5 ways the Army will keep pace in cyber and electronic warfare

On the same subject

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  April 24, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  US Army faces uphill battle to fix aviation mishap crisis

  Fiscal 2023 marked the highest death rate for Army soldiers since the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, with a total of 14 dead across 10 accidents.

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  July 27, 2020 | International, Land

  Two Men & A Bot: Can AI Help Command A Tank?

  Instead of a traditional three-man crew, Brig. Gen. Coffman told Breaking Defense, “you have two humans with a virtual crew member, [sharing] the functions of gunning, driving, and commanding.” By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 27, 2020 at 7:00 AM WASHINGTON: Field tests and computer models have convinced the Army that future armored vehicles can fight with just two human crew, assisted by automation, instead of the traditional three or more, the service's armor modernization chief told me. That confidence drove the Army, in its draft Request For Proposals released on the 17th, to require a two-soldier crew for its future Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. The OMFV is scheduled to enter service in 2028 to replace the Reagan-era M2 Bradley, which has the traditional trio of commander, gunner, and driver. (Both vehicles can also carry infantry as passengers, and the Army envisions the OMFV being operated by remote control in some situations). The Army has already field-tested Bradleys modified to operate with a two-soldier crew instead of the usual three, said Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, the director of Army Futures Command's Cross Functional Team for Next Generation Combat Vehicles. “As we speak,” he told me in an interview last week, “we've got those Mission-Enabling Technology Demonstrators, or MET-D, actually maneuvering at Fort Carson, Colorado, as part of the Robotic Combat Vehicle test.” With the benefit of modern automation, Coffman said, those two-soldier crews have proven able to maneuver around obstacles, look out for threats, and engage targets — without being overwhelmed by too many simultaneous demands. “They're doing that both in simulation and real world at Carson right now,” Coffman told me. “You have two humans with a virtual crewmember that will remove cognitive load from the humans and allow the functions of gunning, and driving, and commanding the vehicle to be shared between humans and machines,” Coffman said. “We think that the technology has matured to the point where ...this third virtual crewmember will provide the situational awareness to allow our soldiers to fight effectively.” The defense contractors who would have to build the vehicle – even if a government team designs it – aren't so sure. “A two-man crew will be overwhelmed with decision making, no matter how much AI is added,” one industry source told me. A Persistent Dilemma For at least eight decades, combat vehicle designers have faced a dilemma. A smaller crew allows a smaller vehicle, one that's cheaper, lighter, and harder to hit – and if it is hit, puts fewer lives at risk. But battlefield experience since 1940 has shown that smaller crews are easily overwhelmed by the chaos of combat. Historically, an effective fighting vehicle required a driver solely focused on the path ahead, a gunner solely focused on hitting the current target, and a commander looking in all directions for the next target to attack, threat to avoid, or path to take. (Many vehicles added a dedicated ammunition handler and/or radio operator as well). A “virtual crewmember” could solve this dilemma — but will the technology truly be ready by the late 2020s? The Army actually tackled this question just last year and came to the opposite conclusion. You see, the draft Request For Proposals released last week is the Army's second attempt to launch the OMFV program. In March 2019, the Army issued its original RFP for an Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. In most respects, the 2019 RFP was much more demanding than last week's draft: It wanted the vehicle in service two years earlier, in 2026 instead of 2028, and it had such stringent requirements for weight and amor protection that no company managed to meet them, leading the Army to start over. But for all its ambition in other aspects, the 2019 RFP did not mandate a two-person crew; that's a new addition for the 2020 version. It's worth noting that just one company managed to deliver a prototype by the Army's original deadline in 2019: General Dynamics. They built their vehicle to operate with a crew of three – but with the option to go down to two as automation improved. At the same time, the Army started experimenting with Robotic Combat Vehicles that had no human crew aboard at all. The long-term goal is to have a single soldier oversee a whole wolfpack of RCVs, but the current proto-prototypes are operated by remote control, with a crew of two: a gunner/sensor operator and a driver. The Army has been impressed by how well these teleoperated RCVs have performed in field trials. If two soldiers can effectively operate a vehicle they're not even in, might two be enough to operate a manned vehicle as well? The other piece of the experimental RCV unit is the mothership, an M2 Bradley with its passenger cabin converted to hold the teleoperators and their workstations. These modified M2s, called MET-Ds, also operate with just two crewmembers, a gunner and a driver – without a separate commander – and, says Coffman, they've done so successfully in combat scenarios. The Army is not just adding automation to individual vehicles. It's seeking to create combined units of manned and unmanned war machines that share data on threats and targets over a battlefield network, allowing them to work together as a seamless tactical unit that's far more than the sum of its parts. “This [vehicle] will not fight alone, but as part of a platoon, a company, a battalion,” Coffman said. “The shared situational awareness across that formation will transform the way we fight.”

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  December 27, 2018 | International, Naval

  The US Navy’s surface fleet: Here’s what’s ahead in 2019

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. surface fleet has a big year in store for 2019, and we're going to start getting more details very soon on what the future has in store for surface warriors. But surface leadership has been dropping clues on where things are going. Here's a handy reference guide for heading into January's Surface Navy Association annual symposium and for what the fleet has up its sleeve for the coming months. Robot wars The Chief of Naval Operations' Surface Navy Director Rear Adm. Ron Boxall forecast what was on his mind at a recent training and simulation conference in Orlando. The focus for Boxall and the N96 shop will be to get more sensors and weapons into the battlespace, distributed and networked, so that a smaller number of larger warships can act as command and control for smaller units. “If you think about what we are trying to do with the surface force, we have large and small surface combatants that will [ultimately make up part of the 355-ship Navy] but we have no requirement for unmanned surface vessels right now, which I see as an absolutely critical part of distributed lethality, distributed maritime operations environment that we are moving into,” Boxall said. “Ultimately I need more nodes out there.” N96 is looking closely at what might be needed for a large unmanned surface vessel, much like the Sea Hunter drone developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I think these are what you need to go in the water and carry large things and be more places at less cost,” Boxall said. “So, in that nodal structure, we are looking at them becoming large sensors or large shooters, but we are still working out the requirement.” Developing unmanned vessels for military use was a key component of a recent agreement with NATO forged during the July summit. Future frigate Next year is the crucial year for FFG(X), the year when the Navy finalizes its requirements and puts the first hull out to bid for a 2020 detailed design and construction award. Look for news to creep out on this ship throughout the year but Boxall had some remarks on how it will fit into the fleet now in development. Boxall hinted that the planned 20 hulls may be a low-ball figure, and that he's looking to maybe keep the program going beyond that. “It will be a very capable ship, but it won't have a lot of capacity,” he said. “But it will be able to both sense and shoot and do command and control at a smaller level. It will be a much less expensive platform and I can have more of them.” Training Training is a major focus of Surface Navy boss Vice Adm. Richard Brown, and some ongoing efforts will start to bear fruit in 2019. Earlier in 2018, the Navy reprogrammed $24 million to build a Maritime Skills Training Program, which will be heavily reliant on simulators to bring together officer and enlisted watchstanders from both the bridge and the combat information center to train on equipment and work as a unit. “We've secured the funding for the maritime skills training centers, which is going to do two things: individual officer training through the [officer of the deck training],” Brown said earlier this year. “So that, in conjunction with building out the navigation, seamanship and ship-handling trainers in the fleet concentration areas, will give us integrated bridge and [combat information center] training at the high end. That's my No. 1 priority.” Those facilities will be ready for use by the waterfront in the 2021 time frame, Brown said. Upgrades to existing simulators are being rolled out this month. DDG-1000 Look for news on the future of DDG-1000. The first of the class, the Zumwalt, is wrapping up its combat systems installation in San Diego and will start the process of integrating the three-ship class into the fleet. We're going to find out more about its new mission – surface strike – and how the Navy plans to employ its behemoth new surface combatant. The Navy has pivoted away from its long odyssey to find a use for its advanced gun system, with requirements boss Vice Adm. William Merz saying in testimony in April that the Sisyphean task of getting a working gun on Zumwalt was holding the ship back. “Even at the high cost, we still weren't really getting what we had asked for,” he said. “So what we've elected to do is to separate the gun effort from the ship effort because we really got to the point where now we're holding up the ship.” Instead, efforts are going to focus on getting Zumwalt into the fleet and on the hunt for ships to kill. Large surface combatant Last up, the Large Surface Combatant should start getting some meat on its bones in 2019. Boxall and company are aiming to put the fleet on a course to buy its cruiser and destroyer replacement in 2023 or 2024, which means a request for information from industry could be in the near future. What we know is that, like the small surface combatant, the Navy wants commonality with other nodes in the network. That means a similar radar as on FFG(X), the same combat system and as much overlapping equipment as the fleet can manage to tamp down on compatibility issues and on how much specialized training sailors need to be on one platform or another. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/12/26/the-us-navys-surface-fleet-heres-whats-ahead-in-2019/