Artificial intelligence and data analysis firm Primer monitored the situation from afar using its Command software. It demonstrated its AI-enabled parsing capabilities at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington days later, promising to identify kernels of truth among the chaos in the Middle East.

“Just aggregating lots of data, particularly if it’s a really noisy environment and the facts have yet to be established, can be really problematic because you’re just making a big pile for the user to go through,” Primer CEO Sean Moriarty told C4ISRNET on the show floor. “As you might imagine, data is all over the place. There’s all sorts of open-source intelligence data. The question is: What can a professional do with it, using their knowledge and experience? And that comes down to speed, power and accuracy.”

The Command software is designed with the single-pane-of-glass motif in mind. The program takes queries from users, much like a Google search; pulls vast amounts of data, namely social media feeds and news articles; and populates the results with summaries, context and name-entity recognition. It extracts people, places and things of note, handles translations, and presents sources that explain the process like math homework.

In a demo at the AUSA event, the software sorted through information related to the Israel-Hamas war and then produced a continuously refreshed timeline of events. Some of the points were geolocated, generating a heat map of posts and interactions.

“What it’s actually doing is interrogating these disparate sources, identifying anomalies where information is in conflict, and scoring it,” said Moriarty, who previously led Ticketmaster. “Anywhere there is a hot spot, our folks are looking to see what signal we can pull.”

The Command software is tailored for defense applications, according to the company, whose advisers include a former principal deputy director of national intelligence and former leaders of U.S. Special Operations Command and Africa Command.

Primer in June announced a $69 million funding round to help accelerate product delivery to government and commercial customers.

Mark Brunner, the president of the company’s federal team, said the goal of Command is to reduce “the latency between sensor and shooter.” That language is often used to describe the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort, or CJADC2, which seeks to seamlessly link forces across land, air, sea, space and cyberspace.

“Sense, make sense, decide and act — we’re the ‘make sense’ people in that loop,” Brunner said. “If you’re a customer and you’re on the watch floor at SOCOM or the Army intel fusion center, our platform gives you the ability to ingest not only [open-source intelligence] from these various sources, but in over 100 languages.”

Military analysts and others in the intelligence community must sift through sometimes overwhelming volumes of information. Some of it can be correct, some of it can be incorrect and some can be purposely deceptive.

The U.S. Defense Department is spending money on AI and machine learning to augment such workloads and pick out patterns that may have been previously missed.

“What we have, though our product here, is the ability to ingest vast amounts of data, run it through our GPUs, and actually summarize and contextualize that data,” said Chris Lacy, who led the Command demonstration. “The key things an analyst is immediately going to look for — it is categorizing that and showing that [in] real time to the analyst as soon as they walk in the door.”

“As soon as the breaking news happened,” he added, “I put in a monitor and just started tracking it.”

The Defense Department sought $1.4 billion for artificial intelligence in fiscal 2024, which began Oct. 1. A continuing resolution that maintains funding rates from the prior year is in place until mid-November.

He was sitting alone on stage during the last day of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, held in early October in Washington. The Army officer had just been asked about remarks made by the service’s newly sworn-in chief of staff, Gen. Randy George.

“Under continuous transformation, he did say the No. 1 priority and focus area is the network,” Stanton said, looking up from his notes and smiling. “Our Army senior leadership understands the significance of being able to move the right data to the right place at the right time.”

Stanton serves as both the commander of Fort Gordon and its Cyber Center of Excellence, a Georgia schoolhouse where troops are drilled on everything from electronic warfare to communications capabilities to cyberspace operations. The teachings there are increasingly important — especially so, after George named networking upgrades the Army’s most pressing modernization endeavor, citing lessons plucked from the battlefields of Eastern Europe.

While sophisticated, secure connectivity has for years been a focal point for the service, alongside other priorities such as long-range precision fires, air and missile defense, and aviation, it was not necessarily as high profile. Artillery, missile interceptors and helicopters have a splashy presence; the invisible tubes and tethers that enable military information sharing do not.

But that does not minimize their importance.

“They’re providing the right prioritization, they’re providing the right guidance,” Stanton said. “They’re providing the right degree of resourcing in ways that we haven’t seen historically.”

‘Shoot, move and communicate’

As the U.S. Defense Department reshapes itself following decades spent in the Greater Middle East, it is assuming a new posture molded by Russia, China and the dangers posed by their digital-savvy forces. Both powers, much like the U.S., wield influential cyber weaponry and pour money into military-related science and technology efforts.

As a result, networks that are insulated from hackers and capable of reliably connecting front lines to headquarters, wherever they may be, are of utmost importance, according to U.S. military leaders.

The Army in fiscal 2023 sought $16.6 billion to fund cyber and information technology projects, about 10% of its total budget blueprint. About $9.8 billion was set aside for the network. Another $2 billion was earmarked for offensive and defensive cyber operations as well as cybersecurity maturation.

“The character of war is changing,” George said at the outset of his AUSA address. “It’s changing rapidly because disruptive technology is fundamentally altering how humans interact.”

“Soldiers need to shoot, move and communicate,” he added. “Technology should facilitate those fundamentals, not encumber them.”

One doesn’t have to look further than the Russia-Ukraine war for evidence, according to George, who said Moscow’s forces face the consequences of compromised networks and clunky command centers multiple times a day. In other words, aging connectivity and outdated outposts make for easy targeting.

American troops are now learning those lessons — just not “the hard way,” George said earlier at the conference.

“Antenna farms and endless server stacks are conspicuous and generate too much electromagnetic signature,” the chief of staff said. “If we slog around the battlefield with massive operation centers, which are difficult to set up, and often contractor-supported, we will get pounded.”

George’s preference to the network and its facets — security, reliability and flexibility — feels more like an evolution of previous thinking than an entirely new paradigm, both Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, the head of Army Cyber Command, and Lt. Gen. John Morrison, a top uniformed IT official, told C4ISRNET.

George served as the Army vice chief of staff before assuming his current role.

“As the vice, the chief was really driving us in a direction to really get after how we simplify the network at the edge, make it resilient against a near peer and make something that can actually move,” Morrison said on the sidelines of AUSA.

“All of our modernization,” he added, “hinges on a network that is secure, defendable and maneuverable.”

Bigger and better

The demand for network innovation comes as the Army focuses on the division, not the brigade, as the unit of action.

The larger formation, made up of about 15,000 soldiers plus firepower, is thought more suited for war against Russia or China, where fighting will likely be scattered across vast distances and require a level of self-sufficiency. Such expectations will put significant strain on networks.

“What underpins everything is a singular vision that Army senior leaders have for the network. The network has to evolve, it has to be flexible, it has to be simple,” Mark Kitz, the head of Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, told C4ISRNET. “In order to do that, we’ve got to build into our programs the ability to get after those three things.”

The office and other organizations in May rolled out what’s known as the division-as-a-unit-of-action network design.

The initiative is meant to inform communications setups moving forward and, ultimately, free up soldiers under fire by reassigning more complicated networking tasks.

“I think underpinning a lot of this is our ability to be agile,” Kitz said, “and our ability to look at the network as a living, growing, evolving set of capabilities, whether that’s applications, whether that’s backhaul [satellite communications], whether that’s radios.”

“All of them have to evolve over time,” he added, “so we can leverage innovative technologies that we can reorganize and reconstitute based on how the Army wants to fight in the future.”

The plans come as the service, the military’s largest, reinvests in electronic warfare and electromagnetic mastery after years of neglect. The renewed interest is spurred by threats posed by Russia and China after years spent in the Middle East.

Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, Fort Gordon’s commanding officer, on Oct. 11 said the facilities will be a place where soldiers can get familiar with their jamming and sensing gear in realistic settings.

“It’s a fantastic training area to leverage EW capabilities,” Stanton told reporters on the sidelines of the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington. “It is heavily wooded, it’s undulated terrain. It has an airstrip built into it — lots of things that will benefit our ability to look at distances that matter in large-scale maneuver environments, in terrain that the Army would likely find itself fighting in.”

The sensitive nature of EW has long rendered full-strength testing and training tricky. Defense officials have said they do not want to harm neighbors on the spectrum and do not want to tip their hand to faraway observers, like Moscow and Beijing.

Todd Boudreau, the deputy commandant of the Army cyber school, in August said the project was approved by service leadership and “already” in the program objective memorandum, a layout of future spending plans.

The outdoor range, he told reporters the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference in Georgia, will give students an opportunity to engage with “the environment, movement and maneuver, light discipline and noise discipline in a combat environment.”

Fort Gordon will be formally renamed Fort Eisenhower this month.

On Oct. 11, staff with both the 56th Artillery Command and the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force shared results from their recent fires exercise at the annual Association of the U.S. Army’s Meeting and Exposition that’s shaping how the Army will share data and targeting information with both joint forces and partner nations.

Col. Seth Knazovich, chief of staff for the 56th Artillery Command, told the audience that with new platforms, cyber, electromagnetic warfare and space-based capabilities, the command can better coordinate and synchronize fires, especially across deeper ranges.

That matters because forces in Europe are within reach of Russia’s arsenal, should the war in Ukraine escalate. And with more military activity in Eastern Europe overall, the distances that U.S. Army and partner forces must contend with have increased.

“Information sharing is a constant line of effort,” Knazovich said.

Taking the steps to continually share a common operational and intelligence picture to partner forces, as broadly as possible, is key to coordinating any kind of fires or targeting work, he said.

The Army reactivated the 56th Artillery Command in 2021, the same year it formed the 2nd MDTF. Both moves were to meet a growing need for longer-range fires coordination. That push followed the creation of the 1st MDTF in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in 2018.

During the recent Arcane Thunder military exercise, the 2nd MDTF tested fires platforms such as artillery, missile launchers, Electronic warfare and cyber tools and communication equipment, passing targeting data from an Army unit in Germany to a contingent of soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division in Romania, then sharing firing data with U.S., French and Romanian firing units on the ground in Romania.

“That was the first opportunity to really show that the 2nd MDTF can share with all our coalition partners and get that firing data down to firing units that need it,” said Col. Patrick Moffett, 2nd MDTF commander.

Arcane Thunder ran from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8 and was the last exercise of fiscal year 2023 for the Army’s three MDTFs.

Both the 1st and 3rd MDTF are stationed in the Indo-Pacific. The 1st MDTF took part in the Joint Warfighting Assessment 23 in the Philippines this past spring while the 3rd MDTF received their assessment during Northern Edge, a military exercise in Alaska.

Each of the three task forces, all formed in recent years to embody the Multi-Domain Operations doctrine the service has adopted, regularly share lessons learned and best practices as these new formations play the lead role in future exercises and operations.

“The biggest difference is how the fight will happen,” Moffett said. “We’re in the European theater, we do not have to go to unpopulated areas like in the Pacific. We don’t have the same deployability requirements as first and third have. But overall capabilities and requirements will be the same with some niche changes.”

And the Army is spreading the knowledge.

Gen. Charles Flynn, head of U.S. Army Pacific, told Defense News that the 3rd MDTF in Hawaii will add five officers from the Australian military in the summer of 2024 to build a combined element of the task force.

Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said earlier this year that a fourth MDTF might be created and deployed to the Pacific as well, Defense News reported.

The Europe-based Arcane Thunder exercise for 2nd MDTF included the 10 NATO corps commanders, Moffett said.

Some of the unexpected challenges that the 2nd MDTF encountered included finding the right kind of electrical power to run their systems.

“Not all NATO power generator capabilities are the same,” Moffett said.

Next steps for the task forces will involve more work with joint military services and an experimental evaluation during Project Convergence Capstone 4, early next year, according to an Army release.

Project Convergence is an all-services effort to connect battlefield sensors and shooters into a single framework that allows commanders, regardless of service, to see and strike any target with the most relevant fires platform.