January 4, 2019 | International, Land, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau
Europe's increasingly contested environments have required increasingly complex electronic warfare planning tools. Vehicles, however, can't house the power of command posts, so the Army is adapting an existing system for the tactical edge.
The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, is a command-and-control planning capability that allows commanders and soldiers to visualize on a screen the effects of electronic warfare in the field. As part of efforts to provide soldiers additional capabilities for EWPMT ahead of the program's scheduled add-ons — an effort dubbed Raven Claw — the Army received feedback that troops at the vehicle or platform level don't need the full application required at command posts.
This feedback coincided with other observations from the Raven Claw deployment, which officials said were mixed.
“It does what it's supposed to do, but it requires a lot of computing capacity and also it requires a lot of inputs from the [electronic warfare officers] right now,” Col. Mark Dotson, the Army's capability manager for electronic warfare, told C4ISRNET in a November interview.
In response, a new effort called Raven Feather “will address both processing consumption and critical EW tasks required at the vehicle/platform level,” Lt. Col. Jason Marshall, product manager for electronic warfare integration at Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told C4ISRNET in response to written questions. “Raven Feather will provide a more tactically focused Graphical User Interface as part of the EWPMT Raven Claw system mounted in the vehicle or loaded into the Mounted Family of Computer Systems (MFoCS).”
Dotson added that the Army is eyeing lighter versions of the capability that could be available for lower echelons that may not need as much modeling and simulation.
“We're looking at ways to tailor it specifically to the echelon, and then that will help us with the platform we need to put it on,” he said. The modeling and simulation might be important at the staff officer level, he added, but he questioned whether that computing power is needed at the micro-tactical level.
December 15, 2022 | International, C4ISR
Work under this new program award will be performed at secure Kratos engineering and manufacturing facilities
December 17, 2023 | International, Aerospace
The Block 4 upgrades, which are intended to bring greater weapons capabilities and other features, are facing hardware maturity and software issues.
April 20, 2018 | International, C4ISR, Security
By: Brandon Knapp Artificially intelligent systems must be able to explain themselves to operators if they are to be trusted, according to an expert from the Defense Advanced Research Agency, who voiced concern that methods used by current AI systems are often masked by mysterious algorithms. “A lot of the machine learning algorithms we're using today, I would tell you ‘good luck,” Fred Kennedy, the director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office during a panel at Navy League's Sea-Air-Space on April 10. “We have no idea why they know the difference between a cat and a baboon.” “If you start diving down into the neural net that's controlling it,” Kennedy continued, “you quickly discover that the features these algorithms are picking out have very little to do with how humans identify things.” Kennedy's comments were in response to Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Unmanned Systems Frank Kelley, who described the leap of faith operators must make when dealing with artificially intelligent systems. “You're throwing a master switch on and just praying to God that [Naval Research Laboratory] and John's Hopkins knew what the hell that they were doing,” Kelley said of the process. The key to building trust, according to Kennedy, lies with the machines. “The system has to tell us what it's thinking,” Dr. Kennedy said. “That's where the trust gets built. That's how we start to use and understand them.” DARPA's Explainable Artificial Intelligence program seeks to teach AI how to do just that. The program envisions systems that will have the ability to explain the rationale behind their decisions, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and describe how they will behave in the future. Such capabilities are designed to improve teamwork between man and machine by encouraging warfighters to trust artificially intelligent systems. “It's always going to be about human-unmanned teaming,” said Kennedy. “There is no doubt about that.” https://www.defensenews.com/home/2018/04/10/darpa-official-to-build-trust-in-ai-machines-must-explain-themselves/