What exercises with allies and partners have shown over the years is that this type of interoperability remains challenging, but military officials say repetition and practice are key to making strides.

The casualty evacuation mission was “a good example of that progress there,” Brig. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, deputy commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, told Defense News in an interview following the completion of the exercise known as EDGE 22, which took place at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, earlier this month.

“That’s just a small thing,” he said. “We have a lot of progress to make still, but again, a really good step forward.”

Additionally, the Army reported a call for fire was achieved through a Dutch-run waveform.

The Army’s EDGE series of exercises began last year and is slated to continue annually in coordination with Project Convergence, a larger event in the fall. EDGE is considered the practice round for the aerial tier of PC. This year, Project Convergence, now in its third iteration, brought in international partners for the first time; EDGE then followed.

Project Convergence examines and tests how the Army plans to fight against near-peer adversaries across all domains using capability slated for fielding in roughly 2030 and beyond.

EDGE, this year, was focused on a European theater scenario centered around a wet gap crossing. The 82nd Airborne and other allied units at the exercise were tasked with defeating an enemy’s integrated air defense systems. That would then lead to the second phase, introducing maneuver forces through air assaults to seize two different pieces of terrain.

Netherlands, Italy and Germany were active participants in the exercise, while Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom were observers.

German and Italian forces participated in the combined air assault with the 82nd. The Germans brought their German Future Soldier System, and Italian soldiers brought their Targeting and Communication Command Kit.

The Netherlands contributed its Joint Air Ground Gateway, a command-and-control tactical node, and was able to successfully integrate the node into the Windows Tactical Assault Kit (WINTAK), a map-based application that provide operators position data, a chat function and mission planning capabilities across a shared picture.

The exercise relied on the Variable Message Format communication protocol, understood by all NATO forces, to communicate.

“I think everybody would admit we are not where we need to be with our allies,” Tegtmeier said. “I think having those nations present out at Edge 22 is a huge step forward in terms of fixing that problem.”

Exercises like EDGE, he noted, generate new technology ideas and new possibilities to increase interoperability.

In the scenario, the 82nd’s Tactical Command Post served as a Combined Joint Task Force headquarters. The headquarters was positioned well outside the range of enemy long-range fires that it would not have been able to assume using current fleet capabilities. The Army expects to have vast improvements when it comes to speed and range from its Future Vertical Lift fleet with a planned fielding timeline of 2030.

The work the Army did as a coalition with its allies “really informed our gaps when it comes to cross-domain solutions within the coalition,” Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, who oversees the Army’s FVL development, told Defense News in a recent interview.

“It went much better than expected,” he added.

The exercise also helped the service and its coalition partners further understand the technical challenge of achieving the ultimate interoperability goal — being able to work from a single screen in the CJTF environment.

The coalition used a cross-domain solution certified waveform to perform a number of vignettes in which sensitive but unclassified data was passed into a secret enclave and then out to an unclassified one.

“The reason that’s important is really being able to go from strategic to tactical, tactical to strategic in a very agile manner,” Rugen said, referring to the way digital data was securely passed between those performing the tactical mission and the headquarters coordinating the mission.

But coalition interoperability remains a challenge, Rugen said, because it’s not yet clear what data should be passed and what the U.S. and its partners should keep to themselves.

“We should have the ability to filter that [data] out but still provide useful information to our coalition partners and vice versa,” Rugen said. “There’s an ability to filter out that metadata and then give useful things to either the tactical edge or the strategic decision makers.”

Findings at EDGE will inform policies going forward, he noted.

Moving forward, the coalition needs to come to a decision on what waveforms and databases are used as a standard of operation and construct a gateway that allows the right data to flow, Rugen said. Then that gateway has to be interoperable within everyone’s network.

In EDGE, the Army used a variety of waveforms including TSM and Link-16.

During the exercise, “we didn’t necessarily care what the parallel network was, if somebody has a different one. … It doesn’t matter what the black box is,” Rugen said. In other words, the exercise proved interoperability as a concept, but the Pentagon and its allies and partners will have to determine what hardware and software will be standard.

The Army, over 19 days at EDGE, said it achieved 67 technical objectives with 34 first-time events using over 17 distinct FVL-related technologies and capabilities.

These included experimentation with an Air-Launched Effects swarm launched by a surrogate aircraft flying as Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. The swarms evaluated at EDGE mark the largest ALE-small swarm to date. The Army deployed about 25 drones in four waves using the service’s “Wolfpack” concept for intelligent swarms, allowing the aircraft to stimulate, hunt, kill and assess threats.

The Army also used two waveforms that allowed the swarm to double ALE range from missions executed last year.

And the service’s Aerial Tier Network (ATN), which provides digital and voice communication, saw further refinement and improvement, according to Rugen.

The Army also evaluated a number of dual-use sensors typically used for protection, but, at EDGE, were used for lethal effects. Radar warning receivers in aircraft cockpits, for example, transferred data of incoming fire through the network to the CJTF to be used for targeting, Rugen said.

The system consists of a handheld device that paints a picture of activity happening within a designated area. A unit can set up the system while it runs perimeter checks.

A typical base camp setup consists of three different parts. Infrasonic sensors stay central to the camp and are about the size “of a baby’s arm,” Thompson told Defense News. The audio sensors are about the size of a golf tee, with microphones the size of a pencil tip, and can be planted in the ground in a circular pattern to set up a perimeter. The infrasonic sensors have a range of about 2 to 3 miles, Thompson said. Perimeters can be expanded by adding more sensors. A hand-held device that maps sensor placement and breach detection would be included with the system.

The sensors also are low-power and easy to set up and connect using long-range wireless technology, Thompson said.

The sensors, since they are tiny, would go largely undetected, but should one be taken out of play through damage, mechanical malfunction or an enemy, the remaining sensors would continue to work, he added.

The company’s current vision for the product is to provide an operator with a map containing information about breaches, but the system is also capable of feeding into augmented reality goggles, so a sentry on the perimeter can “see” things coming before the sentry can really physically see them, according to Thompson.

Information coming from the sensors are also fed into a large artificial intelligence system that allows it to become smarter over time. The system can tell the difference between a person digging or crawling, how many people or animals might be walking around, the point of origin for direct or indirect fire, and even specific vehicles. And as it gets to know an area, its differentiation improves, according to Thompson.

Long-term plans for the technology, Thompson said, include configuring and integrating it with other security systems, linking enduring sensor placements to a cloud and air-dropping sensors to areas void of troops.

Thompson said there are “a ton of possibilities” for Smart Sound Perimeter to be a “powerful tool” for troops, where human vision is simply limiting, such as in the field at night, in bad weather and where the enemy is well-concealed. “Smart sensors can fill that gap,” he said.

When asked at SOFIC how the command might be developing requirements for managing big data, Maj. Gen. Sean Swindell, director of USSOCOM’s Force Structure, Requirements, Resources and Strategic Assessments (J-8), said, “I don’t know that we have all the answers to that. That is currently something we are working right now,” he said.

The command is “trying to make sure we have a unified way ahead so we don’t all have separate competing initiatives,” across the components, Swindell said, noting that a “data council” has been set up to help tackle the task of generating recommendations. And once recommendations are ready for prime time, Swindell said he would push them forward through the chain for possible approval and execution.

Critical to the effort is collaborating with industry. “One thing we are hoping is to work with industry, to tell you the truth, to look at big data,” Swindell added.

“I don’t think we have a big data problem, compared to what industry has to deal with, but it’s a big data problem to us for sure,” Col. Michelle Schmidt, the USSOCOM’s director of intelligence (J-2) added.

But since the commercial world deals with big data on a level exponentially larger than USSOCOM, learning from industry is vital, USSOCOM leadership said.

SOCOM retrieves significant amounts of unclassified data during typical reconnaissance missions and all of the data is sent to a command center for exfiltration. S&T efforts need to address how to pull out the relevant and crucial information from large swaths of data streaming in and pass it on to intelligence analysts for further exploitation, according to the presentation.

Several companies presenting during an innovation showcase at SOFIC were in the data analytics business.

Cloudera, an open source data hub, can take data and run large-scale analytics. The company already digests data from NASA’s Orion Spacecraft and also developed the analytics process for fleet health management for Sikorsky’s aircraft, to name a few.

And Boston-based DataRobot provides an automated machine learning platform with 130 million predictive models built on its cloud platform, according to Kevin Stofan, a data scientist with the company.

Using artificial intelligence, machine-learning and technology that can process, eliminate the white noise and disseminate the important and usable intel, will be critical in managing big data in the future, intelligence analysts throughout the Pentagon and with the services have made clear.

But there’s always a matter of money needed to tackle the challenge. “When I hear all the talk about big data,” USSOCOM’s comptroller Mark Peterson said, “I have a big money problem.”

Therefore, Peterson noted, it would be ideal to serve as a test bed for the U.S. Army or another service. An effort such as developing technology that would ease the daunting process of big data analytics might be too big to try out with a service with data sets as large as the Army’s, for example.

“We can test a proof-of-concept and if the service likes it they can grab it and then I can say it’s service common,” which would alleviate some of the funding strain on SOCOM, Peterson added.

So Defense Department leadership have started up the call again for funding of missile defense threat detection capabilities in space.

Both the Army’s new Space and Missile Defense Commander Lt. Gen. James Dickinson and Brig. Gen. Ronald Buckley, U.S. Northern Command’s deputy director of operations, talked about the importance of space for missile defense in speeches at the Association of the US Army’s missile defense conference in Arlington, Virginia, Feb. 7.

Dickinson said space is “fundamental for every single military operation that occurs on the planet today from satellites to GPS,” and said the domain is a crucial part of connecting the battlefield and the backbone of the missile defense kill chain.

“As long as we continue to solely focus and rely on terrestrial-based for our BMD sensors, there will be gaps and seams in our coverage,” Buckley said. “Our adversaries are actively working to exploit any of these gaps and seams. I’m not saying that space isn’t without its flaws, but I believe it’s time we take a hard look at space as an option.”

Buckley highlighted the BMDS Overhead Persistent Infrared Architecture and the Space-based Kill Assessment experiment as promising and good examples of “what some out-of-the-box thinking can do to capitalize on space.”

BOA uses sensors already in orbit to provide the BMDS system with “more and possibly better data,” he said. And the SKA program uses the concept of commercially hosted payloads to get a “fairly significant” number of sensors on orbit on time and in a fraction of the cost of traditional Defense Department space programs.

“This is the kind of thinking we need to continue to pursue,” Buckley said, “as the sticker shock of most space programs is perhaps the biggest impediment to capitalize on this domain within the DoD system.”

A space-based sensor layer’s persistent vantage point would provide the “holy grail of birth-to-death tracking of hostile missiles, which dramatically improves the lethality of both homeland and regional defense,” Karako wrote in a paper on how the new White House might consider investing in missile defense going forward.

Now space-based missile defense funding is at an all-time low, according to Karako, while improvements to the terrestrial-based missile defense system would still fall short of detecting and defeating missile threats currently in development by adversaries like North Korea and Iran. That shortcoming comes from the detection system’s upward stare and such unfixable issues like the curvature of the Earth, which blocks even the most powerful radar’s full field of view.

But even understanding the utility of space for missile defense and having technology that could provide capability, the issue has always been having enough money, Karako told Defense News. In the last several years, Pentagon investment in space is now a sliver of what it was in the early 2000s.

Still, space isn’t totally devoid of missile defense efforts.

There are two Space Tracking and Surveillance System demonstrators in low orbit intended to track a missile’s path from launch to intercept, but Karako said the mission ends for these two demonstrators this year. A follow-on program to STSS was canceled in 2013 that would have included a constellation of nine to 12 satellites with a large telescope and a gimbaled tracking system, he added.

Karako said there are several creative options that could be pursued going forward including using commercial satellites to host payloads like the Missile Defense Agency’s SKA program and relying on international cooperation and joint agency endeavors.

“We know what needs to be done in terms of capability and the question really just is, do we field the rest of the [STSS] constellation in its current form or do we have a smaller more distributed, potentially cheaper, constellations with similar capabilities,” Karako said. “That is what it really comes down to.”

Both Raytheon and Lockheed Martin swiftly submitted responses to the RFI last summer. The service has also conducted a number of industry visits not only to collect data from them, but to look at technologies as well as manufacturing capabilities and capacities, he said. “The team is in the final stages of rolling that up now to develop an acquisition strategy to carry back for approval with Army senior leaders,” Rasch said.

While he said it was premature to determine exactly when that acquisition strategy would be presented to Army leadership, Rasch said he hoped the Army could deliver it in the summertime or earlier. “We are moving as quickly as we can,” he said.

Both Lockheed and Raytheon have said they can work quickly to bring a solution online. The Army’s RFI calls upon industry to help inform them on the feasibility of reaching initial operational capability for a radar prior to fiscal 2028.

While the Pentagon is currently operating under fiscal 2016 budget levels due to a continuing resolution that won’t lift until April 28 at the earliest, the Army’s lower-tier Air and Missile Defense program office team is working aggressively to be ready to execute a new start to move forward on a modernized radar program — whether new or upgraded — in fiscal 2017 when the dollars become available, Rasch said.

Raytheon first entered into an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1981 to develop AFATDS and received its first contract in 1984. AFATDS was approved for fielding in 1996.

According to the Army’s statement, AFATDS has supported operations in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

AFATDS is 100 percent fielded with more than 4,000 systems. The newest version is expected to be fielded in fiscal year 2020.

Raytheon said it couldn’t provide specifics on award values over the course of the program, but sources say it was a lucrative endeavor for the company. Raytheon successfully fielded 13 versions since 1984.

The company would not disclose if it planned to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but, a spokesman told Defense News on Wednesday, “Our proposed AFATDS solution leverages our extensive experience and proven performance across a broad spectrum of Command and Control programs. We plan to attend the post-award debrief and welcome the US Army’s feedback.”

While the Army would not respond to follow-up questions regarding competition details, following the release of its statement, other competitors included General Dynamics Mission Systems and Northrop Grumman, Defense News has learned.

GD’s response Wednesday was similar to Raytheon’s. A company spokesman said GD was “disappointed” by the decision on the AFATDS competition and also “look[s] forward to receiving a debrief later this week from the Army.”

The service said in its statement, by choosing Leidos it “used a best value, trade-off source selection via a full and open competitive strategy. Based on the market research results, the government pursued a full and open competition to implement the most innovative industry approach possible to address AFATDS 7.0 requirements while reducing risk and continuing to implement new capabilities.”

Rockwell Collins on Monday is introducing Coalescence at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida. Two demos will be showcased at the company’s booth: an F/A-18 “ready room” where pilots prepare for a flight from an aircraft carrier, and a ship bridge simulation.

“The advantage would be to have a very small footprint on an aircraft carrier” that would allow F/A-18 pilots at sea to prepare for and practice missions before they step into the cockpit and execute, Gibbs said.

“It would be a cost-reduced, highly improved fidelity environment to what exists today,” he said. “What that would look like today is you might be in that same cockpit looking at a computer monitor, not really immersed in your aircraft.”

The system can be configured several ways. One method is to mate an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with existing simulation equipment, and pipe data from the simulator into the headset. At I/ITSEC, Rockwell Collins is showing how Coalescence works with an Oculus Rift and typical military hardware not hooked up to a simulator — items like a cockpit, displays and controls — which are integrated with the company’s core simulation architecture and a synthetic environment.

According to Gibbs, the “secret sauce” is how the software figures out what elements from the real world to bring into the virtual world and how to solve latency issues that may arise. For instance, in a situation where a person is holding a ball and then throws it to the user, the user needs to be able to see that ball and catch it without the simulated visuals lagging behind.

The technology isn’t quite ready for full-flight simulators yet, but it’s quickly approaching the resolution and fidelity needed, Gibbs said.

” Moore’s lawis working here pretty hard, so it won’t be long. It will be a couple of years for sure,” he said, referring to the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, who anticipated that computing would increase in power and decrease in relative cost at an exponential pace.

Rockwell Collins plans to make Coalescence available in 2017, but the company is still looking for its first customer. Gibbs believes it could be adapted for a variety of missions including joint tactical air control, dismounted soldier, driver training and even some rotary-wing applications. But although the company is considering proposing it for several programs of record, it has already run into a problem — the technology has outpaced the currently defined requirements.

Gibbs summarized his argument to the US military as: “Let’s identify a set of requirements that satisfies the training needs assessment for the program, and enable those to be satisfied by different and new technology.”

One selling point could be the cost. The company is still solidifying its cost model, but Gibbs said it will be “orders of magnitude less” than the $6 million to $10 million price tag of most flight simulators.