Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets from Strike Fighter Squadron 105 became the first squadron in the Navy to shoot off the AIM-9X infrared-seeking missile in combat.

The milestone came as the squadron, known as the “Gunslingers,” took out Houthi one-way-attack air drones targeting civilian merchant ships, according to the Navy.

The squadron also led the first strikes against Houthi facilities in Yemen in January. These missions allowed the squadron to launch an Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile, or AARGM, for the first time from an F/A-18E Super Hornet. The air-to-ground missile is used to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses.

The squadron also successfully employed the Joint Standoff Weapon-C Variant for the first time in combat, the Navy said. It is the Navy’s first air-to-ground network-enabled weapon that can be used against stationary land and moving maritime targets.

“Our families and friends that loved us, supported us, and sacrificed daily to enable our team to execute continuous combat operations are the true heroes,” Cmdr. Travis “Sweet T” Amerine, commanding officer of the Gunslingers, said in a Navy news release. “For nine months straight, the entire Gunslinger family, those deployed and those back home, banded together to fight evil and save innocent lives. I could not be more proud nor more humbled to have been a witness to them all.”

Additionally, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot from Strike Fighter Squadron 32 was piloted by the first American woman to engage and kill an air-to-air contact, taking down a Houthi air drone targeting civilian merchant vessels.

Other firsts for Carrier Air Wing 3 include Electronic Attack Squadron 130 becoming the first E/A-18G Growler squadron in the Navy to secure an air-to-air kill, as well as the first to fire off an Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile in combat.

“I can’t remember the last time the Navy had a more challenging deployment with a combination of multiple extensions, severely limited opportunities for R&R, and true combat,” Cmdr. Carl Ellsworth, the commanding officer of Electronic Attack Squadron 130, said in a Navy news release. “…not just for aviators, but the crew of the whole strike group as well, in the most kinetic action at sea since World War II.”

The crew of the Ike earned the Combat Action Ribbon – or the CAR – for their actions during the deployment to the Middle East. The award is for sailors and Marines who actively participated in ground or surface action, and has rarely been issued since the 1991 Gulf War.

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro also approved the Air Medal for those with the “Strike/Flight” designation for conducting sustained aerial operations in the region.

The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the Middle East this month to swap spots with the Ike and “to deter aggression, promote regional stability, and protect the free flow of commerce in the region,” according to U.S. Central Command.

The State Department notified Congress of its approval of the $23 billion F-16 sale to Turkey, along with a companion $8.6 billion sale of advanced F-35 fighter jets to Greece, late Friday. The move came just hours after Turkey deposited its “instrument of ratification” for Sweden’s accession to NATO with Washington, which is the repository for alliance documents and after several key members of Congress lifted their objections.

The sale to Turkey includes 40 new F-16s and equipment to modernize 79 of its existing F-16 fleet. The sale to Greece includes 40 F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and related equipment.

NATO ally Turkey has long sought to upgrade its F-16 fleet and had made its ratification of Sweden’s membership contingent on the approval of the sale of the new planes. The Biden administration had supported the sale, but several lawmakers had expressed objections due to human rights concerns.

Those objections, including from the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, have now been overcome, officials said.

Cardin said in statement Friday that he had still had concerns about Turkey’s rights record, but had agreed to the sale based on commitments Turkey has made to improve it. “I look forward to beginning this new chapter in our relationship with Turkey, expanding the NATO alliance, and working with our global allies in standing up to ongoing Russian aggression against its peaceful neighbors,” he said.

Turkey had delayed its approval of Sweden’s NATO membership for more than a year, ostensibly because it believed Sweden did not take Turkey’s national security concerns seriously enough, including its fight against Kurdish militants and other groups that Ankara considers to be security threats.

The delays had frustrated the U.S, and other NATO allies, almost all of whom had been swift to accept both Sweden and Finland into the alliance after the Nordic states dropped their longstanding military neutrality following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Sweden’s formal accession to NATO now depends on Hungary, which is the last remaining NATO ally not to have approved its membership. US and NATO officials have said they expect Hungary to act quickly, especially after Turkey’s decision.

Leaders such as Army Col. Jarrett Mathews, acquisition director of the SOCOM task force over the “hyper-enabled operator,” seek new tech to give even individuals the assets they need to see, sense, act and react to ever-changing conditions on the ground.

Mathews showed the audience here at the Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week not a bearded, muscled operator kicking in doors and shooting but a business suit-clad “operator” navigating the streets of a foreign nation, deciphering spoken language, signage and even graffiti to sus out threats while running their mission.

Prompted by an audience question, Mathews outlined a no-limits picture of what he’d love to put in that operator’s hands.

“I would like a fully-capable, human-machine teaming with an information system that had access to the whole of the Internet,” Mathews said.

The colonel isn’t delusional, he knows that technology isn’t here yet, but Mathews and his team are looking to industry to make it a reality.

“We want these operators to be super users of their environment,” Mathew said.

The concept went public nearly three years ago, Defense News sister publication C4ISRNET previously reported. Since then, the team that Mathew now leads has advanced the language processing capabilities of its voice-to-voice program and started work on translating text via smartphone photo capture and eventually through other devices.

The voice-to-voice program is currently deployed in two undisclosed theaters of operation, Mathews told the crowd. And they’re working now to add languages to the software.

The team has also begun development on an augmented reality piece for viewing the environment with layers of data.

And he’s got some proof that they’re on the right path. As part of their program, the team set out to create a secure capability that can operate without Internet access called “Voice to Voice Language Translation.” The translation allows the user to speak into a smartphone and the software will translate that speech into the desired language and “speak” it aloud.

The team took a calculated risk in trying to demonstrate the software earlier in the day following the morning keynote address. It was clunky, not exactly translating word for word, and required some tech support – a signal that more work is needed.

But Mathews later noted that work with the Stanford Research Institute has allowed base-level translation on smart devices disconnected from the Internet with a higher quality than Google Translate.

The next phase is the Visual Environment Translation, through which a camera can decipher text, even graffiti, which is still in its nascent stages.

Using augmented reality technology, the team also looks to get past tourist-like smartphone photographing, which can draw attention. Instead, they would embed these features into something more inconspicuous, such as a Google Glass-like device that a user could wear, Mathews said.

For that operator running in an austere area with little access, or unsecured access to cloud computing, Mathews and his staff are pushing the boundaries of “edge computing” through a combination of radio frequency sensors and secure video/imagery “pipelines” that piggyback on existing WiFi and Bluetooth networks.

Working as kind of a second brain for the user, Mathews office is developing an “automate the analyst” program. The program aims to help users have not only those voice and text options but feeds from mapping software, social media and other feeds to have a clear picture on what’s happening around them.

The goal is to have all of that without the ever-present hovering “eye-in-the-sky” drones that may not be an option on some of these very small footprint missions.

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, is a nearly $22 billion program that the Army is developing to bring night vision, thermal vision, tactical edge computing and the situational awareness of a fighter pilot down to the lowest-level infantry soldier. The device will likely be the most advanced single technology ever fielded exclusively to the close-combat, squad-level soldier in military history.

The Army will deliver 5,000 IVAS 1.0 versions and another 5,000 IVAS 1.1 versions this coming year, said Brig. Gen. Christopher Schneider, the Program Executive Office-Soldier commanding general. Previous budget reports indicate the Army will purchase 40,000 devices or more.

The combined 1.0 and 1.1 fielding is a delay from the previous first unit equipped planned date of September 2022, which was delayed from another previous initial fielding planned for late 2021. But the short-term holdup is critical to ensure soldier acceptance of the device, according to Army officials.

Schneider spoke with Army Times about the IVAS program recently, noting the new rollout plan will field the two existing versions and begin developing the IVAS 1.2 version in parallel with those first fieldlings. IVAS 1.2, which will have a new low-light sensor and hardware redesign, is scheduled to field in the fiscal year 2025.

“We don’t want to rush IVAS to the field until it’s ready,” Schneider said.

The Army will send 5,000 IVAS 1.0 devices to units in Training and Doctrine Command, such as the Maneuver Center of Excellence, for use in training, schoolhouses and experimentation.

The 5,000 IVAS 1.1 devices will go to not-yet-identified operational units and can be used in garrison, field training and on combat deployments. Units such as the 82nd Airborne Division, 75th Ranger Regiment and 101st Airborne Division often receive such technology first, due to their unique missions.

The 1.0 and 1.1 versions look similar from the outside. Both have night vision as good or better than most fielded systems. Both also have thermal sights in the same device, present only in one other goggle that’s had limited fielding to a select group of close combat forces, the Enhanced Night Vision Device-Binocular.

Both versions also allow for “passive targeting.” This lets users identify aiming points and targets without being seen by other night vision users.

“If we have to plan to fight a near peer threat, they’re going to be equipped with night vision, too. And if you use a laser, they see a laser too,” Schneider said.

With passive targeting, that’s not a concern.

“They have no idea you’re targeting them until a bullet hits them,” Schneider said.

The challenge is that the IVAS is expected to be more than a night vision goggle. It’s designed to provide mixed reality, information sharing, situational awareness tools and a host of other capabilities to the individual soldier.

“People think of IVAS as a night vision goggle,” Schneider said. But it’s more about learning “how to use the cloud at the tactical edge. How to train with the device, execute missions and mission planning.”

What the Army wants

IVAS is a standalone system that contains situational awareness tools in one package, beyond any of the Army’s current systems, including Nett Warrior, a long-running soldier-borne computer in a smartphone or tablet.

The device also works as a vehicle, ground or air integration tool for dismounted soldiers.

That’s part of ongoing work with soldiers integrating the IVAS with helicopters, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Stryker, Brig. Gen. Larry Burris, Cross Functional Team-Soldier Lethality director and Infantry School commandant told Army Times recently.

Soldiers using wireless routers in the Bradley were able to see the same view as the vehicle commander, driver or gunner through their optics, Burris said.

But the most success so far, he added, has come with the Stryker.

“You look around and it’s as if there’s no armor on the vehicle,” Burris said, referencing what it’s like to wear the device from the point of view of vehicle occupants. “I turn my head to the right and it automatically detects the camera that’s off the right side of the vehicle.”

And in all platforms, soldiers passed data and used voice communications with the device, he added.

That work has involved PEO-Ground Systems and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command.

With the current fielding plan, Burris expects to see novel applications and get more feedback from TRADOC and operational units as they use the device.

Mixed reality is a kind of augmented reality common now in gaming devices that places simulated objects, terrain or characters overlaid on the real world. It gives soldiers a tool only available now in laboratories or training facilities.

That feature can be used on the fly, in a barracks parking lot, on a training range or hours before an actual mission for rehearsal.

“We can pipe in ISR feeds into the device, we can scan areas with the device and build 3D models,” Schneider said.

The simulation tech is promising but still needs some work. Schneider said indoor facilities are no problem for scanning, mapping and rehearsals. But outdoor locations challenge the current technology.

If a soldier scans an area, then a car moves, or the sun shifts and shadows change, it can alter a soldier’s view. But, Schneider said, once resolved, a soldier will be able to see a computer-generated avatar that can interact with the real world. That provides a realistic training option that previously required human role players.

Technology limits

But the Army still has some technical hurdles to overcome.

Current tech limitations create challenges to having both a digital low-light sensor and thermal sight in the same device with the level of data fusion, integration and information-sharing that the Army wants.

The legacy technology, known as I2, has been developed over nearly 70 years and uses an analog, tube-based design. That is an extremely capable technology for providing night vision, Schneider said.

“The current I2 systems, high resolution, works really well, but it doesn’t allow us to share or leverage what a soldier sees,” Schneider said. “You can’t employ computer vision software, you can’t employ (Artificial Intelligence) with the analog solution today.”

For example, thermal sights cannot see through glass, but low-light sensors can. Meanwhile, low-light sensors can’t see through dust, smoke or other obscurants, but thermals can. By combining the two, users get the best of both.

After 70 years of fine tuning, the I2 technology has nearly reached its optimum performance levels, Schneider said.

The tradeoff is that the existing low-light sensor and camera works on digital technology. That provides a good night vision capability, to a point. But the existing camera will drop off under dark, less than quarter-moon conditions. The legacy tech can work at those levels, but it does degrade. At a certain point, the digital tech basically stops working.

“We’re trying to replace that technology with something that’s new, we think we’ve finally found a digital low-light sensor that will do it,” Schneider said.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville restated his own commitment to the program and its eventual use, providing some context from his own career as a helicopter pilot, during remarks at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Sept. 13.

“If you flew back when I was flying with night vision goggles in ‘81 they were big, full-face goggles and how we flew with them, I don’t know,” McConville said. “We had weights in the back of our head. It was not very smart, but we weren’t very smart then, we just did it.”

The days of pushing out hard-to-use new tech are no longer the norm, the chief said.

Program delays

The Army planned to have the device to soldiers in 2021, but problems with software reliability, display warping and moisture issues paused the plan. PEO Soldier conducted additional tests through most of the past year.

The Army pushed back release for additional testing, as well as some hardware and software fixes. Those included reducing the originally ambitious field of view to resolve image distortion problems. After further testing and funding approvals, the device release has again been pushed, now to 2023 with versions 1.0 and 1.1.

Most existing night vision goggles have about a 40-degree field of view, meaning you can see about a 40-degree “wedge” in front of the goggle. That does not cover a user’s peripheral vision.

IVAS and Microsoft developers of the HoloLens, the commercial device the IVAS started with, initially sought to double that to an 80-degree field of view.

But image distortion required a scale back to 70 degrees, still nearly twice the existing range, officials previously told Army Times.

A Department of Defense Inspector General’s audit of the IVAS program, released earlier this year, directed developers to seek more soldier input to avoid, “wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.”

Despite dozens of soldier touch points, the report noted, the Army hadn’t determined how it would measure soldier acceptance of the device.

PEO Soldier spokesman David Patterson told Army Times shortly after the IG report released that officials recognized the importance of soldier acceptance of the goggle, but it was not the only factor.

Soldier feedback was incorporated into numerous design decisions and updates in the prototyping process, Patterson said.

The published IG audit included soldier feedback, but those portions were redacted from the publicly released version.

A test report planned for completion in October could determine the next round of funding. Members of Congress in both chamber’s appropriation committees recommended cuts to the program following previous delays.

The next funding installment in the current plan would be for more than $424 million.

Another report on the most recent reliability fixes and anticipated changes is due in October, officials said.

Changes

The IVAS 1.2 version will see a “form factor” redesign. The current systems use straps to fix it to the user’s face and over the helmet, almost like ski goggles, 1.2 will be helmet mounted, like currently fielded night vision devices.

A cable that in versions 1.0 and 1.1 runs down the front of the user and connects to batteries will be moved to the rear of the helmet off the user’s chest and shoulder. The 1.2 version will also be slimmer and lighter.

The entire IVAS 1.0 system, excluding the radio, is about 3.4 pounds. Of that, 2.4 pounds is on the soldier’s head.

In version 1.2, developers seek to cut that total weight to 2.85 pounds or less, same or better than the ENVG-B, officials said.

Humidity control and moisture problems noted in last year’s review have been fixed for IVAS 1.0 and beyond.

All three versions work with the Family of Weapons Sights-Individual and Rapid Target Acquisition software. FWS-I was included in the ENVG-B fielding and allows users to wirelessly link their goggle to their rifle optic to view targets without shouldering the weapon.

RTA uses software to cue a target within the optic or goggle view, much like what vehicle-mounted soldier systems do. The combination also gives soldiers a “picture-in-picture” view option that lets them see the terrain but also a smaller version of the optic view.

The current ENVG-B lowlight sensor does outperform the IVAS 1.0 lowlight sensor. But an improved sensor is planned for both 1.1 and 1.2 versions, officials said.

A lowlight sensor being examined for 1.1 already exceeds all other individual night vision optics, except for the ENVG-B.

Both Schneider and his predecessor at PEO-Soldier, Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, repeatedly acknowledged unplanned delays in the program but defended some of those with the ambitious strides the organization is taking on the edges of existing technology to merge all the capabilities into one individual-soldier-borne device.

Despite those challenges, Schneider stressed in his interview with Army Times that the fielded IVAS devices need to work as advertised to achieve soldier acceptance.

“This plan allows that. We are listening, we’re going to fix the camera and we’re going to get the form factor right. We have to get this right for soldier adoption,” Schneider said. “And we’ve got to maintain trust with them that we’re doing the right thing. But we’ve also got to push, push the limits.”

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, is a nearly $22 billion program that the Army is developing to bring night vision, thermal vision, tactical edge computing and the situational awareness of a fighter pilot down to the lowest-level infantry soldier. The device will likely be the most advanced single technology ever fielded exclusively to the close-combat, squad-level soldier in military history.

The Army will deliver 5,000 IVAS 1.0 versions and another 5,000 IVAS 1.1 versions this coming year, said Brig. Gen. Christopher Schneider, the Program Executive Office-Soldier commanding general. Previous budget reports indicate the Army will purchase 40,000 devices or more.

The combined 1.0 and 1.1 fielding is a delay from the previous first unit equipped planned date of September 2022, which was delayed from another previous initial fielding planned for late 2021. But the short-term holdup is critical to ensure soldier acceptance of the device, according to Army officials.

Schneider spoke with Army Times about the IVAS program recently, noting the new rollout plan will field the two existing versions and begin developing the IVAS 1.2 version in parallel with those first fieldlings. IVAS 1.2, which will have a new low-light sensor and hardware redesign, is scheduled to field in the fiscal year 2025.

“We don’t want to rush IVAS to the field until it’s ready,” Schneider said.

The Army will send 5,000 IVAS 1.0 devices to units in Training and Doctrine Command, such as the Maneuver Center of Excellence, for use in training, schoolhouses and experimentation.

The 5,000 IVAS 1.1 devices will go to not-yet-identified operational units and can be used in garrison, field training and on combat deployments. Units such as the 82nd Airborne Division, 75th Ranger Regiment and 101st Airborne Division often receive such technology first, due to their unique missions.

The 1.0 and 1.1 versions look similar from the outside. Both have night vision as good or better than most fielded systems. Both also have thermal sights in the same device, present only in one other goggle that’s had limited fielding to a select group of close combat forces, the Enhanced Night Vision Device-Binocular.

Both versions also allow for “passive targeting.” This lets users identify aiming points and targets without being seen by other night vision users.

“If we have to plan to fight a near peer threat, they’re going to be equipped with night vision, too. And if you use a laser, they see a laser too,” Schneider said.

With passive targeting, that’s not a concern.

“They have no idea you’re targeting them until a bullet hits them,” Schneider said.

The challenge is that the IVAS is expected to be more than a night vision goggle. It’s designed to provide mixed reality, information sharing, situational awareness tools and a host of other capabilities to the individual soldier.

“People think of IVAS as a night vision goggle,” Schneider said. But it’s more about learning “how to use the cloud at the tactical edge. How to train with the device, execute missions and mission planning.”

What the Army wants

IVAS is a standalone system that contains situational awareness tools in one package, beyond any of the Army’s current systems, including Nett Warrior, a long-running soldier-borne computer in a smartphone or tablet.

The device also works as a vehicle, ground or air integration tool for dismounted soldiers.

That’s part of ongoing work with soldiers integrating the IVAS with helicopters, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Stryker, Brig. Gen. Larry Burris, Cross Functional Team-Soldier Lethality director and Infantry School commandant told Army Times recently.

Soldiers using wireless routers in the Bradley were able to see the same view as the vehicle commander, driver or gunner through their optics, Burris said.

But the most success so far, he added, has come with the Stryker.

“You look around and it’s as if there’s no armor on the vehicle,” Burris said, referencing what it’s like to wear the device from the point of view of vehicle occupants. “I turn my head to the right and it automatically detects the camera that’s off the right side of the vehicle.”

And in all platforms, soldiers passed data and used voice communications with the device, he added.

That work has involved PEO-Ground Systems and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command.

With the current fielding plan, Burris expects to see novel applications and get more feedback from TRADOC and operational units as they use the device.

Mixed reality is a kind of augmented reality common now in gaming devices that places simulated objects, terrain or characters overlaid on the real world. It gives soldiers a tool only available now in laboratories or training facilities.

That feature can be used on the fly, in a barracks parking lot, on a training range or hours before an actual mission for rehearsal.

“We can pipe in ISR feeds into the device, we can scan areas with the device and build 3D models,” Schneider said.

The simulation tech is promising but still needs some work. Schneider said indoor facilities are no problem for scanning, mapping and rehearsals. But outdoor locations challenge the current technology.

If a soldier scans an area, then a car moves, or the sun shifts and shadows change, it can alter a soldier’s view. But, Schneider said, once resolved, a soldier will be able to see a computer-generated avatar that can interact with the real world. That provides a realistic training option that previously required human role players.

Technology limits

But the Army still has some technical hurdles to overcome.

Current tech limitations create challenges to having both a digital low-light sensor and thermal sight in the same device with the level of data fusion, integration and information-sharing that the Army wants.

The legacy technology, known as I2, has been developed over nearly 70 years and uses an analog, tube-based design. That is an extremely capable technology for providing night vision, Schneider said.

“The current I2 systems, high resolution, works really well, but it doesn’t allow us to share or leverage what a soldier sees,” Schneider said. “You can’t employ computer vision software, you can’t employ (Artificial Intelligence) with the analog solution today.”

For example, thermal sights cannot see through glass, but low-light sensors can. Meanwhile, low-light sensors can’t see through dust, smoke or other obscurants, but thermals can. By combining the two, users get the best of both.

After 70 years of fine tuning, the I2 technology has nearly reached its optimum performance levels, Schneider said.

The tradeoff is that the existing low-light sensor and camera works on digital technology. That provides a good night vision capability, to a point. But the existing camera will drop off under dark, less than quarter-moon conditions. The legacy tech can work at those levels, but it does degrade. At a certain point, the digital tech basically stops working.

“We’re trying to replace that technology with something that’s new, we think we’ve finally found a digital low-light sensor that will do it,” Schneider said.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville restated his own commitment to the program and its eventual use, providing some context from his own career as a helicopter pilot, during remarks at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Sept. 13.

“If you flew back when I was flying with night vision goggles in ‘81 they were big, full-face goggles and how we flew with them, I don’t know,” McConville said. “We had weights in the back of our head. It was not very smart, but we weren’t very smart then, we just did it.”

The days of pushing out hard-to-use new tech are no longer the norm, the chief said.

Program delays

The Army planned to have the device to soldiers in 2021, but problems with software reliability, display warping and moisture issues paused the plan. PEO Soldier conducted additional tests through most of the past year.

The Army pushed back release for additional testing, as well as some hardware and software fixes. Those included reducing the originally ambitious field of view to resolve image distortion problems. After further testing and funding approvals, the device release has again been pushed, now to 2023 with versions 1.0 and 1.1.

Most existing night vision goggles have about a 40-degree field of view, meaning you can see about a 40-degree “wedge” in front of the goggle. That does not cover a user’s peripheral vision.

IVAS and Microsoft developers of the HoloLens, the commercial device the IVAS started with, initially sought to double that to an 80-degree field of view.

But image distortion required a scale back to 70 degrees, still nearly twice the existing range, officials previously told Army Times.

A Department of Defense Inspector General’s audit of the IVAS program, released earlier this year, directed developers to seek more soldier input to avoid, “wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.”

Despite dozens of soldier touch points, the report noted, the Army hadn’t determined how it would measure soldier acceptance of the device.

PEO Soldier spokesman David Patterson told Army Times shortly after the IG report released that officials recognized the importance of soldier acceptance of the goggle, but it was not the only factor.

Soldier feedback was incorporated into numerous design decisions and updates in the prototyping process, Patterson said.

The published IG audit included soldier feedback, but those portions were redacted from the publicly released version.

A test report planned for completion in October could determine the next round of funding. Members of Congress in both chamber’s appropriation committees recommended cuts to the program following previous delays.

The next funding installment in the current plan would be for more than $424 million.

Another report on the most recent reliability fixes and anticipated changes is due in October, officials said.

Changes

The IVAS 1.2 version will see a “form factor” redesign. The current systems use straps to fix it to the user’s face and over the helmet, almost like ski goggles, 1.2 will be helmet mounted, like currently fielded night vision devices.

A cable that in versions 1.0 and 1.1 runs down the front of the user and connects to batteries will be moved to the rear of the helmet off the user’s chest and shoulder. The 1.2 version will also be slimmer and lighter.

The entire IVAS 1.0 system, excluding the radio, is about 3.4 pounds. Of that, 2.4 pounds is on the soldier’s head.

In version 1.2, developers seek to cut that total weight to 2.85 pounds or less, same or better than the ENVG-B, officials said.

Humidity control and moisture problems noted in last year’s review have been fixed for IVAS 1.0 and beyond.

All three versions work with the Family of Weapons Sights-Individual and Rapid Target Acquisition software. FWS-I was included in the ENVG-B fielding and allows users to wirelessly link their goggle to their rifle optic to view targets without shouldering the weapon.

RTA uses software to cue a target within the optic or goggle view, much like what vehicle-mounted soldier systems do. The combination also gives soldiers a “picture-in-picture” view option that lets them see the terrain but also a smaller version of the optic view.

The current ENVG-B lowlight sensor does outperform the IVAS 1.0 lowlight sensor. But an improved sensor is planned for both 1.1 and 1.2 versions, officials said.

A lowlight sensor being examined for 1.1 already exceeds all other individual night vision optics, except for the ENVG-B.

Both Schneider and his predecessor at PEO-Soldier, Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, repeatedly acknowledged unplanned delays in the program but defended some of those with the ambitious strides the organization is taking on the edges of existing technology to merge all the capabilities into one individual-soldier-borne device.

Despite those challenges, Schneider stressed in his interview with Army Times that the fielded IVAS devices need to work as advertised to achieve soldier acceptance.

“This plan allows that. We are listening, we’re going to fix the camera and we’re going to get the form factor right. We have to get this right for soldier adoption,” Schneider said. “And we’ve got to maintain trust with them that we’re doing the right thing. But we’ve also got to push, push the limits.”

The committee’s version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, released June 23, also includes other several other provisions designed to give the department increased insight into the cyber hygiene of its contractors.

For example, the legislation would direct the Secretary of Defense to establish a threat intelligence program “to share threat intelligence with, and obtain threat intelligence from, the defense industrial base.” This program would be required to include a mechanism for developing shared and real-time insight into the threat environment, as well as a “joint, collaborative, and co-located analytics.”

The program would also direct the DoD to invest in technology to advance automated threat detection and analysis capabilities for defense contractors.

The program proposed in the Senate NDAA stems from a similar recommendation made by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s final report, a congressionally mandated document that suggested a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. cyber strategy. That group recommended the DoD force contractors to participate in a threat intelligence sharing program.

“The program’s ideal end state is to leverage U.S. government intelligence collection to create a better understanding of adversaries’ intelligence collection requirements,” the report read. “This action would help DoD and the intelligence community anticipate where adversaries will seek to collect against DIB targets, and then communicate that information to DIB network owners and operators so that they can proactively defend against impending adversary activities.”

Under the Senate bill, participation in the program would be based on cybersecurity levels assigned to contractors under the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification initiative, a new program pushing new cybersecurity requirements on contractors. To increase the participation in the program, the DoD would also have to “prioritize” available funding and support to help affect organizations participate.

The department would be required to produce a report on the program by March 2022.

The Senate bill also included language that would direct the DoD’s principal cyber adviser to develop a plan to deploy commercial-off-the-shelf sensors to DIB networks to monitor the cybersecurity of their public-facing websites by February 2021. In addition, the bill directs the department to assess the feasibility of threat hunting on DIB networks by December 2021.

The House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on intelligence and emerging threats and capabilities released draft legislation June 21 that includes several provisions governing the DoD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, which is responsible for the Pentagon’s enterprise IT efforts, cyber talent management and several other modernization efforts.

Here’s a roundup of what the subcommittee wants:

Cyber excepted service

Under the bill, the DoD CIO’s office would have to submit a report to the committee detailing its use of the Cyber Excepted Service personnel management system. That system is supposed to be a critical tool for Pentagon leaders to recruit and retain civilian cyber personnel.

In the fiscal year 2020 version of the National Defense Authorization Act, the committee was concern at the department’s slow implementation of the CES system. In this year’s draft bill, the subcommittee said it is “encouraged” by the progress the department has made implementing the system and “expects to be kept informed on further maturation and implementation of CES hiring authorities.”

Cyber workforce

The House subcommittee bill would direct the DoD CIO’s office to “study and expand” upon a National Security Agency program that allow employees to use up to 140 hours of paid time off to work on NSA-sponsored cyber education efforts in local communities.

“This would explicitly authorize select Department of Defense civilians who are part of the Cyber Excepted Service to utilize paid time toward wider national efforts aimed at addressing the cyber workforce shortage,” the bill summary reads.

The DoD, like most federal agencies and companies around the country, struggle to attract and retain cyber talent.

The bill also would direct the DoD’s CIO shop to produce a report about how two NSA programs to develop cyber talent, GenCyber and its its Centers for Academic Excellence program, can be better “integrated and harmonized.” The NSA and National Science Foundation sponsor cyber camps for K-12 students through GenCyber, while the Centers for Academic Excellence are colleges across the country whose cyber curriculum are NSA-accredited and provide a talent pipeline to the agency.

IT asset management and inventory

The committee calls on the DoD CIO to work with the CIOs of the military services to create standardized processes for identifying duplicative or redundant software, software licenses and hardware. The bill also directs the CIO shops to collaborate to establish a process for identifying and cataloging usage information for hardware and software.

“The committee believes the Department would benefit from an established process for auditing software and hardware inventories,” the summary states. “The lack of a single policy framework hinders the capacity of the Department to discover license duplication and the Department is at risk of wasting valuable resources on redundant or underutilized hardware and software.”

The CIOs would also have to work to create a process to identify the cost savings associated with all those efforts. The committee noted that the private sector has already solved several of the challenges through automated tools in commercial industry. The department would have to brief the committee in September 2021 on the defined processes.

Implementing of the 21st Century IDEA Act

The draft legislation would also direct the DoD CIO’s office to inform the committee of its implementation of the 21st Century IDEA Act, a law that directs federal agencies to modernize websites and increase use of digital forms and tools.

“The committee believes that embracing the requirements of 21st Century IDEA would have a significant positive impact on the Department’s mission delivery and customer experience,” the bill summary reads.

The report would have to include the department and unified commands’ plans to meet a December 2020 deadline for modernizing online forms, identify a designee to lead 21st Century IDEA Act efforts and lay out efforts to budget for and comply with deadlines the DoD missed.

But as part of that work, the Department of Defense needs to carefully implement checks and balances into the development process, experts urged June 16.

“Fundamentally I would say there’s a requirement … that there’s going to be a mixture of measures taken to ensure the governability of the system from the first stage of the design of the system all the way up through the operations of the system in a combat scenario,” said Greg Allen, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s chief of strategy and communications at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, at the Defense One Tech Summit June 16.

The JAIC is working on several lethality projects through its new joint warfighting initiative, boosted by a new contract award to Booz Allen potentially worth $800 million.

“With this new contract vehicle, we have the potential to do even more this next year than we did in the past,” Allen said.

Meanwhile, the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force is working on an advanced threat recognition project. DARPA is exploring complementing AI systems that would identify available combat support assets and quickly plan their route to the area.

Throughout all of the development work, experts from the military and from academia stressed that human involvement and experimentation was critical to ensuring that artificial intelligence assets are trustworthy. The department has released a document of five artificial intelligence ethical principles, but the challenge remains implementing those principles into projects across a department with disparate services working on separate artificial intelligence projects.

“We want safe, reliable and robust systems deployed to our warfighters,” said Heather Roff, senior research analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. “We want to be able to trust those systems. We want to have some sort of measure of predictability even if those systems act unpredictably.”

Brig. Gen. Matt Easley, director of the artificial intelligence task force at Army Futures Command, said the service is grappling with those exact challenges, trying to understand how the service can insert “checks and balances” as it trains systems and soldiers.

Easley added that the unmanned systems under development by the Army will have to be adaptable to different environments, such as an urban or desert scenarios. In order to ensure that the systems and soldiers are ready for those scenarios, the Army has to complete a series of tests, just like the autonomous vehicle industry.

“We don’t think these systems are going to be 100 percent capable right out of the box,” Easley said on the webinar. “If you look at a lot of the evolution of the self-driving cars throughout our society today, they’re doing a lot of experimentation. They’re doing lots of testing, lots of learning every day. We in the Army have to learn how to go from doing one to two to three vehicle experiments to have many experiments going on every day across all our camp posts and stations.”

Increasingly autonomous systems also mean that there needs to a cultural shift in among all levels of military personnel who will need to better understand how artificial intelligence is used. Roff said that operators, commanders and judge advocate generals will need to better understand how systems are supposed “to ensure that the human responsibility and governability is there.”

“We need to make sure that we have training, tactics, procedures, as well as policies, ensuring where we know the human decision maker is,” Roff said.

“As our country reopens, a large portion of our warfighters will still telework and … is going to be increasingly normal, normalized and new,” said Vice Adm. T.J. White, commander of the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command. He adding that “we’re going to be spending some time thinking about the ongoing and likely second wave of the COVID infections.”

The telework environment has continued as some states ease coronavirus-related restrictions while others begin to see spikes. But already, several three-star officers from across the services said June 11 they are working to identify potential problems in case a second wave of COVID-19 infections hits later this year.

Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which manages several Department of Defense networks, said that a potential second wave of COVID-19 infections would force DISA to continue to operate virtually.

“We’ve already been thinking about what’s required” if there’s a second wave, Norton said on a Joint Service Academy Cybersecurity Conference webinar. “As we’ve been looking at all of the choke points, we continue to look at what is the next choke point. That’s why I say to industry: we need you to be telling us what are your next choke points? What needs to happen? And we continue to go out to all of our components to [ask] what are your next mission requirements in order to enable even more people to telework.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, DISA rushed to get employees mobile technology such as laptops and cell phones, while turning to industry to solve security challenges. In preparation for the second wave, Norton urged industry to anticipate, develop, implement and anticipate “choke points” in the future. She added “this is going to happen again, it will certainly happen if we have a second wave that’s even worse than this one.”

In the early days of the coronavirus, the Defense Department’s CIO office held daily coronavirus meetings with top IT officials from the services in order to manage the IT response as workers headed home. The Pentagon rolled out its Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, a Microsoft Teams environment for remote work. According to Lt. Col. Robert Carver, DoD spokesperson, the CVR environment now has more than 850,000 active users. The military services expanded network capacity, upgraded infrastructure to increase bandwidth and expand virtual private networks.

“This model that we would never have tried [has] now been proven to work,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien, deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Cyber Effects Operations. “We’re going to become more comfortable with it and our workforce is going to come to expect it.”

Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, Army CIO/G-6, said June 11 that when his team was developing its response plan to the increase in remote capacity, they were careful to build in “as much flexibility to scale as we possibly could” to respond to a changing environment, including a second wave of the virus.

“We don’t know what the next two weeks hold, let alone the next six months of this,” Crawford said.

As of April, the Army has 800,000 remote users on DoD networks and expanded its network capacity 400 percent. According to Crawford, the Army workforce’s needs during telework demonstrated the importance for mobility and enterprise collaboration tools. The service is nearing 400,000 users on its Commercial Virtual Remote Environment.

Because of the duration of telework and the implementation of tools to adjust to it, “we’re at a point where we can’t go back,” Crawford said.

“Our users have seen the invention of the cigarette lighter so we can’t ask them to continue to rub sticks together,” he said.

In a call with reporters June 12, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, the current CIO/G-6, said artificial intelligence, 5G and cloud computing made the original structure of the office — set up nearly two decades ago — outdated.

It was “time to reassess and revisit some of the assumptions that went into forming the organization and are all of those assumptions still true,” Crawford said. “I would argue …. many of those assumptions have been overcome by the significant advancements in technology.”

The service will now have a dedicated chief information officer and a separate deputy chief of staff of the G-6. According to a June 11 announcement from the Army, the CIO position will serve as the “principal advisor” to the secretary of the army “on information resource management, information technology, and their effects on warfighting capabilities.”

The deputy chief of staff for the G-6, a position that will be filled by a three-star general, will focus on network communication issues and their effects on warfighting capabilities, as well as implement the Army CIO’s policies. The G-6 will report to the Army Chief of Staff and serve in an advisory role on the enterprise network.

The reorganization will take place by Aug. 31.

Crawford, who is scheduled to leave his role in August, said that the decision on the next CIO of the Army is an “ongoing process” underway by top Army officials with a decision that will “likely” be made before Aug. 31.

“Given the reliance on technology, this recognition of the strategic importance of both the CIO and the G-6 is going to be critical in that move from the industrial age to the information age,” Crawford said.