Steve Wallace, the agency’s chief technology officer, said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International that this is a way of getting at a common problem in the Defense Department: a focus on emerging technology without a clear understanding of the problem its intended to solve.

“How does the department understand what you all can bring forward?” he said to a crowd of industry leaders and other cyber professionals in Baltimore June 26. “And then at the same time, how do you understand what the heck we actually need? There’s always that friction there.”

It’s not just an attempt to speed up the acquisitions process as the Pentagon is in a race for digital dominance against China and other nation-state hackers. So much of the conversation around cybersecurity in national defense is around pacing, but with industry constantly coming to market with new tools, there’s a need by government to be a wary purchaser.

These problem statements are a potential way for the Defense Department buy the tools, not just the shiniest ones.

“I think there is that risk that we get excited by new things — which are exciting — and we want to play with them and explore and see what’s possible,” said Scarlett Swerdlow, a senior technical strategist in the DISA’s Emerging Technology Directorate. “But at the end of the day, we have to make sure we’re solving a real problem that a real person has.”

The government often tries to emulate industry. But startups in Silicon Valley aren’t tied to a congressional budget cycle. And they have the room, and often the in-house expertise, to fail fast and pivot often. And though the Defense Department is at the mercy of a constantly changing threat landscape, DISA officials said at the conference that it can be enough for DoD to allow industry to do what it does best and be an evaluator when it comes time to settle on a solution.

“It is our ability to interface with industry, but knowing that the dollars that mature the technology are industry dollars, and not tax dollars, and then understanding where to apply some tactical patience as industry develops tech and [then we] insert ourselves,” said Army Maj. David Courter, chief of combatant command plan integration with the J-5. “I think that’s much different than us writing an initial capabilities document and saying, ‘I need you to build this cool tool.’”

Cautionary tale

One cautionary tale came to mind: the Joint Regional Security Stacks, an ambitious plan to massively consolidate the DoD’s sprawling IT infrastructure that set to be wound down in 2021 following reports of cost overruns and unresolved complexities.

At inception, it was supposed to be a gamechanger for the department, but a 2019 inspector general audit revealed it ultimately wasn’t meeting end users’ needs.

“The whole notion behind JRSS was best of breed for every component in the doggone stack,” Wallace said. “We are going to have the very best of everything. And then we are going to attempt to integrate or interoperate between all these components. Didn’t go well.”

The other issue is ensuring that DoD can verify for itself whether a tool actually does what it claims to do when its adapted for military or defense purposes. That comes into play when the department thinks about how buying one system must be able to operate with existing ones and those to come.

“[That’s] another reason to add that in-house talent that can … test some of those claims that products make,” said Swerdlow.

Tom Sasala, the Navy’s chief data officer, said Feb. 17 during C4ISRNET’s “Removing Stovepipes” series that officials are looking to find communications gaps that would hinder joint warfighting.

“You have a lot of weapon systems that have been under development in in the field for 20 or 30 years and now we’re asking them to suddenly start talking to each other using modern web services and technologies that most of them weren’t even built on,” Sasala said.

Here are four other ideas Sasala discussed that could improve JADC2 and the Navy’s data environment.

Learning how incentivize interoperability

The military services are beginning to work together on data standardization. In a meeting late last month, top data officials from the services and the joint staff met to settle on a definition of a common data fabric to set the foundation for data interoperability.

But one problem that remains is that the current acquisition process does not encourage vendors to build systems that can connect to each other.

“We pay a vendor to build a system and we pay a different vendor to build a different system. There’s not a whole lot of incentive right now for those two vendors to talk to each other,” Sasala said.

“True interoperability is really going to have to happen by the government for the government. It needs to be a combination of workforce skills and cultural change, as well as acquisition policy and process change, where the government program managers insist that the system they’re building must be able to speak to the system that some other program manager is building.”

For example, one incentive could be to include contract language that offers additional money for systems that can connect more easily to other. Or, conversely, the department could include language that would disincentivize systems that only work in a silo.

“We’re trying to figure out exactly when you employ these different models right now,” Sasala said.

Defined data standards for Joint All Domain Command and Control?

Sasala said service leaders are making progress on exactly which systems need to be able to communicate.

“Part of the conversation was focused on the gaps that we have in exchanging information,” Sasala said. “And part of the conversation was on the interoperability problems we have with exchanging data.”

For example, Sasala mentioned that how militaries throughout the world use Link 16, a communications system used by the U.S military, NATO and coalition partners, could change. That’s in part because it’s not easy to change a system that’s globally dispersed and that was developed decades ago.

Sasala said he made a recommendation to the JADC2 cross-functional team that partners should “look at the operational nodes, and how they’re communicating today and find either gaps or interoperability issues in those nodes and focus our standards on those, rather than creating whole new standards that people then need to turn around and adopt.”

Data security

The SolarWinds breach that afflicted several U.S. government agencies has raised eyebrows within the information security community at the department. With the reliance of third party vendors for many IT contractors, service officials are looking toward zero-trust architectures to secure their networks.

Zero-trust is “a little bit of a buzzword right now in my personal opinion, but the notion of zero-trust has to be fully embraced, where nothing on the network is trusted,” Sasala said.

Right now, he said, software isn’t mature enough to validate identity at each stop along a network: the router, the switch, the computer to the DoD’s common access card. While the end goal is zero-trust, the basics of data security are still fundamental: encrypting data at rest and in transit.

In the future, he said he’s looking at polymorphic encryption, which would allow data to be used while still encrypted. But this approach, he said, still has vulnerabilities to quantum computers.

The Navy’s changing its approach to data

Within the last week, Sasala said that the Navy started changing how it looks at data. This includes using analytics for the performance management of systems that could ultimately lead to cost savings.

The Navy is starting to pull in data from program aspects such as contracts, sustainment or delivery orders that can provide insight into program milestones, instead of setting performance metrics dashboards. By using analytics, the service hopes to save money and reallocate those funds. Sasala said the Navy returns a “fair amount” of total obligated funds every year. Using analytics, the service could determine where that unspent money is and instead spend it elsewhere.

“We can start modeling things and do ‘what if’ scenarios now,” Sasala said. “So what if we were able to find 15 percent of unspent every year? What could we spend it on? So we have a 355 ship target but we’re only funded at 310? Well, that seems like an easy target … Those are all trade spaces that the Secretary doesn’t have today that we want to open up in the future.”

The defense secretary delegated the Army in November 2019 to lead the effort to take a petting zoo of counter-small unmanned aircraft systems, or C-sUAS, many of which were rooted in urgent needs from Middle East conflicts, and to consolidate capability into a select group of interim systems. Army Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, who is leading the effort through the Joint C-sUAS Office, spoke to Defense News on Oct. 2 ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

That part of his project would be followed by the development and fielding of a long-term system.

The office has already taken 40-plus systems and whittled the selection down to three systems-of-systems approaches — one from each service — for fixed and semi-fixed sites. The office also settled on the Light-Mobile Air Defense Integrated System from the Marine Corps as a mounted or mobile system; Bal Chatri, Dronebuster and Smart Shooter for dismounted, hand-held systems; and one command-and-control system.

The C2 system is called Forward Area Air Defense C2 and is sponsored by the Army, but it does include interoperable systems from the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

The threat is changing, according to Gainey, as the use of signals evolves. What this means is the long-term solution must bring in new technology and easily swap out old capabilities.

“It’s how rapidly we can integrate it, and by writing those requirements standards, it’s a big win for us because now if you’re building to that, then we allow industry to compete in this process by building component technology that can integrate into this open architecture,” Gainey said.

The Army will host a virtual industry day at the end of the month to share its requirements.

While Gainey was careful to avoid divulging classified requirements, he said the initial C-sUAS systems focused on Group 1 drones (such as Raven and Wasp) and Group 2 drones (such as ScanEagle). The program will also focus on Group 3 drones (such as Shadow), he added.

“We have a capability out there that can get after Group 3,” Gainey said, “but we know we need more focus in this area.”

Overcoming the threat of drone swarms will also receive increased attention, he added.

The plan is to test available capabilities at common ranges twice a year, he explained.

Meanwhile, industry is conducting several demonstrations a year, “so we have a good pulse of what technology they’re working on,” Gainey said. “What our efforts are doing is trying to help focus them in.”

Because the Joint C-sUAS Office was established in the middle of a budget cycle, Gainey said, the Army is working through the funding aspects; not just to keep interim systems funded, but to ensure there’s enough to develop a long-term capability.

The Army wants to get the first set of possible capabilities out to a test range in February or March, Gainey said. “We’ll see how quickly we can pull it together,” he added.

Additionally, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, is helping the Joint C-sUAS Office by leveraging directed-energy and high-power microwave pursuits into a C-sUAS solution.

Lt. Gen. L. Neil Thurgood, the RCCTO’s director, told Defense News ahead of the AUSA conference, that it would field a high-power microwave capability developed by the Air Force in February 2021 to perform operational tests on it.

“It will be the first of its type that we put in theater,” he said, adding that it would likely go into the Central Command or U.S. Africa Command areas of operation.

The high-power microwave will be fielded along with a directed-energy capability as part of the Army’s Indirect Fires Protection Capability Increment 2 in fiscal 2024, which is designed to defend fixed sites from rockets, artillery and mortars as well as drones and cruise missiles.

Not only did that connection show the flexibility of the Army’s evolving tactical network, but it demonstrated the success the armed services can have as they connect different platforms.

“In some cases — I’m hesitant to use the word but I’ll use it — I think in some cases it was unprecedented,” said Willie Nelson, director of Army Futures Command’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Cross-Functional Team.

The connection occurred during Project Convergence, a massive Army exercise at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, that wrapped up at the end of September. During the so-called campaign of learning, the Army put its most cutting-edge technology to the test. It connected sensors from multiple domains to various fires capabilities, fused data and cut down the sensor-to-shooter timeline from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.

The Army clearly had big plans for Project Convergence, though none of them involved F-35s.

But location can be everything. Over the course of the exercises, the Marine Corps offered the Army an F-35 to borrow.

“Because we’re in Yuma, right across the highway is the Marine Corps air base with many, many F-35s,” explained Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, who oversaw Project Convergence. “Due to the incredible relationships that were developed, the Marines provided F-35 time.”

“Why I was a Yuma fan and pushed for it is the opportunities that exist,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said, referencing the use of the F-35B during Project Convergence. “And they worked it out over a handshake. Once that F-35 is airborne, it’s over the target. It’s right across the street.”

Nelson’s sensor-to-shooter team adapted to the opportunity. That team was at the heart of what Project Convergence was all about — connecting any sensor in any domain to the best possible shooter.

“And at the time the sensor-to-shooter team was up and operating, we had the emitters on and we were working back and forth. You know, every time we just felt that we were running the test,” Nelson said. “When the F-35B came on, there was a discussion of how could we work together in real time in the middle of that exercise and kind of put what we were doing down and do some direct support and targeting with that airframe.”

Connecting capabilities

During Project Convergence, the Army demonstrated it could use targeting data from an F-35′s sensors to deliver ground-based fires. The service also used on-orbit sensors and artificial intelligence capabilities to synthesize targeting data, then provide it to the F-35.

Sensor fusion — the ability to take data from the F-35′s sensors and radar and combine it with information from other F-35s — is considered one of the hallmarks of fifth-generation fighters, and a strength of the Lockheed Martin-made Joint Strike Fighter in particular. However, the U.S. military has only begun to experiment with using the F-35 to sync data among multiple platforms owned and operated by different services.

The Army brought its sensor fusion capabilities to bear. On-orbit sensors collected images of the simulated battlefield before sending them to a TITAN ground station surrogate located in Washington state. From there, the images were run through an artificial intelligence system called Prometheus, which scanned and fused those images to detect threats and create targeting data. That targeting data was then sent to Yuma Proving Ground over tactical satellite communications. Then the data was sent to the F-35B over the Link 16 tactical data link. The threats could then be populated on the jet’s onboard weapons systems, allowing the pilot to respond to the new threat.

In short, operators were able to use tactical networks to give a Marine Corps F-35B pilot targeting data created from commercial satellite images using Army-owned AI.

“We’re not aware that’s even been done before,” Nelson said. “We’re excited as can be.”

Nelson said the exercise took place a few times in the brief period the service had access to the Marine Corps’ F-35B.

In that example, the F-35 was used as the shooter in the critical sensor-to-shooter chain. But the Army was also able to use the jet as a sensor, passing along targeting data to another shooter.

Fusing the data generated by the jet’s onboard electronic sensor, the F-35B identified a potential threat and passed that information through Link 16. From there, Army operators could use the FIRESTORM system to find the best possible shooter to fire at the target. (FIRESTORM is the FIRES Synchronization to Optimize Responses in Multi-domain Operations. It’s an AI capability being built for the Army that recommends the best available shooter to respond to a given threat.)

In this scenario, the Army used an Extended Range Cannon Artillery platform to shoot at the beyond-line-of-sight threat picked up by the F-35.

“They played around a lot with data passing back-and-forth between, again, a joint partner — in this case, the Marine Corps and an F-35B — to ground,” Nelson said. “So really when you think space to an aviation platform, aviation platform to ground platform, and our ability to pass targeting data back-and-forth between those different communities, it was just wonderful.

“It just goes to show … what happens when you put very capable and smart engineers in the field along with operators who are technically capable and understand the weapon system, and you’re able to really crack that open and work on those problems together and achieve, to some extent, entirely new outcomes that you hadn’t planned to at the beginning.”

The Marine Corps’ participation has far reaching implications as the Army seeks to involve the joint force for the next iteration of Project Convergence in 2021.

“The excitement for me is that you can bring in a massive amount of other assets from the other services and continue to work through just how we would be able to package information to then prosecute targets with the best capability,” McCarthy said.

The Army’s use of an F-35B is just the latest development in the Defense Department’s efforts to connect the advanced fighter jet with other platforms.

While the Army experiments with using Link 16 to share data between its own platforms and the F-35, the Air Force is testing the Advanced Battle Management System to assess technologies that may enable the F-35 and F-22 to send data across their unique, stealthy data links.

Although information cannot currently be shared across the F-35′s Multifunction Advanced Data Link and the F-22′s Intra-Flight Data Link, the Air Force in December successfully demonstrated a radio interpreter that would allow some data to be passed between the aircraft. The service plans to conduct an airborne test of the interpreter sometime this year.

The capability, called Tactical Network Transport-On the Move, allows for improved connectivity in tactical environments and is currently being fielded to infantry and Stryker brigades. On-the-move tactical connectivity for armor brigade combat teams, which includes tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, are critical because these formations must continually move to avoid becoming a target.

The effort to better equip armor brigades is another piece of the Army’s work delivering new tools to its tactical network every two years, known as Capability Sets, to increase connectivity and resiliency as it prepares for future wars against advanced adversaries. These tools are being developed through a partnership between the Army Network Cross-Functional Team and Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical.

“As the Army faces increasingly capable adversaries, on-the-move tactical network connectivity for armor formations is becoming critically important to enable more effective and less predictable armor offensive and defensive operations,” said Paul Mehney, PEO C3T communications director.

PEO C3T’s Project Manager Tactical Networks and the Network-CFT are working with the Army’s science and technology community, capability managers and industry, including SATCOM providers, radio vendors and application developers to integrate three design options as it works to inform network design for armor brigades. The Defense Department awarded a $29.9 million contract to General Dynamics Mission Systems for the pilot program on Sept. 30. Mehney said that the company will support integration, engineering and fielding services for the ABCT experimentation effort.

“Together this team-of-teams will implement a ‘buy, try, decide’ acquisition approach, emphasizing innovation to improve network connectivity, resiliency and protection for ABCTs,” Mehney said.

The specific needs of the armor brigades came from feedback from observer/controllers at the National Training Center. During these feedback events, Mehney told C4ISRNET, program managers learned that armor formation leaders wanted complex network systems to be left out of the fighting vehicles so they could focus on the fight. This feedback led to a decision to increase capability increases to command post vehicles that support armor formations.

He also said formation commanders told program managers they need more robust and resilient on-the-move voice communications. That way, “when a unit stops to set up the command post, voice and data links are already in place to execute the [command post] mission,” Mehney said.

The armor brigade combat team pilot efforts are funded by Congress’ inclusion of a $71 million increase for the Army’s Tactical Network Technology Modernization In Service to support prototype efforts for on-the-move capabilities for armor formations.

Experimentation will take place in fiscal 2021 and 2022, he said, adding that the work will inform Capability Set ’23 armor brigade network design prototyping efforts. That work will lead to fielding in Capability Set ’25.

Mehney said that fielding to Stryker and infantry brigades will be completed by the end of fiscal 2021.

The series of exercises and experiments that made up the Project Convergence “campaign of learning” took place at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona. The event, held over a six-week period in the harsh desert at America’s southwest border, was deemed the most important Army event outside of global operations, and future annual iterations are expected to continue shaping the future force.

“We’re going to have even further transformation of the battlefield geometry,” Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of future vertical lift modernization, told Defense News in an Oct. 6 interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

“We want to go deeper. We made it to 61.9 kilometers, across the forward line of troops in the scenario we fought in 2020,” Rugen said. “We will want to go farther than that.”

The Army will also join forces with all of the other military services in 2021, according to Gen. John Murray, the head of Army Futures Command. It will be up to those other services the kinds of capabilities and technologies they each bring to the equation, but the intention is to have the Air Force’s F-35 fighter jet integrated into the architecture of the operation.

Earlier this month, the Army and the Air Force signed a two-year collaboration agreement to develop a concept for Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, which carries over the Army’s future war-fighting doctrine, “Multi-Domain Operations” — which is still in the concept phase — to the world of joint operations.

JADC2 essentially connects sensors to shooters — which was the bread and butter of Project Convergence this year — across the joint force. The exercise involved about 500 people at Yuma; most were data collectors. The event represented a platoon-sized operation.

But in 2021, according to Murray, an entire operational headquarters element will be brought in to drive the learning in terms of how “we organize and how we fight the capability in the future.”

Additionally, the Army wants to bring in a multidomain task force from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, which would likely be the centerpiece of Project Convergence 21, said Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, who leads the Army’s long-range precision fires efforts, which is the service’s top modernization priority.

There will also be other operational units brought in “to help explore and to help test on a larger scale,” Rafferty told Defense News in an interview this month.

Starting in 2021, the exercise will have a foreign flavor. The United Kingdom signed on to participate next year, Murray said, and Australia may join. In 2022, the focus of the exercise will build significantly in terms of involving coalition forces.

The Army also plans to tie Project Convergence to other exercises happening at roughly the same time. For example, since the event has an objective to operate in denied and degraded environments, the Army’s Position Navigation and Timing Assessment Exercise will likely be a part of Project Convergence in 2021.

In its first year, the Army had elements from the modernization teams focused on future vertical lift, long-range precision fires, the next-generation combat vehicle, the network, and positioning, navigation and timing. Next year, more teams will join, including those dedicated to air and missile defense, soldier lethality, and the Synthetic Training Environment.

The Army also plans to involve its developmental missile, meant to replace the Army Tactical Missile System for a long-range shot.

The Precision Strike Missile — a weapon with an expected range of 500 kilometers — will likely have a test shot that aims to surpass that during Project Convergence. The missile has an aggressive test schedule next year.

The Extended Range Cannon, or ERCA, which participated this year, will have new technology rolled in by 2021, Rafferty said.

The service also plans to demonstrate the Excalibur Hit-to-Kill capability, which is one of the competitors for the Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition replacement effort. “That really is the lethality component of ERCA at extended ranges,” he added.

The future vertical lift team will bring its 20mm gun planned for its future attack reconnaissance aircraft to the event as well as its Modular Effects Launcher prototype, which will carry both lethal and nonlethal effects to deploy from the air, Rugen said.

The Army has begun firing live rounds from the gun, and will fire roughly 285,000 rounds through it this fiscal year.

The Air-Launched Effects, or ALE, capability played a critical role in Project Convergence this year, and is to return with increased capability and improved technology.

“The lower tier of the air domain is decisive,” Rugen said. “I think ’20 proved that yet again like it did in ’19. We need a broader acceptance of that from the joint force and from defensewide. There is a capability to show up at the time and place of our choosing with vertical lift from relative sanctuary and have operational effects, and that’s really what we intend to show in ’21.”

The network underpins everything at Project Convergence, and improvements will continue to be made so the network that shows up in 2021 is more robust and geared beyond what it was originally designed to do, which is to support a tactical brigade.

“I think you’ll see better discipline on our data management and message traffic, message formats, which, again, is going to help that machine-to-machine targeting,” Rugen said. To further improve the ground and air assets connectivity, there will be a few more waveforms incorporated “to see if they can produce the bandwidth we need.”

The Army wants the mesh network established through ALEs to be “more resilient and have greater goals on distance,” he added.

FIRESTORM is also expected to return next year. The system uses artificial intelligence to help select the optimal shooter for engagement.

Surrogate robotic combat vehicles and an optionally manned fighting vehicle will continue to play a major role as well.

The hope is also to bring in the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, known as IBCS, which is currently undergoing development to connect sensors and shooters for the purpose of countering missile threats. The system recently completed a by-and-large successful limited-user test and will head into its initial operational test and evaluation in 2021.

Murray noted that if the test and evaluation conflicts with the Army’s schedule, the system will not participate in next year’s Project Convergence, noting that the evaluation is a top priority for the program to remain on track.

The Army is also hoping the Integrated Visual Augmentation System — which will provide soldiers with AI-enhanced goggles that assist with navigation, targeting, and advanced night and thermal vision — will be ready for next year’s experimentation.

Overall, the Army has collected “70-plus technologies” — to include a few capabilities from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — that it might incorporate into the event, Murray said, noting not all 70 will end up participating.

YUMA PROVING GROUND, Ariz. — During the U.S. Army’s high-profile test of emerging technology in the Arizona desert last month, service leaders packed explosives into a prototype of the Extended Range Cannon as part of a bold experiment.

The cannon had the ability to fire beyond 70 kilometers, and the XM1113 projectile had been customized with a precision guidance kit (not the next long-range precision guidance kit that will be integrated later).

“It didn’t go off every time,” Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, who oversees long-range precision fires modernization, said of the weapon during an Oct. 2 interview with Defense News. “It was kind of disappointing when there was a hole in the ground right next to the target because it didn’t explode.”

The XM1113 incident matched what many service leaders experienced at Project Convergence as new concepts and modernization efforts were put to the test. Sometimes, Army officials were thrilled with the progress of new technologies. Other times, they saw room for improvement.

“This is a major step forward in transforming the United States Army for the next 40 years,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said while attending Project Convergence at Yuma Proving Ground.

“This may not be the most important thing Army Futures Command is working on,” added Gen. Mike Murray, the head of the command. But “this may be the most important thing the Army is doing today,” outside of global ongoing operations.

The service is shifting its focus from counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East to an era of great power competition — one where the United States must be prepared to operate against advanced adversaries in high-end conflict across air, land, sea, space and cyber domains.

Army leaders hope Project Convergence shows the service is more willing to abandon the customary hand-wringing over whether technology is completely mature, and instead jump into the fray to try and even fail publicly.

“Every one of these weapons systems, as they get anywhere close to a determination by Army leadership … we’re putting it in Convergence,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters before the event. “It’s a much more effective means for operational tests.”

Perfection vs. progress

Project Convergence was meant to be hard, Army leaders said, to challenge in the harshest of environments the systems and concepts that would be needed to against sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China.

The Army picked Yuma Proving Ground for the new experimental exercise because of its “harsh conditions,” large operating area and “brutal” temperatures that reached 120 degrees, the exercise’s commander, Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, said Sept. 23 on the ground at Yuma. “We knew that if we could accomplish our mission here, we can do it almost anywhere on Earth.”

It was so hot in the Arizona desert that aircraft tires blew up on the runway.

While the effort met and, in some cases, greatly exceeded expectations, it was wholly imperfect.

The service flew a group of reporters to Yuma on the last day to witness firsthand how its efforts were panning out. In a small warehouse full of military leadership, reporters, foreign military counterparts, civilian engineers and legislative staffers, the Army put its tech to the test.

At the front of the room were eight large television screens: The top four showed livestreams of the action occurring on the range — mortar fires, drones flying overhead and the targets set to be destroyed.

Yet the real action was taking place on the four bottom screens, where observers could see the Tactical Assault Kit — a software system giving operators a common picture of what was happening on the range — and other advanced software applications. And below those screens were 10 Army operators controlling all of the action from behind their monitors.

“I was focused on those 10 people up front that were simulating a tactical operation and a little less so on the screens,” McCarthy told reporters the day after the exercise. “The only screens that I really cared about were the lower ones that showed how they were moving the pieces from the battlefield.”

In other words, Project Convergence was not about the boom. It was not about hitting the targets.

Which is good. Because not all of them did.

On that day, the Army missed two targets during live-fire demonstrations. In the first miss, a modified Gray Eagle UAV used another drone as a munitions mule. The primary Gray Eagle identified the threat, ordering the other drone to drop a glide munition on the target. The first Gray Eagle was supposed to guide that munition to the target over the Army’s tactical network — however, a lost network connection led to a miss, Murray confirmed to Defense News.

In the other miss, an XM1113 projectile failed to explode on its target after being fired from the first prototype of the Army’s Extended Range Cannon, which has the capability to fire beyond 70 kilometers.

“This was the first time we had the XM1113 firing targets with high explosives inside of it, instead of inert, with a currently fielded precision guidance kit, not the [next] long-range precision guidance kit,” Rafferty said. “It didn’t work every time. It was accurate, but it didn’t go off every time.”

“The bullets flying through the air and exploding is interesting,” Coffman said. “But that’s not what’s compelling about Project Convergence. It’s everything that happens before the lanyard is pulled, the trigger is pulled. We didn’t come out here for a precision fires exercise. What we came here to do is increase the speed of information between sensing the target and passing that information to the effector.”

By creating a complex network of systems, the Army was able to dramatically shorten its kill chain. And the service moved the architecture from PowerPoint to a living and breathing capability in less than eight months.

Science and technology efforts that were just “two months ago an idea in a lab some place in an air-conditioned building” were worked into the exercise, Murray said.

“I can’t emphasize enough that yesterday exceeded any expectation that I could have had. It was an experiment. It was an experiment at scale for a combined arms operations, and the fact that they compressed the timespan … was incredible,” McCarthy said.

Networks aren’t built in a day

Over the course of the effort, the Army was able to shorten its sensor-to-shooter timeline from 20 minutes to 20 seconds by using emerging artificial intelligence algorithms, experimental tactical networks and space-based sensors. This introduced a new pipeline that takes sensor data, transforms it into targeting data and delivers it to the best possible shooter at blazing speeds.

“Taking information from space-based sensors and passing into ground- and air-based effectors seems really simple and happens super fast, but it was very complex and took us weeks of hard coding in order to get it done,” Coffman said.

Added Murray: “It’s all about the ability to pass data, and if you can’t do that, a long-range cannon becomes interesting, but not really relevant.”

During the effort, “we had all kinds of problems. That’s why we were rewriting code and fixing stuff constantly,” he continued. “But you know? It worked.

The network “was a plus and minus,” he explained. It was the backbone of everything the Army was doing at Project Convergence, but “like everything else we brought, what we had, it wasn’t designed for this,” he added.

The network used during the event is being designed for a tactical brigade, and not to operate in the context of Project Convergence in a constrained bandwidth environment, he noted. “The network worked. It just took a tremendous amount of work to get it to work.”

For example, the Army had a hard time getting the network to connect from ground assets to air assets, according to Murray, while ground-to-ground and air-to-air connectivity performed well.

The connectivity between ground and air was established — for the first time ever — through a mesh network of unmanned aircraft called Air-Launched Effects that were intended to serve as repeaters to extend connectivity beyond line of sight.

Some of the problems had to do with the conditions. “There were lots of days we couldn’t fly because of crosswinds,” Murray said. “I think just continuing to refine [the mesh network] and increasing — really not necessarily the range but the throughput capacity — is probably where we need to go.”

There were also tests that surpassed expectations. With some systems, it was expected that “swivel chair” methods would be needed to manually input information from one system into another. “We were able to actually automate machine to machine, which we weren’t expecting to be able to do,” Murray said.

Project Convergence was easily the Army’s — and perhaps the entire military’s — largest test of emerging AI capabilities to date. AI algorithms were used to speed up the sensor-to-shooter chain at every point. But perhaps the biggest star of the event was FIRES Synchronization to Optimize Responses in Multi-Domain Operations, or FIRESTORM.

“What is FIRESTORM? Simply put, it’s a computer brain that recommends the best shooter, updates the common operating picture with the current enemy situation and friendly situation, [and] admissions the effectors that we want to [use to] eradicate the enemy on the battlefield,” Coffman said.

Observers at Project Convergence were able to see FIRESTORM’s recommendation pop-ups in real time — often in the blink of an eye — allowing operators to rapidly review and approve the algorithm’s recommendations.

But the AI systems at play are still in development, and Army officials acknowledged they remain brittle.

While prepping for Project Convergence, the Army used more than 3.5 million images of opposing and friendly forces’ tanks and vehicles to build a database of enough images in different contexts to train the algorithms needed for the exercise. “Every image you get to train an algorithm just makes that algorithm better,” Murray said.

“Artificial intelligence is no different than a human being,” added McCarthy. “It needs a number of repetitions to be perfect. The difference is they’ll be faster and better because it’s a machine. But you still have to have hundreds if not thousands of these repetitions to make it perfect.

“And you might have seen the fourth rep. Come back when there’s 400.”

Cultural shift

Project Convergence pointed the Army in the direction it must go if it wants to shape a force for future conflict, but the effort also pushed the service toward a major cultural change.

“It’s OK to fail,” Murray said. “I’ve done some touchpoints with soldiers, and soldiers aren’t used to failing and it actually drives them crazy when you put a piece of immature technology in their hands that doesn’t work exactly like they expect it to work.

“That’s part of the culture change: It’s OK,” he said. “You’re learning, growing and making better decisions, investments, as you continue to mature this technology. I think this is absolutely the way forward.”

Speaking at C4ISRNET’s “Accelerating IT Modernization” panel Oct. 14 at the AUSA conference, IT officials laid out their modernization priorities and explained how new technology is changing their jobs.

Among the more tangible steps the service is taking are releasing a new Army data strategy, kicking off a series of 5G pilot programs to explore the best way to use the technology and rethinking the IT skills soldiers need.

Data strategy

With 5G capabilities and artificial intelligence applications on the horizon, the Army is trying to focus on ensuring its data is order. To use those emerging technologies, the Army is developing a data strategy. Col. Schawn Branch, 5G and Enterprise IT service project lead in the Army CIO/G6 office, said that strategy is going through the approval process at the senior level, but there’s no timetable yet for its release.

“We know it’s important and we know folks are asking for it,” Branch said.

The strategy, Branch said, will help the Army improve how it captures and uses data that is stored in disparate locations.

“You’re not really truly able to leverage those capabilities unless you have your data aligned properly,” he said.

5G pilot

The Army is also looking to conduct 5G pilot ,programs at 13 installations across the country as part of a partnership with the Pentagon and the other services. Eventually, Branch said, the list will be narrowed down.

“From industry, what we’re looking for you to [do is] come in and provide 5G capability and if it can enhance military application to enable to war fighter, then that’s what we’re looking at,” Branch said.

The pilots are expected to start later this fiscal year. The Army has identified several 5G use cases for the new technology, such as global asset and supply chain management, augmented reality, and how 5G can enable preparations for forward deployment, smart bases and smart ports.

Service leaders want to be on the forefront of developing and deploying emerging technology, especially as adversaries make technological gains.

“As we pivot to near-peer fights, technology is not going to be our advantage,” said Col. Shane Taylor, project manager for the tactical network at the Army’s Program Executive Office Command Control Communications-Tactical. “Our advantage is going to be the ability to inject technology faster than our peers.”

Workforce

Brig. Gen. Chris Eubank, chief of signal and the commandant of the Army Signal School in Fort Gordon, Georgia, said IT modernization must include the workforce.

“If we don’t start with the workforce, it’s not going to matter what kit or capability we deliver,” Eubank said.

He noted that the Signal School is shrinking the Signal Corps’ occupational skills from 17 to seven. The school is moving to a new training regiment that starts with a basic foundational class. The next course will be a basic “communicators course,” followed by functional training and individual training.

The purpose is to break down silos within the Army.

“We’re going to get out of the business of being stovepiped and get into the business of creating multifunctional, multi-discipline signal soldiers that can work across the IT environment solving problems for the war fighter,” Eubank said.

Spoiler alert: They might sound familiar to those following the problem over the past several years. Here’s a look at what still needs to be solved:

Moving from a platform-centric mindset

The military loves its tanks, planes and ships, but equally important is the ability to push the data collected by those platforms to each other in real time, Capt. Clayton Michaels, the special assistant to the associate director for operations at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said.

“We have to network our sensors better, our platforms better and, at this point, we are platform-centric, so I know in my own experience in the U.S. Navy we could probably do a better job of linking each platform together to the other ones in the battlespace and then getting that information out there,” he said.

The Defense Department recognizes that it can no longer continue to press forward with expensive acquisition programs with lengthy development timelines and field products that can’t network with each other, according to Mark Tapper, the Air Force’s special adviser to the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

“Everything we build has to be involved with a ground component, a maritime component, a sub-surface [component]. They all have to be interoperable,” he said.

Acquisitions and policies will need to change in order to harness the latest technologies in areas like networking, big data analytics and artificial intelligence, Ken Peterman, Viasat’s president of government systems, added.

“There has to be a cultural change and recognition that we need to move more toward an adopt, apply, deploy, evolve kind of a thing and leverage the enormous investment and technology trajectory that the private sector is on,” he said.

Industry doesn’t always feel listened to

There’s a lot of useful and innovative technology already out there, Peterman pointed out.

However, the Defense Department leadership doesn’t seem to be aware of that — in part, he acknowledged, because the private sector doesn’t make their technology road maps public due to competitive sensitivities.

“There has to be a more candid, transparent dialogue so you can see the art of the possible and how affordable it is,” he said.

Data security concerns

The possibility of getting hacked is just a reality of today’s world, and networking many different platforms together offers more opportunities for vulnerabilities.

“How do you protect the data? We’re not exactly sure. We’re looking at that at NGA,” Michaels said.

Peterman pointed out that data security is an area of concern both to the military and to the commercial sector, especially in terms of protecting banking and medical information, as well as intellectual property.

“I think we have enormous horsepower in this country that is yet untapped if we pull the public and private sectors together and recognize that we’re trying to solve problems that have a certain common thread.”

Craig Lawrence, program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, speaking Thursday at the annual C4ISRNET Conference, couldn’t offer many details on the project given it is still awaiting final signature.

What he did say was that the program would focus on helping develop “kill webs” for targets across all five domains of battle.

“I’d like to discover capability in any domain that exists,” he said of the effort. This could include real time or planning time and be done in a decentralized fashion to discover the best solution in a particular domain for a particular problem.

The military writ-large is moving toward some version of multidomain operations that would seamlessly integrate effects and capabilities through each domain of warfare. This is in contrast to approaching problems from a domain centric view — applying a land solution to a land problem — as opposed to applying a cyber solution to a land problem, for example.

Lawrence said a big push for him is trying to get his hands around what multidomain or crossdomain means, adding if the U.S. is serious about bringing a greater capability to bear on the adversary, the military needs to figure out how to plan and manage across domains to develop kill webs.