools in support of AI.

“As data grows, JCF will provide the supporting back-end infrastructure, tools and processes necessary for conducting analysis at scale,” said Elissa Smith, a Department of Defense spokesperson.

A cloud-based environment will deliver those resources to the war fighter. “It will provide the necessary platform capabilities for processing batch and stream data in an environment where the data can easily be discovered and shared across AI projects,” Smith said.

That’s a rough sketch. Industry experts say that “cloud” is only an approximate goal. The military will need to take a sophisticated and nuanced approach to the cloud in order to make AI work for war fighters on the edge.

While the big cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, can crunch massive loads of data to inform AI algorithms, it takes time to send that data from the myriad intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors in the field back to the cloud for processing — perhaps too much time.

“If you are in the Navy running AI on a ship, that ship is producing data on an hourly basis,” said Cameron Chehreh, Dell Technologies federal chief technology officer and vice president.

“Rather than send it to the cloud and get an answer back using limited bandwidth, you want to do the compute on the ship in near real time. You produce the data locally and you do the analytics locally.”

This requires robust local networking, large-scale compute power and ample storage, all at the tactical edge. In essence, this setup is a small-scale mirror of the large commercially available cloud offerings.

“If you have semi-autonomous drones in the battlefield, you need to be able to run the algorithm at the edge so that it can take defensive maneuvers immediately if necessary,” Chehreh said.

“The platform has to make some real-time decisions and you cannot afford the latency required to send it out to the cloud and back. It has to be able to do that computing at the edge where it sits.”

Some describe this as a “smart edge” infrastructure: a compute architecture that empowers sensors, mobile devices and drones to inform the AI algorithms in real time.

“This reduces the time from data to decision, and it decentralizes that decision authority,” said Ki Lee, a vice president in Booz Allen Hamilton’s strategic innovation group. Ideally, this system would dovetail into a large network infrastructure, making it possible to send AI findings back to the commercial cloud for further processing.

“In the instances where you don’t have the bandwidth, you process on the end, and then you will sync up with the cloud after operations, because that data is still imperative for refining the AI algorithms,” Lee said.

To make the most of this edge AI infrastructure, military planners will need to take a deep dive into data management. Data sits at the core of the AI effort, and industry experts say the Pentagon will need to be thoughtful about how it is handled, ensuring they have the architecture in place to make relevant data easy to share.

“If you have algorithms running at multiple locations, they will be processing different data. You need a global fabric that allows us to sync that data and those algorithms, a distributed architecture that ties it all together,” Lee said.

This issue of sharable data is a key consideration in discussions of AI infrastructure.

“The department first needs to figure out how to share data and break down data silos. Traditionally, the DoD and the intelligence community have held their data very close, but AI implementations require a steady stream of data to train models and improve inference engines,” said Steve Orrin, federal chief technology officer at Intel Corp.

This is of critical importance to the C4ISR community, which likely will be a prime generator of AI data.

“Sensor fusion, in particular, will require updated infrastructure to realize its benefits. The DoD will need to invest in architectural frameworks, such as peer-to-peer and mesh networks with gateways and aggregators,” Orrin said.

This modernized infrastructure does not come in a box, but rather is the product of new methodologies.

“When you look at AI there are some basic things you need to get right: data tagging, data [extract, transform and load]. When you think about combining data sets, tagging them so they can be understood, cleansing the data to get the noise out of it those are all steps that need to be done to make the data available to AI,” said Kyle Michl, managing director at Accenture Federal Services. “It’s not as exciting as algorithms, but it is critical.”

Securing the infrastructure

The next element in this infrastructure is security.

In this AI-enabled future, data must be secure and reliable. “If we actually do expand AI to the edge, we are dramatically increasing our attack surface,” Lee said.

“It will be critical to be able to secure things all the way to that edge device.”

Defense will need infrastructure not just to protect AI from garden-variety hacking, but also from enemy AI.

Consider the rise of Adversarial Machine Learning, or AML, “which, until recently, has mostly been explored in academic “circles,” said Scott Scheferman, senior director of global services at BlackBerry Cylance.

“That field has now matured sufficiently to present near-term material risks to AI systems that are not designed to withstand AML or be able to detect AML attacks.”

As the Department of Defense moves to address these security concerns, along with myriad other infrastructure needs, some say military leaders should look to industry to play a leading role.

Much of the development currently unfolding in the commercial realm could also be leveraged to support the military’s emerging AI infrastructure.

“If the Defense Department can take 80 percent of a solution from industry and spend only 20 percent of the time customizing it for the DoD’s unique use cases, they can speed development and avoid starting from scratch,” Orrin said.

Lee points to industry efforts in support of higher processing speeds and smaller, lighter computing devices as two areas ripe for industry engagement. “These algorithms will require more processing, and that will require computers with new efficiencies. At the same time, we have to be very mindful of size, weight and power: We need higher compute with lower wattages. Those are places where industry can help,” he said.

Arguably, the military may also need to look at its ethical infrastructure around AI. It’s less tangible than networking and storage, but no less significant, officials have said.

“If AI were leveraged for vehicle collision prevention technology, what does AI do in the event of an imminent crash in which avoiding one way will kill the driver of car A, and avoiding another way will kill the driver of car B?” said Edris Amiyar, a senior systems engineer at NetCentrics.

In mid-2018, Pentagon leaders tapped Maven’s chief, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, to head up the newly formed Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or JAIC, with an eye toward applying Maven’s learnings across a broad range of AI applications.

A year into that effort, JAIC is seeing tangible results. The team has released algorithmic models in support of predictive maintenance and is deep into an effort that would use AI in support of humanitarian systems.

Shanahan spoke with C4ISRNET’s Adam Stone about the efforts to build a multiagency organization, about JAIC’s relationships with industry, and about his vision for the future of AI.

C4ISRNET: You’ve had to build a new joint-service organization from the ground up. Are you there yet?

LT. GEN. JACK SHANAHAN: I call it the “big bang” theory.

How do you create something from nothing? It’s not easy to do: recruiting, hiring, getting physical space, getting money, internal outreach, external outreach. We started with two people. Got a couple of part-time helpers from the CIO … but we did not get the first bodies beyond those initial cadre showing up until about October of last year.

I’m never going to be satisfied that we’re moving fast enough, just because I understand the pace and the urgency of doing this. When I go back and think — “Where were we a year ago?” — it is, in some ways, remarkable.

C4ISRNET: You’ve already been applying AI to predictive maintenance. How far have you gotten?

SHANAHAN: The 160th SOAR, the Special Operations Aviation Regimen, already had a plan underway to look at business intelligence and analytics for the entire H60 fleet.

With the H60, flying in the desert in the Middle East, you can get a condition where the sand basically melts into the engine and it could be catastrophic. So how could you predict what that failure mode is going to be? Just from that initial problem set, we have embarked on 12 different lines of effort. We’ve delivered the first model in March, and we will continue to refine that model and deliver additional products based on these other lines of effort.

C4ISRNET: Another top priority: AI for humanitarian relief.

SHANAHAN: This is what I would call a logical extension of Project Maven, because Maven has already done a lot of work in this area that we call “computer vision” [which uses AI to analyze visual data]. We then picked this up for domestic support to civil authorities.

We took as our initial lines of effort fire-line plotting, mapping, and then, eventually, prediction. These are coming from supported units who really need help in a given area. In this case, it came from last year’s natural disasters, the fires in California and the hurricanes on the East Coast.

We expect our first prototype, which is an AI-enabled model, to be delivered [in August]. We’ll do some evaluation of that and get to a model within a month or two after that. Fire line, flood, damage assessment, road obstruction: all happening over the next six months for delivery.

C4ISRNET: Humanitarian work and the predictive maintenance grow out of projects already underway. Are you looking mainly to leverage existing work, or will JAIC push out new initiatives?

SHANAHAN: It’s a little bit of both. There will likely be some service that has got an initial prototype or pilot that’s out there. That may be coming from DARPA looking for a transition partner, or DIU has found something that they’re looking to go from prototype into production. There are going to be use cases over the next couple of years where it will be us engaging a service, or a component, or a combatant command, based on their initial ask. The user engagement is always going to be the critical first step.

C4ISRNET: You’re looking for the components to come to you?

SHANAHAN: In some of our initiatives, the JAIC is playing more of a leading role, but more and more it is what we call component services, combatant command, beginning to embark on their own projects. We’re there to help them to on the funding side; we’re here to give them access to the tools they need. This can’t be the JAIC and everybody else. It’s the JAIC with everybody else.

C4ISRNET: How do you envision industry’s role in all of this?

SHANAHAN: We’re taking the commercial-first approach. There will always be some parts of the department that are DoD unique, but as a starting point, because of the speed of development in commercial industry, because we know what they can bring to any problem, we start with commercial in almost every case, then figure out how to repurpose it to military requirements.

C4ISRNET: In talking to industry, have you seen any commercial off-the-shelf products in the AI space that the Department of Defense should put in place in the short term?

SHANAHAN: Without question there are some of those. Computer vision, right? Computer vision is well-established in commercial industry. However, I have not seen in any case yet [where] you just take a commercial capability and immediately apply it to a military problem. First of all, the data set … you’ve got to train it against the different kind of datasets. With Maven, we had to get real, full-motion video from the Middle East, tens of thousands of hours of it, curate it, label it, train against it. So those computer-vision algorithms that Ph.D.s from Stanford, MIT, as well as the start-up companies had developed then had to be repurposed for DoD uses.

There’s a tendency for people to say, “I have a solution to your problem.” You might have a narrow solution to a narrow slice of an overall problem, but what we’re interested in doing is understand how does it fit into DoD systems, DoD workflows. We don’t need bespoke solutions.

C4ISRNET: How do you see AI specifically impacting the C4ISR space?

SHANAHAN: It’s enormous. That’s what we spent two years on with Maven: You could call it accommodation of perception, natural language processing, recognition, object classification detecting and tracking. I don’t think there is any part of C4ISR that does not have the potential to be improved through AI-enabled capabilities.

I want JAIC to help the services and the combatant commands with the ops side: How do we do ops-intel fusion? How do we do AI-enabled mission command? How do we get faster at sensor-to-shooter? How do we do data link faster than we do it today? There is great promise and potential though the entire C4ISR enterprise.

C4ISRNET: Let’s talk about the “joint” nature of JAIC. How will you make your solutions applicable across all of defense?

SHANAHAN: The whole real reason for the JAIC to exist is to have a place that services, combatant commands and components have a reason to come to. They must have an incentive to come. So, I must build credibility and expertise. That’s going to be a long time coming. Nobody has got the market cornered on AI expertise. It’s rare to find. Most of it is in commercial industry and being paid a lot of money. We’re trying to attract them to the JAIC.

Then we are also building the JAIC Common Foundation. We want to democratize access to data, build APIs against that data. I want to create a place where people can get whatever they need, so they don’t have to start their own program.

If we get this right, this is the place where we want everybody to come in to and get access to an enterprise cloud-enabled environment where they can do everything from initial development to testing evaluation to scaling delivery across the DoD.

C4ISRNET: What are the biggest challenges facing JAIC?

SHANAHAN: I can rattle off the top four: data, talent management, culture and then, a little bit more complex, how to retool the Defense Department to be an AI-ready force.

What’s the quality of the data? What’s the ground truth of the data? Is the Army reporting their maintenance data the same as Special Operation Command? The algorithm is generally the easier piece. The hard part is wrangling that data, cleaning the data, labeling the data.

As for being an AI-ready force, we learned through Maven that you can’t take cutting-edge technology and bolt it onto legacy systems and workflows. It really does require a redesign of how we develop our weapon systems and how we do our workflows.

C4ISRNET: What’s next on the to-do list for JAIC?

SHANAHAN: We just started on cyber. We’ve got three lines of effort, but we expect to expand that very quickly based on requirements from Cyber Command and others.

Then there is this thing that we’re calling “predictive health,” which may offer some of the closer-term returns on investment because there is so much going on in commercial industry and the healthcare business, whether it’s recognizing cancer through medical imagery [or using AI for] suicide prevention.

Maneuvers and fires refers: that’s ops-intel fusion, figuring out how to do sensor-to-shooter quicker.

And one that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but I think will be one that provides return on investment faster than some of the others, is what we call “smart automation.” How do we automate a lot of back-office functions to help people get through enormous amounts of data much faster?

Then we’re going to look at what other big projects we can take on. Special Operations Command is interested in using AI-enabled capabilities for MISO, Military Information Support Operations, or influence operations.

Our biggest challenge over the next year is learning when to say no. We are only so big.

The Pentagon’s proposed budget for fiscal 2020 includes some $927 million for AI, as well as machine learning, according to Ainikki Riikonen, a research assistant for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

This includes $208 million earmarked for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, which was created in 2018. The Center’s initial efforts have delivered “a very mature, insightful high-level view” of issues surrounding AI, said Ian McCulloh, chief data scientist at Accenture Federal Services.

AI encompasses hardware, software, people and processes. With nearly a $1 billion bankroll, Defense Department leaders and the intelligence community are now looking for the best ways to leverage this emerging capability most effectively.

Starting point

A deep dive into the numbers shows an early emphasis on basic research. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s budget request includes $138 million for advanced land systems technology, up from $109 million in fiscal 2019. That program includes research into urban reconnaissance and AI-driven subterranean operations. DARPA’s budget also includes $10 million for the Highly Networked Dissemination of Relevant Data Project, a situational awareness tool, as well as $161 million for the AI Human Machine Symbiosis Project, up from $97 million.

“That’s all about creating systems and people that actually understand each other,” Riikonen said.

These foundational research efforts could yield practical results for the war fighter. But before the Pentagon can make use of AI’s analytic and predictive powers, military leaders will need to ensure they have the underlying infrastructure in place.

“There’s so much data available to the military, but it’s stored all over the place, and rarely in a format that is easily transferrable into an algorithm,” said Todd Probert, vice president for Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services. “If the military wants to set itself up for success, they should focus on data curation, labeling and cleaning, as well as recruiting and training the data scientists necessary to make use of it.”

Good data requires good technical people, and those aren’t easy to come by. “Talent isn’t cheap and it’s in high demand. The government will be competing directly with industry for a very small pool of people,” Probert said. This indicates a need for early investments on talented professionals.

From there, defense can begin to look at funding specific projects and programs that take advantage of AI’s capabilities.

AI applications

The Pentagon might begin by considering the potential for AI as a weapon of war. “We are only starting to scratch the surface on the impact of AI and how it can be manipulated by adversaries for nefarious purposes,” said Rahul Kashyap, president and chief executive of network traffic analysis company Awake Security.

Machine learning might help military systems be more effective, but the reliance on data could also make those systems vulnerable to new kinds of attack. “With the adversarial use of AI, there are already discussions about ways in which data we have come to rely on may be poisoned to trick the machine inputs and algorithms,” Kashyap said.

Some experts suggest that any early investments should address this potential risk, building in a defensive capability as part of AI’s foundational layer.

Others say that the low-hanging fruit lies in the military’s ability to leverage AI in support of mundane, but nonetheless critical, tasks.

In the near term, for example, AI spending could help provide transparency around inventory and supply chain management.

“AI could help manage the complexity behind the connectivity and flow between transportation, people, facilities and supplies including equipment, spare parts and fuel in a predictive manner,” said Brigham Bechtel, chief strategy officer for intelligence and defense at big data applications firm MarkLogic.

In this scenario, AI would leverage existing data on materiel availability and equipment performance to drive preventative maintenance, as well as parts procurement — “keeping records of millions of screws, wire couplers, and even tank gun barrels to support scaling to operational demand,” Bechtel said. That’s a task for which machine-scale intelligence is ideally suited.

In the realm of ISR, some industry representatives point to “open-source intelligence” (such as social media) as a prime target for AI investments.

Sources such as Facebook and Twitter contain “significant intelligence that is beyond the scale of humans or classic computation analysis,” said Chad Steelberg, chief executive and chairman of AI-based analysis company Veritone.

As in logistics, open-source intelligence offers ample data in a space where machine-scale analytics could have a deep impact. “The war of ideas, ranging from ISIS recruiting to state-sponsored propaganda, is the most dangerous battlefronts today,” Steelberg said. “With the source of ideas now being influenced by AI, the countries that harness this new weapon most effectively will have a distinct advantage.”

The intelligence community also could benefit from AI’s analytic powers to manage the sheer volume of sensor data in the field.

“Is the analyst overwhelmed with data? If so, AI has the potential to help,” said Graham Gilmer, a principal in Booz Allen Hamilton’s analytics business. “Generating a more robust search capability, fusing data from multiple sources, and generally doing the heavy lifting to cue the analyst are the most immediate applications.”

In addition to addressing external data, the intelligence community could score an early win by building AI models that scrutinize conversations amongst analysts themselves.

“In an ISR suite there can be as many as 15 chat rooms going at any time, with info coming in from various units and intelligence agencies,” Probert said. “That’s too much data and crosstalk for a person to manage, so information is inevitably going to be missed. We need machine learning tools that can flag critical data and alert analysts to what’s important.”

All these represent valid points of inquiry and the Pentagon likely will pursue diverse variations on these themes. In the short term, though, analysts predict AI will mostly be about robots.

“Advanced automation is the fastest growing category in AI, with the rise of unmanned systems,” Riikonen said, noting it would be a natural evolution for the military to leverage private sector learning to utilize AI in support of autonomous systems. “That fits very well with the overall U.S. defense strategy, which is all about having more of these autonomous systems that support war fighters in denied and contested environments.”

In order to achieve those goals, the Defense Department may have to adopt a new way of investing in technology.

Rather than a single development effort that leads to a completed product, however, AI requires an iterative process in which the computers learn over time.

“You do small chunks, you do small bites,” said Paul Johnson, Grant Thornton public sector senior strategic adviser for the defense and intelligence community.

In this light, AI investment will require not just algorithmic development, but investment in organizational change, to spur deep interactions between stakeholders. “We need to get the coders in the same room with the end users and start having the conversation about the art of the possible,” Johnson said. “You have to have that conversation early, often and repeatedly, for the coders to understand what they need to do.”

The organization’s chief information officer, Lisa Costa, spoke with C4ISRNET about how SOCOM is addressing the latest networking efforts.

C4ISRNET: What are the emerging capabilities and latest advances you are investigating?

LISA COSTA: Here are three:

* SOF hybrid cloud. SOCOM’s holistic cloud strategy is based around cloud development and application modernization. The command leverages hyperconverged infrastructure already on the network to host private cloud and take advantage of commercial cloud providers to host our containerized applications. We are cloud provider agnostic as a result of this approach.

* Software-defined networking. The capabilities offered by SD-WAN [software-defined wide-area networks] — particularly the dynamic load distributing and control-plane policy management — certainly pique our interest. Our management model for supporting a growing, global multisite enterprise is becoming obsolete. We have observed the maturation and quick adoption of SD-WAN technology in industry, and now believe we have a business case for it. SOCOM has partnered with a leading commercial vendor to begin experimental testing. With a growing customer base that is needing guaranteed network connection to critical applications, migrating to a SD-WAN architecture is the natural next step.

* Next-gen laptop. We are improving user access to the Special Operations Forces Information Environment network enclaves by removing the need to use an external retransmission device with mobile devices and the requirement for the user to carry a separate device for each security enclave. There is great potential to significantly reduce the complexity of access layer networks, centralize network monitoring and management functions, and reduce cost by making all-access network infrastructure available via an unclass, or black, laptop.

C4ISRNET: How about with space?

COSTA: SOCOM has taken advantage of some high-throughput satellite constellations for testing and even some operations. We have used the Intelsat EPIC constellation for airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance supporting higher throughput off the aircraft [up to 4Mbs] and are currently using Inmarsat Global Xpress for high-throughput testing to a DISA Gateway. The anticipation of low-Earth orbit is also an expected game-changer in the satellite industry. It appears to be closer to a reality as SpaceX got ahead of its competition by launching 60 LEO satellites in May. We expect to start testing in the continental United States in the first quarter of 2020; however, LEOs are not expected to have a global presence until approximately fourth quarter of 2021 and possibly not until 2022.

There is a caution with LEO as there has not been an antenna solution for the constellation at this time. Multiple companies are working on a single antenna solution and the expectation is someone will get a reliable antenna to market prior to the global coverage of LEO. As stated, LEO will be a game-changer for the commercial satellite world, not just DoD, as it is expected current GEO satellite providers will have to change their support and pricing model.

C4ISRNET: What are some of the challenges around networked communications and how are you addressing those?

COSTA: Let’s talk about three again.

* ISR backhaul. Demand for near-real-time ISR data is increasing. SOCOM established a commercial off-the-shelf tactical, deployable backhaul solution in response to global shortfalls — impacting SOF, as well as conventional forces. SOCOM integrated a tactical relay variant within its satellite deployable node family of systems. This capability can backhaul SOF-specific sensor data, as well as C2 communications services, eliminating duplicate systems and reducing the forward operating footprint.

* IPv6. SOCOM is determining the number of IPv6 IP addresses required to support the SOF Information Environment. Due to IP address management challenges, specifically the non-contiguous IP address ranges across the SIE, it is imperative to request the correct amount of IP address space required to support the SIE.

* Cybersecurity is a continuous challenge particularly with today’s near-peer adversaries and insider threats. SOCOM is the lead in the department’s pilot identity, credential and access management infrastructure implementation plan. SOCOM implemented multi-factor authentication — in direct coordination with the National Security Agency.

C4ISRNET: Do you have any specific networking initiatives under way? Any recent wins on the networking front?

COSTA: SOCOM is deploying application-centric infrastructure — in conjunction with the SOCOM data center capital equipment replacement program. ACI will provide orchestration capability, as well as a firewall-like capability to manage network traffic. The orchestration capability provides a repeatable process for deployment and configuration management of network equipment that delivers standardization across the SIE and will also contribute to increased network reliability. Increased network stability is needed to adopt enterprise data discoverability and artificial intelligence/machine learning solutions.

C4ISRNET: What are the latest evolutions in radio and how are these affecting SOCOM? What are you doing with software-defined radio? Size, weight and power improvements? Are there other advances that are proving useful?

COSTA: SOCOM led the development of the Link 16 AN/PRC-161 handheld tactical radio, which provides a critical piece in digitally aided close air support architecture, increasing situational awareness, decreasing kill-chain time, and decreasing the probability of fratricide. This radio integrates into the common operating picture between ground and air operators via the existing Link 16 network.

SOCOM is also leading the development of a next-generation handheld AN/PRC-163 and NG Manpack RF-345 tactical radios, both providing dual-channel, multiband capabilities that enable simultaneous communication over two channels hosting both narrowband, wideband voice and IP-based data waveforms.

These radios accept an attachable mission module, allowing for rapid integration of emerging technologies. For example, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance full-motion video mission modules enable operators to receive and disseminate full-motion video, chat and other data while maintaining voice communications without additional transceivers.

C4ISRNET: How are you making tactical use of tablets and other networked devices on the edge? Any new devices in the mix, or new uses for existing platforms?

COSTA: Because of their slim and lightweight profile, tablets can be carried and used by mounted and dismounted operators during missions. Tablet computers process and display software applications, providing operators real-time situational awareness. Tablets and networked devices allow us to collaborate on maps (including points), drawings and locations of interests. They also deliver on chat, file sharing, photo sharing and video streaming, and will offer control of military radio devices.

SOCOM is always experimenting with the latest in computer technology, including tactical mission networking advances. For example, SOCOM is currently coordinating and developing policy with its components regarding research and use of, among other things, new LTE technologies and MANET radios to facilitate high-bandwidth and long-range wireless communications requirements.

C4ISRNET: What plans are you making for 5G? How will it enhance SOCOM operations?

COSTA: Last year, SOCOM hosted a 5G capability assessment event, leveraging SOFWERX’s vast ecosystem in order to assess 5G products or technologies. It became evident that almost every layer of communications is being updated and/or changed in all aspects related to what will become 5G. SOCOM will continue to monitor the evolution of the 5G architecture and assess all next-generation technologies as they mature for use or application in Special Operations Forces communication systems. We especially look forward to the impact that 5G technology will have on tactical communications capabilities.