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.

The service is interested in the updates amid a focus on countering the Russian and Chinese militaries, forces more sophisticated than those fought for decades in the Middle East.

“Aerostat, I think, is synonymous with the old fight, counterinsurgency,” Lareina Adams, a project manager for terrestrial sensors, told C4ISRNET during an interview at the Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington. “But what we’re trying to see is if we can expand the applicability of the aerostat to other missions that will support the Army in 2030.”

Future aerostats could carry autonomous capabilities — slashing costly logistics and staffing needs — or even counter-drone payloads. Adams said she observed autonomous features aboard an aerostat at a recent demonstration, but offered few additional details.

The Army has for decades deployed and tinkered with aerostats and other so-called lighter-than-air technologies. Examples include the Persistent Threat Detection System, PTDS, and the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, JLENS.

“One of my priorities is to help reimagine aerostats,” Adams said. “We’re starting to have those conversations with the requirements community within the Army to figure out what the needs are. We’re also looking at industry, as well, to see what advancements they’ve made.”

The terrestrial sensor bureau that Adams leads is part of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors. The executive office is tasked with helping develop and deploy everything from aerostats to biometric devices, electronic jammers to soldier-carried navigation tools.

“Right now, the way we organize ourselves is in a 24-hour battle rhythm, and that has to change,” said Maj. Gen. Charles Costanza, special assistant to the commanding general of Army Forces Command.

“[Large-Scale Combat Operations] are not going to let you do that,” he said.

The two-star explained this during an Oct. 11 panel on intelligence modernization here at the annual Association of the U.S. Army Meeting and Exposition.

The former commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, who conducted four Division Warfighter exercises while leading the unit has seen a lot of how the Army will fight in 2030. His team ran through an entire exercise in which his force simulated such a battle with all the tools and formations the Army expects to have in its arsenal in the next decade.

The rapid pace of battle and enemy movement in those scenarios meant that a division intelligence officer could come into the command center, which radically changed the day’s plan and targeting list.

Or, because of more advanced systems, in a single day, a unit might run through a 72-hour “kill contract,” a list of targets to destroy.

In that instance, the commander’s job would be to direct his intelligence team to find more targets in the battlespace, Costanza said.

Those scenarios are a driving force behind why the Army has revised how it gathers operational intelligence as it moves to keep pace with the modern battlefield.

Part of that plan is for the intel side to take the initiative on gathering information, what the Army refers to as “fighting for intelligence,” officials said.

“Bottom line, in today’s and tomorrow’s battlefield we’re not only under constant observation but our ISR will be contested in all domains and all three dimensions, which will make it extremely important for how we go about doing intelligence collection and information operations,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Appelhans, commandant of the Army’s Intelligence Center of Excellence.

Sometimes that’ll mean a quick and dirty brief, with rapidly acquired intelligence that must be expediently vetted through a host of networks and databases.

“I don’t have time for you to put together a nice PowerPoint slide to come bring me and show me that, hey, the enemy’s situation has changed and now we have a new challenge or risk or potentially we have an opportunity we need to exploit,” Costanza said.

Commanders paired with their intelligence experts must be “able to change operations” on the fly and not be so deliberative, he said.

To make that a reality, Costanza advised that intelligence officers need to understand the targeting process almost as well as the targeting teams do.

Helping those sped-up efforts along is a list of technology that the Army is pursuing or fielding that officials hope will help gather, verify and disseminate information more accurately and quickly than they’re able to now.

That includes Terrestrial Layer Systems for both the brigade combat team and for echelons above brigade, the Multi-Domain Sensing System, the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, the High Altitude Platform Deep Sensing Annex, High Efficiency Radio Frequency Monitoring and Exploitation System and Aerial Geo-Intelligence System, Lt. Gen. Laura Potter, deputy chief of staff for Army G-2, shared in a presentation slide.

Those systems gather much of what’s happening out there. But to decipher that information, the intel field will lean on artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and cloud-based systems, she said.

The effects that equipment had highlighted another key need — a better, quicker way to conduct battle damage assessments. Inaccurate or lagging reports caused “tremendous problems,” Costanza said.

The unit was moving more quickly than their assessments could manage, meaning after an initial barrage, units were going after targets that were no longer there or looking in the wrong places, he said.

Many of these changes and improvements reside with the man or woman in charge and how well they communicate with their intelligence team.

“Intel drives operations which means commanders own intel,” Costanza said.

The Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large, or MFEW-AL, is part of the Army’s focus on sophisticated electronic warfare technologies after years of divestment. Lockheed Martin is handling development of the self-contained pod, which was initially meant to be slung beneath an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, made by General Atomics.

This summer, the MFEW-AL was put through its paces on an MC-12W Liberty, a plane typically used to conduct medium- to low-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The Air Force previously expressed interest in integrating the EW pod onto an A-10 attack plane.

“MFEW-AL is an innovative converged technology that addresses our customer’s vision for combined cyber and electronic warfare capability and dominance,” Deon Viergutz, vice president of spectrum convergence at Lockheed, said in a statement to C4ISRNET. “In collaboration with the U.S. Army, this demonstration expanded upon all testing of the MFEW-AL system to date, bringing to bear a more complete hardware and software configuration that gets us closer to delivering this technology to our EW soldiers.”

Electronic warfare is a high-stakes game of cat and mouse tied to the electromagnetic spectrum. Militaries rely on the spectrum — and its manipulation — for connectivity, navigation and weapons guidance. The MFEW-AL is designed to detect, locate, disrupt and degrade adversary communications and radars.

Key to MFEW-AL’s flexibility is a Lego-like, plug-and-play approach known as the C5ISR Electronic Warfare Modular Open Suite of Standards. The CMOSS backbone embeds critical capabilities — like communication, timing and mission planning — into cards that are then inserted into a standardized, ruggedized chassis. The interchangeable setup is expected to reduce development cycles, shrink equipment downtimes and improve the Army’s elasticity.

Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, in August told C4ISRNET developmental testing of MFEW-AL took place at the China Lake weapons range in California. He noted the service is getting the tech into the hands of troops.

“We’ve had soldiers both at China Lake and then up at 10th Mountain Division,” Barker said in an interview on the sidelines of the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference in Georgia. “The software and hardware is stable. I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Additional flight tests are expected in the coming months, on top of the 200-plus hours MFEW-AL has already logged. Lockheed said it will use the feedback to further refine its technology. Airworthiness certification is anticipated for fiscal 2024.

Lockheed is also involved with two additional Army electronic warfare and signals intelligence systems: the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team and the heftier Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade. The service tapped the company in April to fit Terrestrial Layer System technology onto Stryker combat vehicles, made by General Dynamics, and to begin planning for the same aboard BAE Systems’ Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle. The arrangement was worth nearly $73 million.

Months later, Lockheed was selected to continue development of TLS-EAB in a deal worth nearly $37 million.

The Maryland-based company reaped $63 billion in defense-related revenue in 2022, earning it the No. 1 spot on Defense News’ Top 100 list, which ranks companies worldwide by defense revenue. It secured $64 billion the year prior.