29 avril 2024 | International, Sécurité
14 septembre 2020 | International, C4ISR
How does the Pentagon’s AI center plan to give the military a battlefield advantage?
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is working on tools to help in joint, all-domain operations as department leaders seek to use data to gain an advantage on the battlefield.
This year, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center kicked off its joint war-fighting initiative, under which it is developing algorithms to provide armed services and combatant commands with AI tools to accelerate decision-making.
Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the JAIC, said the center, for example, is “heavily” involved in the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, the service's primary lever to enable the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. The system underwent a major test last week.
The center is “specifically focused” on working to harness AI to link together systems involved in the intelligence-gathering phase to the operations and effects piece of all-domain operations, Mulchandani added.
“It's how do we actually connect these platforms together end to end to build sort of a system that allows a commander to actually have that level of both visibility on the intel side but able to action it on the other side,” Mulchandani said on a call with reporters Thursday.
The JAIC is also working on an operations cognitive assistant tool to support commanders and “drive faster and more efficient decision-making through AI-enabled predictive analytics,” Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said Thursday at the DoD AI Symposium.
“Our goal is to nest these capabilities under the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept ... to provide a more cohesive and synchronized operational framework for the joint force,” Deasy said.
Earlier in the summer, a JAIC official said the war-fighting team was trying to aim a laser on an enemy vehicle to inflict damage.
But to enable all these tools, one thing is paramount: data.
The DoD CIO's office is set to release its data strategy later this year, with the department's new chief data officer, Dave Spirk, saying at the symposium that the he worked to reorient a draft of the strategy to ensure the use of data to enable joint war fighting is the top priority.
“We're in a place now where we want to put joint war fighting at the top of the pile of things we're working on,” Spirk said at the symposium Sept. 9.
Deasy also emphasized the importance of data in war fighting during a session at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference that same day.
“When we do the exercises, the experiments and things maybe don't go right — I can guarantee you what they're going to write down on the whiteboard at the end of that is ‘data.' Did we have the right data today? Why couldn't we connect those data across our weapons systems, our various assets?” Deasy said.
Critical to the development of artificial intelligence are adequate data storage and development platforms. The JAIC recently awarded a contract worth more than $100 million to Deloitte for the development of the Joint Common Foundation platform, an enterprisewide, cloud-based platform that the center will use to develop AI tools.
Meanwhile, DoD components such as the JAIC are also awaiting the deployment of the DoD's embattled enterprise cloud, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Department officials have continuously pointed to the JEDI cloud as a critical piece of the JAIC's ability to develop artificial intelligence, as the new technology it is expected to store 80 percent of DoD systems across classification levels and provide massive amounts of data.
Deasy said Sept. 9 that JADC2 will require the services to collect and share data with each other in a way that they have never done before, and that may require changes to how they operate. But in order to enable JADC2, he added, a cultural shift in how the services treat their data is needed; if the services want to link sensors to shooters, interoperability of services' systems and data is imperative.
“Historically, each service could gather up their data, send it up their command to focus on. But in this new world ... the services are going to have to come together, which means the data's going to have to come together in a very different way,” Deasy said at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference.
The DoD is in the "early days of how we're going to do that,” he added.
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US Air Force looks to fast track cash to Kratos Defense for more Valkyrie drones
By: Valerie Insinna LE BOURGET, France — Things are looking up for Kratos Defense's XQ-58A Valkyrie drone. Fresh off its second flight, the U.S. Air Force is considering buying 20-30 aircraft for further experimentation, the service's acquisition executive said Monday. “I'm now looking at ways to do that and what the cost will be,” Will Roper told reporters on the sidelines of Paris Air Show, saying that the Air Force is looking for prototyping funds that it can access for a rapid procurement of those aircraft. The XQ-5A Valkyrie is an “attritable” drone, the word the military uses for an asset that can be reused but is cheap enough that a commander could use them aggressively and would expect — and be comfortable with — some losses in combat. What sets Valkyrie apart is not only its low price point, which Kratos estimates will be $2 million per copy in a production run of 100 jets or more, but also the aircraft's near supersonic speed, long endurance and maneuverability, which could make it a formidable partner for manned fighter jets. Once the Air Force buys additional Valkyrie drones, the idea would be to pair those unmanned aircraft with manned fighter jets. “Depending on what comes out of that campaign, the idea would be to look and do a program of record. You'd want to start spiraling the development,” Roper said. A decision on starting a program could be made as soon as fiscal 2021, and from there it would be only two to three years to begin production and fielding aircraft, he said. “I am really pleased we're getting strong buy-in, strong appetite at the pointy end for attritable systems by our pilots.” Roper's comments come after another milestone for the Valkyrie — the second flight demo, held June 11 at Yuma Proving Grounds. According to a Kratos release, the aircraft completed unspecified objectives over a 71 minute test. “With this most recent milestone, the readiness of the XQ-58A is accelerating and increasing the near-term application opportunities for the system,” said Steve Fendley, the company's president of its unmanned systems division. “I am extremely proud of our development, production, and test teams who continue to deliver successful results, in record time, on our comprehensive system level efforts — rare within the aerospace and defense industry." The Air Force Research Laboratory is partnered with Kratos to develop Valkyrie through the Low Cost Attritable Strike Demonstrator program, the service's effort to field a “Loyal Wingman”-style drone that can be flown alongside a fighter jet or other combat aircraft in manned-unmanned teams. But Roper has alluded to even more ambitious plans for Valkyrie or other attritable drones like it. Not only does the Air Force want to add sensors and weapons to Valkyrie, but it wants to implant artificial intelligence in the drone so that it can train and learn alongside pilots, eventually growing in skill and becoming able to respond independently to threats. Roper calls that effort “Skyborg” and in May told Defense News that the service was considering how to incorporate it with manned fighters like the F-35 and the F-15EX. “I don't want this to just be a laboratory project that lives and dies there in a petri dish. I want this to become a program,” he told reporters in March. “I want to see real, operational demonstrations within a couple years. And I will push them to be faster than that.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/paris-air-show/2019/06/17/us-air-force-looking-to-fast-track-cash-to-kratos-defense-for-additional-valkyrie-drones/