The deal follows QinetiQ’s announcement that it plans to acquire software provider Avantus Federal by year’s end — “an important step in the execution of QinetiQ’s five-year ambitions to expand our presence in the US,” QinetiQ CEO Steve Wadey said Friday in a statement about the purchase.

In the latest deal, QinetiQ US will provide services for “system development, fabrication, sensor and system integration, prototyping of multi-function sensor suites, and technology assessment efforts” to the Prototyping Integration Facility of the C5ISR Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the release said.

“We are proud to continue our partnership with the C5ISR Center and its mission partners to rapidly deliver innovative capabilities to support our national security,” said Shawn Purvis, president and CEO of QinetiQ US.

The indefinite delivery, infinite quantity contract is made up of a one-year base period followed by four one-year option periods, the release stated.

QinetiQ was named the 64th largest defense company in the Defense News Top 100 list, with a fiscal 2021 defense revenue of $1.5 billion.

The Army’s C5ISR Center — short for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance — researches and develops advanced technology. It operates under Combat Capabilities Development Command, which is under the purview of Army Futures Command — an organization responsible for modernizing the force.

Industry can help the U.S. and its allies expand interoperable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Integrating advanced capabilities into airborne sensor systems and other assets will create an integrated deterrence to counter regional threats. This will allow allied forces to sense more accurately at longer ranges to discriminate targets, and to detect dangers more quickly in advance of escalation.

Three important advancements enable effective airborne ISR use for the U.S. and its allies:

Increased, innovative use of space assets

There are hundreds of new low earth orbit sensor systems planned for launch in the next few years. The proliferation of commercial and military space platforms enables the U.S. military and its allies to think differently by leveraging data from these assets to focus requirements of airborne collections. From radar to EO/IR and hyper-spectral sensors, the existing and emerging space technologies and systems can help the nation and our allies to more effectively address regional intelligence and surveillance challenges.

For example, through commercial space systems, troops will soon be able to look at multiple threats at much faster revisit rates than ever before. These systems will monitor potential targets in near real-time and allow analysts to update information pertaining to the most pressing threats more quickly.

The smarter, more innovative use of space assets is critical to moving the needle against adversaries in airborne operations.

Multi-function, multi-mission capabilities in platforms

It’s extremely expensive to buy and deploy military aircraft on a regular basis. For this reason, multi-function capabilities are needed to optimize those investments and enable our customers to operate smarter. An example of this can be seen in expanding radar systems to also perform communications and signals intelligence functions, while also advancing the technology to make the new additions smaller, lighter, and more efficient. Industry has been working closely with the Department of Defense to develop this type of multi-function, multi-mission radar approach. This will enable our troops to operate more efficiently, maximizing their airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Maximizing automation and autonomy

During recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military collected 22 football seasons’ worth of full motion video every day. That’s an enormous amount of data – far too much for an operator to sift through manually and make critical decisions quickly. With potential adversarial threats spread across much broader regions with strategic competition, as well as multiple military domains, it’s extremely difficult to effectively analyze all this data manually. However, we cannot let insights from such data fall on the floor.

In strategic competition, the timeline from detecting to countering threats is decreasing significantly. Compounding the problem, the ability to add more people - actual humans - to sift through the vast amount of data and provide fast action is not currently an option, leaving a major issue without any immediate resolution.

Automation can help solve this challenge. With smarter airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, automation makes it possible for machines to perform data analysis, with operators coming out of the data analysis loop and remaining focused on the critical decision-making loop – a far better use of their time and skills. Automated sensor systems can deliver intelligence so that combat team members can achieve high-level mission objectives.

Ultimately, expanding automation to full autonomy is key to truly transforming airborne ISR systems. For instance, with autonomy, an unmanned vehicle with multiple sensors can be assigned high level intelligence objectives, enter a high-threat environment, control its sensors to collect required data, adapt to changing collection conditions, process the data and determine whether objectives have been met, and return with answers to the collection objectives. Instead of operators handling reams of radar data – or another big data dump – they can instead focus on analyzing intelligence answers and determine courses of action.

The technology foundations for achieving a more responsive airborne ISR capability that can help the U.S. and Indo-Pacific allies and partners achieve regional security and stability currently exist. Industry must continue to work closely with our security community to develop, deploy and refine these capabilities to fulfill the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy.

Jim Wright is technical director for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems, Raytheon Intelligence & Space

The Leonidas Pod makes the company’s ground-based system, designed to protect forward operating bases from incoming threats, mountable on a variety of other systems, according to a company statement.

The system is designed to address drone swarms rather than singular drone threats. These swarms are a growing problem for the U.S. military as it develops counter-unmanned aircraft systems capability.

“The newly introduced Leonidas Pod enables a range of mission capabilities and, with multiple mount options to maximize portability, can advance directly to the threat environment,” the statement said. “With Leonidas deployed alongside a drone-mounted Leonidas Pod, the systems work in unison to achieve greater power and range and create a layered defense forcefield.”

Leonidas is intended to be a cost-effective solution to countering electronic threats when compared to using expensive kinetic means to take out cheap drone threats. Leonidas can fire rapidly on targets with “near-instant effects” without overheating, the company said, and the system eliminates the need to reload.

The system is able to power up and down in minutes and has extended battery life, allowing the Leonidas Pod to move to the threat in any domain and then return to base. The pod has a standby mode and the system can be activated without draining battery power.

The company unveiled its ground-based version of the system in 2020. Through three field demonstrations in 2021, the system demonstrated it can counter both rotary and fixed-wing drones, and at its most recent demonstration, the system disabled an outboard ship motor, proving possible maritime applications.

Epirus recently won a multimillion-dollar contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop software to more accurately predict the behaviors of electromagnetic waveforms. Last month, Epirus was one of four companies selected to the Army Applications Laboratory Soldier Power Cohort to develop intelligent power management solutions.

The company has also partnered with larger defense contractors. Epirus announced in October 2021 it was teaming with General Dynamics Land Systems to integrate Leonidas on vehicles like the Stryker combat vehicle and other manned and unmanned ground vehicles to provide Short-Range Air Defense (SHORAD) capabilities.

The Army recently fielded its first platoon of Stryker-based SHORAD systems to Europe. The service is also building four SHORAD 50-kilowatt-class directed energy-capable Strykers.

Epirus launched in 2018, jumping into the $2 billion-and-growing counter-drone market.

Leigh Madden, who heads the company, was general manager for Microsoft’s national security business before joining Epirus. Its chief financial officer, Ken Bedingfield, previously was the CFO at Northrop Grumman. Former defense secretary Mark Esper is on the company’s board of directors.

The counter-drone market is so dense that the Pentagon founded a Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, tasked with identifying enduring systems and rapidly integrating new technology to address the problem.

Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky and DARPA have been working on ALIAS for roughly six years, but have always had a pilot in the aircraft just in case, even if the helicopter performed the flight entirely on its own.

There’s a switch in the helicopter called the “210 switch,” Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky Innovation, told reporters during a Feb. 8 virtual press briefing. The switch indicates how many pilots are present in the aircraft; for the first time before the flight, it was turned to zero.

For 30 minutes, the ALIAS Black Hawk flew without anyone inside over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Feb. 5 and then again on a shorter flight on Feb. 7.

The aircraft performed pre-flight checks, took off and ran through a simulated Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system depicting the congested and complex New York City skyline. The 14,000-lb aircraft responded autonomously to the simulated skyscrapers, weaving through Manhattan, according to Cherepinsky. Then the aircraft landed by itself.

The Black Hawk uses the Sikorsky MATRIX autonomy system designed to help pilots and aircrew when flying in degraded environments, including ones with limited visibility or lacking reliable communications.

Sikorsky developed the MATRIX technology through its Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA). U.S. Army pilots took it for a spin in 2018 for the first time as the service continues to work toward the option to make both the current fleet and future fleet under development optionally manned.

ALIAS integrates a high level of automation into manned aircraft and has the capability to take on additional autonomy capabilities.

“ALIAS aims to support execution of an entire mission from takeoff to landing, including autonomously handling contingency events such as aircraft system failures. Easy-to-use interfaces facilitate supervisor-ALIAS interaction,” the company statement said.

“With reduced workloads pilots can focus on mission management instead of the mechanics,” Stuart Young, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said. “This unique combination of autonomy software and hardware will make flying both smarter and safer.”

DARPA and Sikorsky have together invested roughly $160 million in the ALIAS program. The plan is to wrap up the program by the end of the year, Young said. The split between the two, Young said, was relatively even.

ALIAS brings operational flexibility to the Army, he said. “This includes the ability to operate aircraft at all times of the day or night, with and without pilots, and in a variety of difficult conditions, such as contested, congested, and degraded visual environments,” Young added.

A leading cause of Army aviation mishaps is a combination of human error and degraded visual environments. The service continues to seek systems that will help offload the burden on the pilot in these environments.

“Even in today’s most automated aircraft, pilots must still manage complex interfaces and respond to unexpected situations,” the statement said.

ALISA will also allow the Army to fly in conditions that normally ground a helicopter.

The system could ultimately be incorporated into the Army’s Future Vertical Lift programs as they continue through the development process.

Young and Cherepinsky said DARPA will transition the capability to the Army so it can kit out its current and future fleets with tailorable autonomous capability.

ALIAS previously flew an autonomous resupply mission at Project Convergence in 2021 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. Next month, the program will conduct the first flight of a fly-by-wire Mike-model Black Hawk, the most modern version of the Army’s utility helicopter fleet, at Fort Eustis, Virginia, the statement noted.

“You’ve got the commander’s hatch and the loader’s hatch, and you’ve also got this other little cap,” he said during his presentation as director of the Cross-Functional Team-Synthetic Training Environment on Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting.

“And we had no idea what it was for,” Glaser said. “You simply bolted a road wheel there and threw your TA-50 (individual load-bearing gear) into it.”

One day the lieutenant asks the master gunner what that cap is for.

“It’s actually for the independent thermal viewer so that the commander can continue to search for targets and the gunner can engage other targets,” the gunner said.

Glaser asked why they don’t have that tool: not enough time, money and the technology wasn’t ready, he was told. But it will come eventually.

“I said that will never happen,” Glaser recalled.

But then, about eight years later, when the M1A2 was introduced, the Army had the thermal viewer and instead of replacing the entire turret, they just popped the new device into the existing cap, he said.

That’s the kind of thinking and planning that Glaser’s CFT and their partners at the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation are doing in Orlando, Florida.

The team has two major tasks. First, develop and deploy advanced trainers for all of the weapons systems, basic tasks and objectives the Army has for training now. Second, ensure that those simulators and training tools are embedded in all of the new modernization items that the Army is pursuing.

Glaser and colleague Tim Bishop, deputy program executive officer for PEO-STRI, described a number of programs and approaches they’re pursuing.

“The point of need is eventually going to come into our modernization programs,” Bishop said. “We’re going to have Future Vertical Lift, ground combat systems. We need embedded training.”

While incorporating those training technologies on the front end for new systems is crucial, the team is spreading the gospel of better, more manageable and user-friendly training simulation packages across the force.

Glaser admitted that some of the messaging to industry has been confusing.

For instance, the Army touts its combat training centers such as the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Leaders call them the “crown jewels” of training.

But rotations to those CTCs are down. It’s expensive. While the Army has started to send expeditionary-type packages that replicate the CTC experience to Hawaii — and has plans for another to go to Alaska in March 2022 — that’s not the be-all, end-all.

“To improve at the lower tactical level, we need to get STE in the hands of more soldiers,” Glaser said. “Where do you do that? You do that at home station.”

Some of that will get tested out at Fort Hood, Texas, said Bishop. They’re working on systems integration tasks, especially with the STE-Live Training System.

The STE-LTS offers live force-on-force training, performance evaluations, analytics and after-action reviews.

But Glaser was quick to caution that simulations complement — and shouldn’t replace — live training.

But the key is making simulations easier for soldiers. Even many current simulation trainers are cumbersome. They use dated, complicated technology that often requires a team of private contractors to run and fails too often for a commander to regularly include in their tight schedules.

And Glaser has a measuring stick for STE success.

“When the STE becomes so well thought of and so well used that commanders are demanding it for the deployed environment, we will have really achieved our end state,” he said.

More and more companies across America are turning to human resources analytics to identify and manage their internal talent.

And soon, the Army’s platform to collect, analyze, and harness that data for the uniformed workforce will come online.

Ahead of AUSA, Army Times spoke with the service’s senior leaders responsible for developing and implementing personnel policies and talent management — Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, G-1 Lt. Gen. Gary Brito and Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston.

“As we look ahead, we’re well past that period where 9/11 was kind of a big recruiting push,” explained Wormuth. “We have to think anew about how we bring people into the Army, and certainly part of that is making sure that we’re giving them the opportunities they want.”

The all-volunteer force is entering a new era after the Afghanistan withdrawal. Most young people joining the Army today are looking for a career and benefits.

Enter the Army’s expanded “War for Talent,” as McConville likes to put it. It’s an integral part of the Army’s “people first” approach, he told Army Times.

Under McConville’s watch, the service has transformed how it identifies and selects leaders for key leadership roles. But the Army wants to create a comprehensive culture of talent development and management that will span soldiers’ entire careers rather than just cropping up at key moments.

What’s in place and expanding

In recent years, the Army has developed and implemented new processes for screening and selecting leaders for key positions, McConville and Brito told Army Times.

“It’s really about getting the right leaders in the right place at the right time,” McConville said.

The service’s key initiatives for achieving that goal — command assessment programs — are maturing and expanding, McConville said. The multi-day events, described by some as resembling the NFL scouting combine, include a fitness test, psychological evaluations, blind interviews and evaluations from former colleagues and subordinates.

The Battalion Command Assessment Program, which evaluates lieutenant colonels and promotable majors, will start its third iteration in fiscal 2022.

The Colonels Command Assessment Program, which evaluates colonels and promotable lieutenant colonels, is continuing into its second year.

These centralized programs are expanding to include selection of command sergeants major for brigade-level organizations. A pilot assessment program for battalion-level CSMs will continue in the fall, as well.

“We did the pilot last year, and this year is focused on [evaluating and selecting] the nominative sergeants major which are selected to go into certain brigade-level positions,” Brito told Army Times.

The service is still crunching the numbers to determine whether commanders selected through these programs are performing better, according to McConville.

“We don’t have a sufficient amount of data to show the results of commanders in command,” he said. “But what we do have is data that shows that those we found not ready for command, we believe, would’ve had some challenges.”

And those who weren’t ready for command, McConville noted, were given feedback on how they can improve themselves and come back in the future.

There have been cases where officers who had weaknesses were coached “to address those weaknesses, and then come through the process and do much better,” McConville added.

The Army is also currently piloting a semi-centralized version of the assessment program for selecting first sergeants at each installation.

The First Sergeant Talent Alignment Assessment is designed to be administered at the division or installation-level rather than in one place for the entire Army, which is how other selection programs operate.

In practice, the first sergeant assessment is similar to the command and CSM assessment programs. Pilot versions have included a fitness test, behavioral interview and blind panels. The pilot program is set to expand in fiscal 2022, with potential implementation across the force in fiscal 2023, according to Army officials.

The Army has also worked in recent years to implement marketplace-style assignment processes for officers and NCOs who are earlier in their careers.

The service’s Talent Alignment Process for officers allows soldiers to browse unit vacancies and directly connect with those units.

The first full marketplace cycle, which covered summer 2020 assignments, saw approximately two-thirds of officers and units alike receive one of their top-three preferences.

A similar program for NCOs completed its first iteration for staff sergeants through master sergeants earlier this year. While it did not have the same level of participation as the officer assignment marketplace, Army officials are confident it will deliver better assignment satisfaction for mid-career NCOs.

What’s soon to come

The Army is also confident that the launch of the Integrated Pay and Personnel System-Army will play a central role in revolutionizing the talent management process for the entire force.

IPPS-A, which is currently scheduled to go live for the Regular Army and Army Reserve in September 2022, will subsume an archipelago of legacy human resources and pay systems.

Senior leaders have hailed the new platform as transformative.

“I see [IPPS-A] as a very positive, beyond 21st-century web-based system that allows us to take a very wide and deep portfolio of systems that managed all the HR aspects and put it into one,” said Brito, the G-1.

McConville emphasized that IPPS-A will help keep all three components of the Army on the same page.

“We’re continuing to emplace [IPPS-A]; it’s in the National Guard right now,” McConville said. “And over the next 12 to 18 months, [we want] to get that completely fielded in the Regular Army and Reserves so we have all of our components on one system.”

One of the key selling points of IPPS-A — beyond eliminating outdated systems — deals with integrating aspects of the Army’s talent management plan.

“The intent is that we move from an industrial age personnel management system where we manage soldiers by two variables — their rank and their MOS — and we go into a much more comprehensive [talent] management system where we take advantage of their knowledge, skills, behaviors and even preferences that they have,” McConville said.

Once fully implemented, IPPS-A will collect and manage the data that drives individual soldier talent profiles, Brito explained, in addition to hosting the officer and enlisted talent marketplaces. The new platform, if properly harnessed, will provide a massive injection of data to facilitate talent management and the assignment process.

“It gives you that capability to streamline and see the [talent] data on our field and this massive Army we have, and [it also helps to] transparently provide the human resource management and lifecycles that our soldiers and our Army deserves,” Brito said.

Upcoming IPPS-A releases will also create a condensed display for each soldier’s individual talent profile that is similar to existing record briefs, but with one key difference: civilian-acquired skills and work experience are listed on the front page. Those fields aren’t even on traditional record briefs.

The switch will effectively raise the importance of civilian experience, and even soldiers’ hobbies.

“Future releases will aim…to enable us to see [that] civilian expertise, the language skills they may have developed as a hobby, or some other attributes that might not be resident to your specific [job], regardless of the component you’re in,” Brito said.

McConville pointed to a handful of active-duty soldiers with completely unrelated jobs who just successfully completed a coding tryout for the Army’s new Software Factory.

“We put out a call for those who would be interested, and three of the people who signed up — one was a medic, another was an automotive mechanic, and another was a baker,” McConville said. “That’s what their MOS was, and then we find out they’re actually world-class coders, and [now] they’re going to be coding for the Army.”

Brito reflected on a similar experience he had with a reserve soldier during a 2005 deployment to Iraq.

“While deployed several years back in Iraq as a battalion commander, we had a reservist that was supporting our operations who was an expert in road repair and development,” Brito said. “[Civilian expertise] is a level of data that you would just not ever see [then]. And I would not have learned [this without] talking to him.”

“So fast-forward to now, and then 2022 and beyond,” Brito added. “[With IPPS-A,] we’ll see that type of thing. ... It really just allows us to retain, see, attract and keep that level of talent we need.”

Lots of data

The service is also launching Project Athena, which Brito described as “the nexus” of talent management.

Athena is currently rolling out at various career milestone levels of professional military education, like the captain’s career courses and Command and General Staff College. It offers a framework for leaders to “identify those attributes that they’ll need [to improve] for command — it’s about leader development,” McConville said.

Project Athena is an outgrowth of some of the early feedback that the Army received from its command assessment programs, McConville explained.

“Many of the officers that went through [command assessment programs] said, ‘I wish I knew that these were my weaknesses and strengths,’” the chief of staff said.

Project Athena may just be the beginning of the long-term changes to early career professional education sparked by the data gathered from the centralized assessment programs, according to Brito.

“Part of what this assessment program may also show us — and this is part of the data-rich feedback — is if we see what could be a trend and a gap in leader development [across the force], why not address it early?” Brito said.

Army senior leaders also see these data sets and talent management programs as a way to alleviate many of the so-called “corrosive behaviors” across the force, like racism, extremism, sexual assault and harassment, suicide and others.

Brito hopes that selecting better leaders for key positions will improve quality of life for soldiers under their command.

“What I expect to see is leaders that connect better or more effectively to their soldiers, leaders that not tolerate any harmful behaviors, [and] leaders that promote a positive command climate,” Brito explained. “[I expect leaders] that will put a firewall…[against] these harmful behaviors — sexual assault, sexual harassment, racism, extremism, you name it.”

For years soldiers have had to go to a Common Access Card-enabled computer, perhaps at the platoon level or higher, to see what was in their training record and let their supervisor know if it was correct.

Not anymore.

Now, soldiers can use a tablet or smartphone and see their records in real-time using the Army Training Network, a secure, web-based portal.

NCOs who manage those records can put the information in while training is underway at the range or in a course.

The move is part of Project Athena, the Army’s way to modernize training records management.

It might seem small, but Brig. Gen. Charles Lombardo explained that those shifts, which involve digitizing records, can transform how soldiers and their training managers approach readiness.

“We don’t even know how much we do annually,” Lombardo said.

Essential training, such as gunnery, can be left off of a soldier’s record. But that’s still a critical measure of how well a soldier performs in one of the most basic tasks — firing a major weapon system.

The new tool comes on the heels of the re-publication and revision of Field Manual 7-0 Training, Lombardo told Army Times on Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting and exposition.

Lombardo heads the Combined Arms Center-Training and his recent work goes far beyond training records.

FM 7-0 is a kind of “how to” for leader development, Lombardo said during a presentation at AUSA. Though originally released in the early 1990s, the revisions are focused on getting the Army’s training to 2028 and beyond, he said.

They’ve added a “fight to train” portion that helps commanders understand the level of training they can sustain to achieve readiness.

That flows into other decision-making areas, Lombardo noted. The Army is also pushing pre-combat training center preparations down to the lower-level units. Soldiers have to figure out how to use the “white space” in their calendar once they’ve gotten their CTC rotation date.

Before, the Army delivered a ready-made package, but that didn’t always fit well with all of the demands on units at lower echelons.

The revised manual ultimately goes back to the core of the training and development paradigm — plan, prepare, execute and assess — which are the building blocks of making relevant training that will help soldiers reach a readiness level.

And they have a model.

“We’re trying to make all of this similar to how aviation does it,” Lombardo said.

When a pilot arrives to a unit, all of their training comes with them, he explained.

Sgt. Maj. Thomas Conn, senior enlisted advisor at the CAC-T, worked a project recently that unlocked jump logs for paratroopers with the XVIII Airborne Corps.

The new requirement means, “a soldier’s jump will be put into their individual training record and will stay with them wherever they go,” Conn said.

It goes further than shooting, driving and flying. Maintenance records are included, too. As is complex engine work for mechanics.

The robot paused, attempted a new path and thunked up against one of the trees. It stilled itself again for roughly 10 seconds, as if pondering how to get out of this pickle, then promptly backed up a little at an angle and squeezed through the narrow goal post of trees.

Developing artificial intelligence and autonomy in the realm of self-driving cars has been easier in the commercial world where a large amount of data is available in terms of maps, roads, infrastructure, to plug into systems.

But where the Army often operates, there’s almost none of that predictability.

“Being able to essentially go into a new space, assess where you are, what you are looking at, understanding the uncertainty with which you’re operating under and then behaving accordingly is essentially what we’re driving toward with the SARA program,” John Lizzi, GE Research Lab’s robotics and autonomy tech leader, told Defense News in an Aug. 3 interview.

SARA stands for Scalable Adaptive Resilient Autonomy Program, which is an Army effort to demonstrate “risk-aware” autonomous ground vehicles capable of navigating safely in complex, off-road test conditions.

GE was one of eight funded projects — with all the rest going to academia — by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in a path to get after autonomous vehicle navigation in complex terrain, where lessons learned and technology could affect next-generation combat vehicles from the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle to the Robotic Combat Vehicle family.

GE has spent the last year developing technology within the Army-sponsored program.

“In future Army scenarios, autonomous systems will have to reliably plan in the presence of challenging features they encounter while maneuvering in complex terrain,” Eric Spero, the Army’s SARA program manager, said. “Incorporating risk and uncertainty into the autonomy decision-making process enables our testbed platforms to show us what it looks like to plan a direct path instead of taking the long way around.”

Using its “Humble AI” technology, which makes artificial intelligence more human by programming into the robot a sense of its capabilities and limitations, GE was able to give the machine the ability to step back and assess uncertain situations.

The robot has the ability to decipher known and unknown paths when navigating; gathering information using camera data, LIDAR sensing capability, odometry and other measurements to make decisions on which way to go, Lizzi said.

Humble AI has already been tested in the context of, for example, how to safely optimize the energy output of wind turbines. The AI may recognize certain wind patterns but if it encounters new wind forces or weather, it goes into safe mode while deciding how to respond to the new situation.

The company’s work on the AI technology, to include its development effort with the Army, aims to achieve decision-making at human speed or faster, Lizzi said. “I think that is going to be absolutely critical.”

These systems will also need to learn in the moment, he added. “The paradigm today is, I go out in the field, I collect a bunch of data, and then I program my system to function in that understood realm. I think we’re going to get to a point where that paradigm is not going to work anymore, so learning on the fly, learning from limited data, learning from demonstration could be a way in which we deal with that.”

The AI development within the program isn’t happening in a vacuum either. The technology is being integrated with the Army’s core autonomy stack as the program proceeds and will be there to build upon in the future.

And while there is strong applicability to ground robotics, the advances GE has made in AI technology through the ARL program could be useful in variety of spaces, from industrial to commercial across sectors like energy, aviation and healthcare, according to Lizzi.

Both organizations have sizable footprints in Brussels, but apparently only the alliance is equipped to facilitate sensitive discussions online from its headquarters building in the northeastern part of town.

“I have anyway wondered why EU institutions aren’t just going there,” Kramp-Karrenbauer said during a Dec. 11 online discussion focused on reviewing Germany’s six-month term holding the presidency of the Council of the European Union. The alliance building, she added, “is big enough,” and secure meetings connecting leaders from both sides of the Atlantic are commonplace there.

“If we – as it seems for the foreseeable future – must continue to meet virtually, then we have two options,” Kramp-Karrenbauer said. Either the European Union bureaucracy creates its own secure communications infrastructure in line with NATO standards, or, in the spirit of neighborly relations in Brussels, bloc officials are allowed access to secure alliance lines, she added.

The recent surprise appearance of a Dutch journalist at a supposedly confidential online gathering of EU defense ministers drove home the need to keep sensitive defense information under wraps, according to Kramp-Karrenbauer. On the agenda at the November meeting was one of the most sensitive issues on the bloc’s agenda at the moment: the development of a common threat assessment supported by all member states.

It’s all but certain that the Russian and Chinese governments are interested in listening in when it comes to such matters.

But loaning NATO communications capabilities for EU business may not be that much of a low-hanging fruit for improved cooperation between the two organizations. If “whatever sensitivities” get in the way, Kramp-Karrenbauer said, then the bloc would have to get its act together and build similar capabilities from scratch.

According to a NATO official, making alliance systems available to all EU members “would have to be assessed carefully” given that only only 21 out of NATO’s 30 members are also members of the European Union.

“NATO operates secure IT networks which allow our 30 allies to exchange classified information,” the official told Defense News, adding that senior EU officials in the fields of defense and security have previously joined classified NATO meetings via secure video connection.

Although the radar’s design phase has been finalized it still needs testing airborne. Nevertheless, Stéphane Lavigne, a sales director at Thales, said that the French Armed Forces Ministry had already notified its intention to buy the equipment for the future light joint army helicopter, the Guépard, developed by Airbus Helicopters and due to enter service in 2026.

Jon Bye, Thales' head of customer marketing, said that the AirMaster C would ensure customers got “that great picture, first time, every time.”

The active antenna radar is based on SiGe (silicon-germanium) technology fully validated in 2019. Thales says SiGe is “much more energy efficient than other technologies used for AESA radars, and allows the radar to self-cool.”

François Arpagaus, the company’s airborne surveillance product line director, said that AirMaster C is easy to integrate, less complex to operate and would allow users to “see more, more of the time” thanks to “multi-polarization” which allows the radar to automatically select the optimal settings for each mission.

The radar was designed for a small footprint, making it 30 percent lower in size, weight and power than other radars in its class. It is small, no bigger than two A4 pages side by side, weighs less than 20 kg (45 lbs) and uses about 1 Kw of power. “It’s perfect for small and medium-sized platforms, both manned and unmanned,” Arpagaus said.

Lavigne said the sensor had been designed with a lot of input from radar users. “The program is launched, we are ready to take orders,” he said, adding that typical delivery time from contract signing would happen within two years.

Negotiations between Boeing and the Ministry of Defence have been underway since mid-summer over a possible reduction in Wedgetail numbers from five to three, or possibly four, aircraft as part of a wider cost-cutting exercise.

Newspapers here have recently been full of leaks about possible capability cuts and delays to equipment like armored vehicles, artillery, surface warships and support ships and fighter aircraft.

All of the leaks have been brushed off by the MoD as speculation, even though some of the leaks were likely inspired by the MoD itself to test the waters of political and public acceptability.

This time, though, the response from the MoD was different. Replying to a tweet in The Times Sept. 22 an MoD spokesperson pretty much confirmed the cuts were under consideration.

“We regularly discuss equipment programs with our partners, particularly when it comes to making savings and cutting costs, where appropriate,” they said.

A Boeing spokesperson in London said the company “doesn’t comment on commercial matters.”

Defense consultant Howard Wheeldon of Wheeldon Strategic Advisory said leaving the RAF with just three Wedgetails would leave the UK seriously short of aerial command-and-control and situational awareness capability.

“Personally, I regard this as little short of insanity. … To guarantee  27/7 capability requires that the UK has a minimum of five airframes. Potentially reducing the number to three would have very serious consequences and if this really has already been decided it needs to be reconsidered very quickly. Assured 24/7 AWACS capability is not just an option – it is an absolute necessity,” said Wheeldon.

A potential reduction in Wedgetail numbers is not the only ISTAR capability cut in the cards.

The RAF remains on track to take out of service next year its Raytheon-supplied Sentinel battlefield surveillance aircraft.

In early 2019 the MoD controversially signed a deal worth £1.5 billion – without a competition – to supply five of the Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft to the RAF with deliveries starting in 2023 and the final platform being handed over in 2025.

The aircraft will replace the RAFs increasingly ancient Sentry E-3D’s, whose capability has been limited by under-investment going back years.

The deal with Boeing was meant to restore high-quality airborne early warning to the RAF by the mid 2020s.

Last year the company signed a deal with STS Aviation to modify the 737NG commercial aircraft used for Wedgetail to an AEW configuration at a hangar on Birmingham airport in England.

Early work on stripping out two second-hand airliners has already got underway in the US ahead of the aircraft being transferred to the UK where the modification effort will create jobs.

Wedgetail is not operated by the US military but has secured Australia, Turkey and South Korea as export customers. Much of the equipment for the RAF aircraft are due to be supplied by Australian industry.

The move to reduce Wedgetail numbers comes as the government moves closer to taking the wraps off what it has promised to be a “fundamental” review of British defense, security, foreign policy and overseas development.

Led by the Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his chief advisor Dominic Cummings, the review is looking at pivoting defense away from conventional sunset capabilities to more sunrise technologies in areas like space, artificial intelligence, cyber and undersea warfare.

The trouble is Britain’s Brexit- and Covid-19-battered economy is unlikely to find much, if anything, in the way of additional resources for an MoD which already has significant funding issues.

To make room for costly future technology programs the armed services are going to have to make sacrifices elsewhere.

The procurement process is likely to be in Cummings cross hairs along with conventional capabilities like main battle tanks and army personnel numbers. When the review is published, possibly around mid-November, it’s likely to be a bloody affair.

One industry executive here, who asked not to be named, said he thought the outcome was likely to be worse than the 2010 strategic defense and security review, which stripped out capabilities like aircraft carriers, fast jets, maritime patrol aircraft and personnel.

Wheeldon said by now nobody should imagine the integrated defense review is about building Britain’s defense capabilities, but quite the reverse.

“If anyone really is still under the illusion that the underlying intention behind the 2020 ‘Integrated Review’ process – that of forming a soundly based long-term strategic decision making process of where the UK wants to be in the future, why and what defense and security capability will be required to meet those ambitions – let them now understand that the reality is that what eventually emerges will primarily have been about further cutting of UK defense capability at a time when others, including our adversaries and would-be enemies, are increasing their expenditure in the sector.”

Teams led by Airbus Defence & Space, Babcock Integrated Technology, BT and Serco, have been down-selected for the Skynet 6 Service Delivery Wrap program following the MoD’s Defence Digital organization release of an invitation to tender document to the remaining contenders June 12.

The make-up of one of the teams vying for the ground station operations contract is already known, while others have yet to announce who their partners are.

Serco has declared its team will involve satellite operator Inmarsat, IT specialist CGI UK and the U.K. arm of defense giant Lockheed Martin.

British communications company BT, Babcock and Airbus are all keeping their teaming arrangements under wraps for the time being.

Airbus, Britain’s biggest satellite builder, did though coincide the MoD Skynet 6 down-select with a separate space partnering announcement of its own.

The company said June 16 it had teamed with KBR, Leidos UK, Northrop Grumman and QinetiQ to launch a new space initiative known as Open Innovation-Space aimed at increasing British involvement in future satellite communications efforts.

No mention was made by Airbus of the Skynet 6 program.

All the companies are working under strict Skynet 6 non-disclosure agreements with the MoD which forbid communication with the media and others.

The ground station program is the second part of the MoD’s wider Skynet 6 project to equip the military and government with a new generation of beyond-line-of-sight communications capabilities starting around 2028.

The Skynet 6 program has already seen Airbus start work on a new satellite, called Skynet 6A, to act as a capability gap filler between 2025 and the introduction of the follow-on, new-generation capacity.

A deal for preliminary design work and long-lead time manufacture was signed by Airbus and the MoD in March and the contract to build the Skynet 6A spacecraft is in the final stages of government approval and expected to be announced within weeks.

The other two key parts of a program presently expected to cost in total around £6 billion ($7.6 billion) are the Enduring Capability project, to provide next generation communications capabilities, and the Secure Telemetry, Tracking and Command (STTC) project for providing assured sovereign control and management of satellites.

The MoD has settled its STTC requirements for SkyNet 6A but its options for the longer term remain open.

Work on defining what the Enduring Capability requirement might look like has been underway for a while and industry executives here expect the effort to be ramped up in the coming months with the first tranche of recommendations due to be presented to the MoD early next year, said people with knowledge of the program.

The next-generation communications requirement is planned to get underway next year with the release by MoD of a pre-qualification questionnaire.

One industry executive, who asked not to be named, said securing the Service Delivery Wrap deal was an important stepping stone towards satellite builders securing the big prize – the Enduring Capability requirement.

“It will help the winning consortium secure local skills in the sector, help in understanding the customers communications requirements and assist in filling in the revenue gaps between what is often sporadic investment in satellites and payloads,” the executive said.

Space is an industrial and military priority for the British, and while it remains unclear how the worsening economic picture here might impact defense spending it is hoped the sector ,and programs like SkyNet 6 and the Galileo global navigation satellite system replacement project, might escape the worst of the expected cuts.

One cost cutting option the British are reckoned to have been looking at is to use future SkyNet 6 spacecraft to double up its use by carrying a GNSS capability as well.

Skynet ground facilities are currently operated by Airbus as part of a wider private finance initiative (PFI) deal signed in 2003 to build, own and operate a constellation of communication satellites and associated capabilities on behalf of the British military.

That deal expires Aug 2022. The winning Service Delivery Wrap contender is slated to take over ground operations from that point after a transition phase.

In a contract note issued June 16 the MoD said the return date of the invitation to tender is set for June next year.

The Service Delivery Wrap arrangement runs for five years, not including any transition phase, with two single-year extension options also expected to be included in the deal.

The terms of the existing PFI arrangement entail the MoD paying a nominal fee of a Pound in exchange for which it will take ownership of hundreds of millions of Pounds worth of assets in the shape of ground infrastructure and the Skynet 4 and 5 satellite fleets currently operated by Airbus.

This time around the MoD wants to retain overall ownership of the capability in order to help grow its space skills and management experience by way of owning the ground station assets with the winning consortium working under a straightforward service provision deal.

Creation of the unit, the 13th Signals Regiment, is part of an ongoing restructuring of the British Army, known as Army 2020 Refine, which includes the creation of a division conducting cyber, electronic warfare, intelligence, information operations and unconventional warfare.

The cyber regiment is built around a core of about 250 specialists and is tasked with combating threats to Army operations overseas and domestically. The new unit will also provide technical support for a hub being set up to test and implement next-generation information capabilities.

Announcing the formation of the new unit. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said the move was “a step-change in the modernization of the UK armed forces for information warfare. Cyber attacks are every bit as deadly as those faced on the physical battlefield, so we must prepare to defend ourselves from all those who would do us harm, and 13th Signal Regiment is a vital addition to that defense.”

The new unit is based at Blanford, southwest England, the home of Britain’s Royal Signals.

“13th Signals will provide the basis of the new Army Cyber Information Security Operations Centre, focusing on the protection of Defence’s cyber domain, and it will work with the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to provide secure networks for all military communications,” the MoD said in a statement released June 4.

Creation of the security operation centre was announced by the MoD in May 2019.

Over £22 million ($28 million) was pledged by the MoD for investment in the new centre. Operations were expected to commence in the early 2020, the MoD said at the time of the announcement last year.

The new centre will, among other things, be responsible for providing round-the-clock information and analysis, as well as having an offensive capability.

The cyber regiment is part of the British Army’s 1st (UK) Signal Brigade, which under the command of 6th (UK) Division, is responsible for conducting information maneuver and unconventional warfare in support of the Armed Forces.

The 77th brigade, a unit made up of regular troops and reservists tasked with conducting psyops and information warfare, is also part of the 6th Division lineup.

The Air Force is set to have spent $300 million on the Advanced Battle Management System through fiscal year 2021. However, the service is still struggling to define what ABMS needs to do and how much it will cost, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released April 16.

"The Air Force has not established a plan or business case for ABMS that identifies its requirements, a plan to attain mature technologies when needed, a cost estimate, and an affordability analysis. … To date, the Air Force has not identified a development schedule for ABMS, and it has not formally documented requirements,” it read.

That could have significant consequences for the program down the road, GAO continued:

“GAO’s previous work has shown that weapon systems without a sound business case are at greater risk for schedule delays, cost growth, and integration issues.”

The GAO made four recommendations: create a cost estimate and a plan laying out how to afford the program, formalize the decision-making authorities of those involved in ABMS, and develop a list of technologies that are expected to fit into the initial system.

In a response to the report, Kevin Fahey, the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, concurred with all four recommendations — a sign that, going forward, the Air Force may be required to solidify more of its ABMS plans.

The Air Force has maintained that the program’s unconventional structure and methodology is a feature, not a bug.

It wants to use a series of experiments to help discover and mature new technologies that can be weaved in alongside legacy platforms. For instance, the first ABMS experiment connected SpaceX’s Starlink constellation with an AC-130 gunship, and the next demo will employ a Kratos Valkyrie drone carrying communications gear that enables the F-22 and F-35 to securely share data while allowing them to maintain stealth.

Air Force officials have said technologies that are proven to be successful and mature during the experiments could become programs of record inside the ABMS family of systems.

However, the Air Force does not seem to have a firm plan for what technologies it needs and when to bring them online, the GAO said. The service has identified 28 development areas that includes a new cloud network, a new common radio, and apps that provide different ways of presenting and fusing data. However, none of those areas are linked to specific technical requirements, and the Air Force hasn’t explained what organizations are responsible for the development of those products.

In one damning section, GAO compared ABMS with several cancelled programs with similar aims, such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems program that sought to field a family of manned and unmanned technologies and the Joint Tactical Radio System, which was intended to create a government-owned software defined radio. These programs publicly flamed out after millions of dollars were spent in development, in part because certain technologies were not mature enough and caused the schedule to unravel.

The scope of ABMS will be far larger than those previous programs, the Pentagon’s Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation told the GAO. But because the Air Force has not provided a detailed acquisition strategy, CAPE does not have confidence that the Air Force will be able succeed where those programs have failed.

“Given the criticality of the battle management command and control mission and the planned retirement of legacy programs, the lack of an ABMS business case introduces uncertainty regarding whether the needed capabilities will be developed within required time frames,” the GAO said.

Figuring out who has responsibility and decision-making authority for ABMS is also a messy proposition, the GAO said.

The ABMS effort is led by a chief architect, Preston Dunlap, who is responsible for managing tradeoffs among the portfolio of technologies and guide experimentation efforts. However, existing programs that will be part of the ABMS family will retain their separate program office with their own independent management, and the Air Force has yet to clarify whether Dunlap will be able to redirect those program’s funding to fall in line with ABMS objectives.

For example, the Air Force’s program office for space is currently working on a data integration project that could correspond with ABMS efforts to field a cloud network.

But “although some ABMS funds have been obligated for this project, there is no documentation to support that the Chief Architect will be able to direct the PEO to change the project objectives or timeline to align with ABMS requirements once they are defined,” the GAO said.

The role of the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability or AFWIC, which was established in 2017 to help define how the service will fight wars in the future, is also unclear. An AFWIC senior official told the GAO that the organization began leading the service’s multidomain command and control initiatives in 2019, but it is uncertain whether AFWIC also has the power to change the direction of the ABMS program.

The Air Force conducted the first demonstration of the Advanced Battle Management System in December, using a number of operational platforms — including F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, F-22 jets and the Navy destroyer Thomas Hudner — to test a number of experimental technologies meant to allow the services to connect and share data more seamlessly.

During a news conference on the Air Force’s response to COVID-19, its chief of staff, Gen. David Goldfein, stressed that the service will pick up the test effort again as soon as the pandemic subsides.

“It’s really important that we’re not canceling it; we’re postponing it because there’s a number of industry leaders that are also involved in this,” Goldfein said. “We want to make sure that we get right on track as soon as the conditions allow us to.”

Goldfein, who retires this summer, has made battlefield connectivity a major priority of the Air Force, but the specific nature of ABMS remains nebulous.

Although the service codified an overall architecture for the system, which will require a more modern IT backbone and moving data to the cloud, the Air Force has not identified specific systems or contractors that will build or integrate the system, instead choosing to conduct multiple experiments to shake out what technologies work and which can be pulled into the whole of ABMS.

The second ABMS experiment was slated to be bigger than the first, with U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command all participating in the exercise. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Air Force Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman, were expected to attend, Goldfein said.

In the meantime, the Air Force will use the time it has available to advance technologies and refine its game plan for the experiment, he said. In the December experiment, 26 of the 28 technologies tested met a satisfactory level of performance.

“We actually thought that was too many. Maybe we should stretch ourselves. … We’re trying far more new things, trying to connect capabilities that are not currently connected,” Goldfein said. “If we get this right, about 60 percent of it will work; 40 percent won’t work, and we’ll learn from that and move forward.”

The Air Force wants to spend $302 million on ABMS in fiscal 2021, more than doubling what the program received in FY20.

War games and supply chains

While Air Force operations are ongoing, the service has opted to cancel a number of training exercises, including Red Flag Alaska, a major air combat training exercise originally planned for May. While the cancellation impacted the training of the “few hundred” airmen scheduled to attend, it also gives those units the opportunity to focus on COVID-19 prevention efforts on the ground, Goldfein said.

“Right now, we’re early enough on the number of exercises canceled that it’s recoverable,” he said. “What I anticipate happening is that we will put into place procedures to actually be able to continue exercising, albeit perhaps at a lower rate in terms of numbers by bringing social distancing and the other [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] protocols in play.”

The Air Force is also keeping a close eye on the availability of aircraft parts and other supplies necessary to complete its missions. Will Roper and Ellen Lord — who respectively lead Air Force and Pentagon acquisition efforts — are in communication with defense contractors about areas of concern, Goldfein said.

“To date, we’ve not yet seen a limitation that’s caused us to pause or affect operations in any way. But this is a concern going forward because companies have got to figure out how to keep their lines open with their own social distancing and own procedures to be able to protect their workforce.”

“The Air Force is changing its acquisition strategy for the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar (3DELRR) program and will take actions to conclude its current engineering and manufacturing development contract,” said Air Force spokeswoman Patty Welsh in a statement.

“The current contractor experienced numerous technical and supplier challenges in the development of their radar that extended the schedule,” she said. “Current market research shows that due to advancements in technology, other alternatives are now available that can deliver the capability faster.”

The Air Force plans to hold an industry day on Feb. 4 at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., and release a solicitation for a replacement to Raytheon’s radar “shortly” afterwards, Welsh added.

Inside Defense was the first to report the news on the program cancellation.

Raytheon won the 3DELRR contract in 2017 after a protracted battle against competitors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The system was slated to replace the AN/TPS-75 ground-based radar used to detect and track airborne targets.

The 3DELRR, as envisioned by Raytheon, was a gallium nitride-based radar that operated on the C-band, a frequency the company said was less congested.

Raytheon was first selected as the provider for 3DELRR in October 2014, but Northrop and Lockheed quickly lodged protests over the decision with the Government Accountability Office. Days before the protest window was to run out, the Air Force voluntarily announced it would re-evaluate the contract award, a move seen as a sign that the service expected the GAO to side with one of the protesting companies.

As a result, Raytheon lodged a suit against the service, one which was ultimately rejected by a U.S. court. The Air Force then relaunched the competition, with Raytheon once again nabbing the $52.6 million fixed-price-incentive-firm contract for the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the program.

At the time of the contract award, Air Force officials indicated that a replacement to the AN/TPS-75 radar had been highly anticipated.

“We are excited about what the future holds, particularly as it relates to the performance and affordability of 3DELRR,” said Lt. Col. Michael Alexander, then the deputy program manager for 3DELRR, according to a 2017 news release.

Aaron Mehta in Washington contributed to this report.

Suddenly, everyone’s computer screens go blank, as does the massive wall-sized projection that tracks air mobility missions worldwide. Classified and unclassified networks are down, leaving landline phones as one of the only communications means available to airmen needing to pass on vital information to squadrons.

The execution floor, once almost silent, erupts into chatter as members of the 618th try to make sense of how to do their jobs without the tools they depend on most.

This scenario is a drill, a 24-hour exercise meant to test the ability of the 618th’s operations center to respond to degraded communications that could arise from situations ranging from a power outage to a coordinated cyber attack by an adversary nation. (Defense News, which embedded with members of the 618th to observe the Dec. 11 exercise, was not permitted to disclose the exact nature of the scenario for security reasons.)

Although the U.S. military has a host of resources, including U.S. Navy ships and commercial railways, that it can use to position forces and equipment around the globe, the Air Force’s cargo planes and aerial refueling tankers can fulfill these missions more quickly than any other approach, said Lt. Gen. Jon Thomas, Air Mobility Command’s deputy commander.

Mobility aircraft regularly provide fuel to bombers in the Asia-Pacific, carry Army battalions to deployments in the Middle East and transport patients to receive medical care. The operations center manages about 134 sorties per day.

Should such an outage at the 618th persist, pilots and aircrew could be left without weather data, diplomatic clearances, maintenance information, or detailed routes to their destinations. And the impact could ripple across the entire U.S. military, with the other services unable to immediately move troops or equipment as needed.

"If [aircrews] are out there flying right now, typically they will call back to us and say, 'Hey, by the way, I need the information for my next mission,’” said Brig. Gen. Jimmy Canlas, who commands the 618th Air Operations Center.

"If no one answers, what happens? What are they going to do? Are they just going to stop? And if they stop, what is the impact? ... If it's a high priority mission, someone may not be getting their food. Someone may not be getting their bullets. Someone might not be getting the personnel that was scheduled for a rotation.”

Beyond surviving 24 hours of degraded communications, the 618th will need to prove through this exercise it can regain control of its missions and recover from the crisis, Thomas said.

“That is as difficult a task, I would submit, as transferring it off to other command-and-control agencies to begin with,” he said. “We have to work that whole process.”

Early hours

At Scott, the center’s leadership met on the execution floor at 6:30 a.m. for an update on the day’s missions and to share intelligence about the simulated threat.

With computers down, no electronic records were available. The PowerPoint slides and print outs used for daily presentations saved the day, providing the operations center a written record of the missions planned for the next 24 hours and beyond and giving its members a starting point for managing the day’s tasks.

“The ability to survive and operate is the name of the game. That’s where we are,” Col. Robert Stanton, the 618th’s director of operations and the senior officer, said as the meeting came to a close.

Today’s exercise was the first time that the 618th has simulated how it would respond to a catastrophic event that knocks much of its communications equipment out, Canlas said.

“I wanted to test our systems, our plans that we have in place to make sure they’re all survivable, if they are realistic,” he said during an interview later in the morning.

“Not much has been different just yet, other than I feel some tension from some of the folks that I ran into in the hallway, as they scramble trying to figure out what they’re going to do to overcome this,” he said. “If you ask me four hours from now, I think I’ll give you a much different answer.”

One issue Canlas anticipated is whether it might be wise for the 618th to invest in backup communications methods such as walkie-talkies, high-frequency radios or fax machines that, due to being stovepiped from the rest of the Air Force’s communications enterprise, might be more survivable in a cyber or electronic warfare-style attack.

"We used to have antennas on top of this building that we were able to talk to our aircraft over HF radios. Very archaic system, right?" he said. "But it was still a means. Coming out of this we'll probably need to evaluate whether the juice is worth the squeeze."

Within the first few hours of the exercise, the “white cell” planners responsible for executing the exercise had already identified one lesson learned. The 618th is often responsible for obtaining diplomatic clearances that allow U.S. aircrews to fly through other countries’ airspace, as other air operations centers sometimes do not have personnel on staff with the authorities needed to perform that task, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Carroll, deputy director of the strategy directorate.

But with the 618th unable to start the process on clearances, Carroll said it may make sense for the Air Force to create processes for other air operations centers to request diplomatic clearances in a contingency, thus reducing dependence on the 618th.

“You make a plan, and no plan survives first contact,” Carroll said. “Maybe we thought through the first problem, but we didn’t think through the second problem. I think we’re going to find a lot of that stuff.”

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop”

By 1 p.m. there have been no major problems, said Master Sgt. Samantha Lanier. Normally the duty officer for the global operations division, Lanier on this day was working on the “purple team,” which had been granted special permission to use the unclassified and classified networks as usual to manage high priority, “no-fail” missions that have been exempt from the exercise.

Lanier predicted the situation will soon become more complicated for everybody on the execution floor. The pace of operations was set to pick up over the next few hours, and the operations center is expecting phone calls from squadrons that have not been given the crew papers containing critical information about takeoff timing, weather, routing and diplomatic clearances.

"We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop,” she said. “We’re at the that timeline now where aircrews are going to wake up and realize they don’t have crew papers because we’re in the dark.”

That problem shouldn’t be insurmountable for aircrews, she added. They can refer to their special instructions for guidance, which would likely refer them to a regional air operations center for flight information or provide other information about how to operate during a contingency.

Airmen from the 618th are also doing what they can to manually control mobility missions, said Lt. Col. Todd Matson, deputy chief of the global operations division.

“[They] pulled out the whiteboard and started manually tracking [sorties] and making calls to the stations that we could to get statuses on every departure,” he said. “We’re getting updates line by line, basically, and going back to a pen and paper tracking method.”

Another major challenge will happen as operations shift back to the 618th, Lanier said.

“There is going to be a ripple effect,” Lanier said. “I think the biggest impact will be tomorrow — how we recover, how easy it is to recover.”

But no more. At long last, that system, the Strategic Automated Command and Control System or SACCS, has dumped the floppy disk, moving to a “highly secure solid state digital storage solution” this past June, said Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron.

Think of SACCS as the U.S. nuclear force’s version of AOL instant messenger — one of the many old, duplicative systems used by U.S. Strategic Command to send emergency action messages from nuclear command centers to forces in the field. Based in Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., the 595th is charged with upkeeping SACCS and ensuring its day-to-day operations.

"I joke with people and say it's the Air Force's oldest IT system. But it's the age that provides that security,” Rossi said in an October interview. "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address. It's a very unique system — it is old and it is very good."

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office wrote that SACCS runs on an IBM Series/1 computer dating from the 1970s and that the Defense Department planned “to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017,” but it’s unclear whether those upgrades have occurred.

Col. Hayley James, deputy group commander for the 595th Command and Control Group, acknowledged that the Air Force is seeking a replacement for SACCS, but both she and Rossi declined to comment on that effort. Asked about ongoing modernization of the current SACCS system, Rossi would only acknowledge that the Air Force has made recent enhancements to enable speed or connectivity.

Software and Soldering Irons

It’s not easy maintaining an IT system that dates from the same era as disco.

Both active-duty and civilian personnel are needed to keep SACCS operational, but most of the active-duty maintainers working on the system are young and less-experienced. Many come from the “cyber transport” career field, meaning that they are trained to manage modern IT infrastructure, not antiquated systems like SACCS that require maintainers to learn skills like how to solder metal, Rossi said.

“I have guys in here who have circuits, diodes, and resisters memorized,” he said. “They use a TO [technical order] to make sure they’re right, but these guys have been doing it for so long, when the parts come in, they can tell you what’s wrong just based on a fault code or something. That level of expertise is very hard to replace. It’s not sexy work. It’s soldering irons and micro-miniature microscopes.”

One of the guys doing that work is Robert Norman, a civilian Air Force employee with more than four years of experience fixing the electronics on SACCS.

“Any electronic repair is going to take a lot of work. I shouldn’t say it’s difficult, [but] unfortunately a lot of the newer electronics are plug and play,” he said, explaining that when electronic components like motherboards or microchips break on newer systems, the common practice is to throw out them out and replace them. On SACCS, all of those pieces are repaired — which for maintainers could mean spending hours spent under a microscope, slowly but deliberately replacing a copper wire laced throughout a circuit board, for example.

“The challenges get a little larger when we’re actually repairing them down to component level,” he said.

It’s work so specialized that the Air Force hired civilians to fix SACCS components rather than teaching the trade to airmen, who would need years of training to achieve the competency of the employees currently working in the repair shop, some of whom have more than a decade of experience on the job.

Instead, airmen are responsible for diagnosing problems with the system, testing components and then handing off faulty ones to civilian maintainers for repairs.

“The biggest challenge is training. A lot of young folks aren’t exposed to this kind of system and it usually takes quite some time for everyone to get trained up and to be able to work with an older system like this,” said Senior Airman Aaron Mentch, a network technician who has worked on SACCS for about a year.

While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief.

SACCS programmers sometimes get the opportunity to play around with different coding techniques by creating apps for Global Strike Command, but the daily job of updating SACCS’s code isn’t the most glamorous job for an Air Force programmer.

To help keep airmen engaged, the 595th’s most promising programmers are regularly sent on short-term assignments to Air Force software development hubs like Boston-based Kessel Run or Los Angeles-based Kobayashi Maru, or to the Shadow Operations Center at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

“When they do understand the impact that they have on the mission, they’re much more excited to come in and be working on it, but at the same time we want to create those environments to work on modern software and give them opportunities to go and participate with other organizations that are doing other flavors of development,” Menard said.

“We are sending our best and brightest out to those other programming entities,” Rossi added. “We have an airman that is heading out this month to Kessel Run — trained here, went and did a [temporary duty assignment] to Kessel Run and was by name requested for Kessel Run. We’re more of a training ground.”

“Some NATO allies have expressed their concerns over Huawei and their role in providing 5G infrastructure. And, of course, NATO takes these concerns very seriously,” Stoltenberg said at a news conference in Brussels on Thursday.

Some officials in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration have been pushing for him to sign an order that could result in U.S. companies being barred from buying Huawei technology.

Earlier this week, there were reports that U.S. European Command chief Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti had warned that NATO forces would stop communicating with German colleagues if Berlin were to team up with Huawei for its 5G telecom infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal said the Trump administration had sent to Berlin a warning that it would scale back data-sharing with German security agencies if China’s Huawei were to get a role in Germany’s next-generation mobile infrastructure.

Shenzhen-based Huawei competes with Apple and Samsung as a smartphone maker and is the global leader in next-generation high-speed 5G mobile network technology.

But some governments have banned Huawei from supplying parts to their networks due to security fears.

The company has repeatedly denied that it works with the Chinese government and that its products are designed to facilitate spying.

But the United States is lobbying European and other allies to shun the company as their phone carriers invest billions in upgrading to next-generation mobile networks.

At a news conference to unveil his annual report, Stoltenberg was asked if there was a chance that NATO would recommend to allies to ban Chinese companies from 5G procurement. He was also asked if NATO had any evidence of state-sponsored cyberattacks from China.

“We are now consulting closely on this issue, including on the security aspects of investments in 5G networks. I know that this is something which is addressed in many NATO capitals, and it is an issue which is partly a trade and an economic issue, but also has potential security implications," he told reporters.

“So we will now consult. We will assess the issue and find out how NATO as an alliance can, in the best possible way, address the challenges related to investments in 5G infrastructure.

“This is a very important issue and therefore I will not speculate so much about the potential outcomes of the assessments and discussions which are now going on in different NATO countries.

“Regardless of this, NATO has significantly stepped up our efforts when it comes to cyber defense and cybersecurity.”

By conducting large-scale exercises, increasing awareness and sharing best practices NATO had sought to “strengthen the resilience of infrastructure and cyber networks for all allies, including our own networks,” he said.

The secretary general’s annual report, published on Thursday, shows that defense spending among European allies and Canada increased by almost 4 percent from 2017 to 2018, and that in the period from 2016 to 2018, they have contributed an additional cumulative spending of more than $41 billion.

“We expect that figure to rise to $100 billion by the end of next year,” Stoltenberg said.

Stoltenberg said that in 2018, seven allies had already reached the benchmark of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, up from three in 2014. A majority of allies is also spending more than 20 percent of their defense expenditure on major equipment, and, according to 2018 national plans, 24 allies will meet that target by 2024.

The report also shows that allies continue to make “valuable contributions” to NATO’s operations, missions and other activities, said Stoltenberg, who indicated that there are “more than 20,000 troops serving from Afghanistan and Iraq to Kosovo, the Baltic countries and Poland.”

The service’s yearlong EW study is drawing to a close, with a final report expected in mid-January, Gen. Stephen Wilson, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, told reporters Wednesday.

“We’re about two months away from having the results of that,” he said.

Wilson announced the EW study in late 2017. Then, Brig. Gen. David Gaedecke, the Air Force’s director of cyberspace operations and warfighting integration, was tapped earlier this year to lead an “enterprise capability collaboration team” that would explore new ways to perform electronic warfare and how to integrate those capabilities across the service.

Gaedecke will brief the results at the Weapons and Tactics Conference held Jan. 16 and 17 at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., Wilson said. A public report is expected to follow in the months afterward.

While Wilson didn’t preview any of the report’s recommendations, he said that the findings make clear that the Air Force may be falling behind in the sphere of electronic warfare.

“We haven’t been paying attention to what I would call spectrum dominance,” he said.

“Almost everything we do in the military goes through the spectrum when you think about it, across any force. I’ll use an airplane [as an example.] An airplane uses GPS, it uses data links, it uses communications, it uses radars. Its weapons all go through the spectrum. If you don’t dominate the spectrum, you quickly resort to a World War II Army or Navy or Marine Corps or Air Force.”

Although few details about the scope of the study have emerged, a January 2018 request for information stated that it would identify near and long-term capability gaps, from fiscal years 2018 to 2040, with an emphasis on threats that would occur in a highly contested environment.

“Particular areas of interest” include the radio, visible, infrared, ultraviolet and millimeter wave portions of the spectrum, as well as space, cyber and directed energy, the RFI said.

Over the course of the study, the team contacted experts, industry, and the other services for feedback, Wilson said. It also brought in red teams to help isolate vulnerabilities.

The electronic warfare study follows two earlier efforts, known as Enterprise Capability Collaboration Teams, that explored air superiority and multi-domain command and control.

While these initiatives usually don’t directly result in funding for new capabilities, they help guide the Air Force’s long-term thinking about a problem, oftentimes informing follow-on studies. In some cases, the findings also prompt experiments such as the “Data to Decision” campaign that looked at using cloud-based technologies to expedite decision-making. This effort was spurred by the Air Superiority 2030 effort.

Such a system may sound like something out of a sci-fi book, but the service believes it could be in service by 2028.

In a July 31 interview, Lt. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for ISR, explained the Air Force’s new “Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan,” which lays out the service’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance goals for the next 10 years.

In the past, “when we fielded a sensor, we fielded a sensor to answer a question,” Jamieson said. What the ISR flight plan tries to accomplish is far more extensive: “How do I get the data so I can fuse it, look at it and then ask the right questions from the data to reveal what trends are out there?"

“We have to do all of that at the speed of relevance — meaning at warfighting speed — so that our decision cycle has shrunk,” she added. “We get our effects in and out, and we create chaos and confusion in the adversary. Once he gets behind, it is extremely difficult to actually catch up.”

The flight plan itself is classified, as are most of the specifics regarding what the Air Force will develop, test, field and when, but Jamieson said the service is working under a “very aggressive framework” with milestones and deliverables to match.

“The Russians and the Chinese — the Chinese especially — have just stolen our intellectual property, and that’s a part of why we’re in this great power competition that we’re in. I don’t want to give them anything that’s going to tip off what we’re doing,” she explained.

“We’ve already fielded capability in 2018. So I want them to be continuously off kilter with, ‘Where are they, and where are they going?’”

The flight plan includes 10 annexes in areas such as machine intelligence — a catch-all for tech like artificial intelligence, automation and human-machine teaming; software development and prototyping; high-altitude reconnaissance platforms; publicly available information; ISR for and from space; ISR for and from cyber; human capital, which examine how to develop the next-generation of ISR professionals; and partnerships with industry, other U.S. military services, academia and international partners.

As part of the flight plan, the Air Force examined what types of platforms it needs in the future — much of which is classified.

A “balanced portfolio” of penetrating, stand-off and persistent capabilities will be required, and everything from swarming, miniature or autonomous drones, space-based sensors, hypersonics, or even smart weapons could be part of the future ISR grid, Jamieson said. However, the service wants to keep its options open at the moment.

“You really do have to look at what technologies are real today and which technologies are really going to be there for tomorrow,” she said.

More important than those new pieces of hardware is the data that they could provide and how it could be used in new ways, with AI reducing the workload of airmen conducting the ISR mission, Jamieson said.

One of the first steps the Air Force took in its ISR flight plan to enable that was to create a data strategy that laid out standards around how the service will exploit, access, and secure its data.

“If you are not first in developing artificial intelligence and the means to employ — with structured data, with the infrastructure to support that, with a multi-cloud approach — you’re going to be last because catch up in this arena with disruptive technologies, it’s too hard and it’s too fast,” she said.

The Air Force envisions industry as a major enabler of its next-generation ISR infrastructure, with the service owning the data rights and tech companies partnered with it to build software and algorithms. However, even that balance could shift in the future, as a younger generation of airmen join the service with more software coding knowledge and a deeper comfort with computers.

“In 10 years, our digital airmen are going to be the preponderance of the force," she said. "So what are the difference skill sets that they’ll bring to bear? Our airmen right now, 24 and under, the majority of them already come in knowing how to code. For my generation, and the generation behind me, that was if you were a computer science major in college.”

For instance, airmen at the 480th ISR Wing built a simulator from scratch after realizing that a video game popular among the wing actually incorporated a number of valuable skills — from collecting and analyzing information quickly to targeting an adversary, she said.

“I go, ‘Holy cow, this is what I’m talking about.’ Our airmen are already thinking about this,” Jamieson said. I shared that with industry, and said, ‘That shouldn’t scare you, that should inspire you on the quality and truly innovative nature of our young airmen today.’”

The service also sees a major opportunity to cull publicly available information on social media or news sites, which Jamieson acknowledges has not always been effectively used by the Air Force for intelligence purposes.

The 2nd Cavalry Regiment conducted an active electronic attack — or jamming — within a European country for the first time since the Cold War this month during Saber Strike in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. The event shows the Army is making headway on refining a rapid electronic warfare capability it put into the field in Europe just one year ago.

The Army’s RCO — which was officially created in August 2016 — is designed to hone in on the service’s largest requirements with the intent to deliver capabilities within a one- to five-year horizon.

At its launch, the RCO prioritized electronic warfare; position, navigation and timing; and cyber that were neglected in the counterinsurgency operations of the past 15 years. Now that the Army anticipates battling more near-peer adversaries in contested environments, it is refocusing on ensuring its capability overmatch against those possible enemies.

The RCO developed an electronic warfare prototype and sent it to Europe to help soldiers view the EW picture in the spring of 2017, which was then tested out in the Army’s major exercise Saber Guardian in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in July. Subsequent versions were sent over in in the summer and fall of last year.

The EW system was also extensively tested at Fort Bliss, Texas, last summer.

Fast forward, and the Army has fielded a refined electronic warfare capability with a platoon in the 2CR and one in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, both of which are permanently stationed in Europe.

There is another platoon with the 1st Infantry Division.

While EW prototypes were tested during Saber Guardian, it was mostly to check the interoperability of the EW systems, which come in the form of dismounted, vehicular and command-post capabilities.

The systems were evaluated during the first Joint Warfighting Assessment in Europe in May ahead of the Saber Strike exercise where Master Sgt. Kevin Howell, a Training and Doctrine Command capabilities manager for EW within the Cyber Center of Excellence, told Defense News at the JWA that the Army is working to develop how various units might employ the systems and refine tactics, techniques and procedures.

“The electromagnetic spectrum is different wherever you go,” he said, so units can conduct a survey to determine what that spectrum looks like, make a determination on how to employ the system, locate the enemy and hide in the spectrum.

“That is the great thing about it, [which] is there hasn’t been much evolution of the equipment, per say, but it’s the education. Soldiers are getting the experience that they are getting. We are getting smarter, we are getting better,” Howell said.

“There is no how-to manual,” he added. “That is what we are developing. It’s really up to the individual units.”

At Saber Strike, the Army’s EW systems were put to the test against one of the most challenging enemies, played by the Lithuanian army.

For Chief Warrant Officer 2 Michael Flory, an EW technician with 2CR at Saber Strike, being able to pass information from the electromagnetic spectrum to an operations center was valuable for a commander to turn around and target the enemy.

And finally being able to conduct electronic jamming against a difficult adversary was “definitely value added” as well as being able to conduct some calls for fires based off the locations identified using the systems, according to Col. Sean Lynch, an electronic warfare officer tasked to evaluate prototypes in Europe at various exercises. He also evaluated the prototypes a year ago at Saber Guardian.

But the most valuable aspect of testing the systems during Saber Strike was the ability to “fully stress the systems to their utmost,” he said.

The systems’ limitations so far in exercises were forecast due to the strength and current limitations of the system, but the prototypes are proving that the Army is moving in the right direction, Lynch and Flory told Defense News in a recent interview.

While much has been discovered and refined from the technical, networking and training standpoints, there’s still work to do, they indicated.

This time the EW systems were employed very much on the move, incorporating the systems onto dismounted soldiers and vehicles. The prototypes were tasked to support a variety of maneuver-force operations from a contested wet-gap crossing, an airfield seizure, and the defense of an airfield, among other operational scenarios, Lynch said.

Operators were given a lot of freedom and were able to use a variety of techniques and methods to employ the systems.

“It was really interesting to see how the guys on the ground decided to employ these systems in kind of less-than-specified situations, how they improvised to make them effective and support the maneuver commander,” Flory said.

The Lithuanians’ ability to jam the U.S. systems had an effect on the regiment’s operations, Flory said, and the commanders were able to feel real impact to being up against an adversary with such capabilities.

“It was sort of a different side of EW, how to protect ourselves, and it’s certainly something we are going to address more in training and nonmateriel solutions and things like that going forward,” he said.

Using the EW capability in the exercise, most importantly, according to Lynch, showed off how broadly the Army needs to approach the challenge of fighting in an electromagnetic spectrum.

“It’s not just a technical solution thing we have to address, it’s the training piece. It’s the organizational piece, it’s the networking, and getting all of those to work in a harmonious manner. That is where we need to go with this,” Lynch said.

But will it work? That’s complicated.

Rep. Anthony Brown, D-Md., said his amendment to the proposed fiscal 2019 defense appropriations bill would bar the Pentagon from spending money to draft plans to transfer DISA’s functions elsewhere in the Defense Department.

The amendment passed the House by voice vote, while the bill itself is expected to come to a vote in the House on Wednesday night.

Through the FY19 National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has targeted DISA for elimination in a larger search for efficiencies militarywide. U.S. Cyber Command would absorb DISA by January 2021, under his plan.

In a floor speech Tuesday, Brown claimed his amendment “prevents from executing this change.” The idea is to push the timeline back for long enough so that a different Congress might re-address the issue.

However, a Republican aide to the House Armed Services Committee said the amendment does not do what Brown intends it to do. That’s because its language mentions the transfer and not any study.

“We didn’t oppose it because it doesn’t do anything,” the aide said. “There isn’t any [proposed] funding to impact DISA reorganization until 2021.“

DISA oversees the operation of DoD networks and IT, as well as significant parts of federal communications, mobility, satellite communications and cloud services.

The agency has a total budget of nearly $10 billion and more than 5,000 employees and 7,500 contractors. Officials at the agency have repeatedly declined to discuss a possible closure, saying they do not comment on pending legislation.

Brown, in his speech, cited the White House’s opposition, from a May 22 statement of administration policy on the House NDAA.

Then, the Office of Management and Budget said, “This action would increase the cost of acquiring information technology, weaken the Department’s ability to secure its cyber networks, and inhibit DISA’s mission to provide seamless communication to warfighters and senior leaders.”

The entire matter is not yet settled, as neither the House appropriations nor authorization bill is law.

The House appropriations bill, which is expected to pass, must still be reconciled with its eventual Senate counterpart, which has yet to receive floor consideration.

Negotiations to reconcile the House- and Senate-passed NDAAs are expected to begin in July.

Chris Moran had spent about 30 years of his career in Silicon Valley before taking over Lockheed’s venture fund in June 2016. So naturally he felt “a little trepidation” about moving into the defense sector, he told a group of reporters at June 6 roundtable.

“Almost from the outset, I was pleasantly surprised by the embracement from the folks that I met both inside the company and in the startup space, finding those technologies, talking about the problems that we have to work on, and finding that they were very excited about working on those technologies and working with Lockheed Martin,” he said.

Google announced on June 1 that it plans to no longer bid for future contracts on the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which used the company’s machine learning technologies to analyze drone imagery.

When Google’s involvement in the program was disclosed earlier this year, it was met with internal criticism, including a petition signed by 4,000 employees imploring Google to vow never to work with the Defense Department, Wired magazine reported in May.

But despite the controversy, Moran said he hasn’t seen startup companies try to move away from working with defense companies — or accepting their seed money.

“I know there’s kind of an independent streak in the Valley, so maybe they want to keep some distance there,” he said. “But I haven’t seen it. When I go talk to companies — and again I’m working at the engineering level a lot of times — they are absolutely enthralled by the types of things that we work on and love the challenge.”

Major defense primes including Lockheed, Boeing and Airbus have recently started venture funds with the hope of deepening ties with fledgling commercial tech businesses, and Moran said the companies’ engagements in Silicon Valley have made defense firms more credible as a partner.

Now, Lockheed is doubling down on its investments. Moran announced during the roundtable that Lockheed will take $100 million of the money saved from recent tax reform legislation and funnel it into the its venture capital fund — increasing that pool of money two times over.

Since 2016, the company has invested $40 million in eight companies, some of which have not be publicly disclosed. While Lockheed’s venture capital arm gets about 500 leads on new technology a year, Moran wants to be able to double that.

“We’d love to go from — generically — about four investments per year, we’d love to get to six or even eight,” he said. “The $200 million will help us to work with more companies, and our goal is to try to get those relationships teed up earlier than later.”

With its new infusion of funds, it might also look to emerging technologies like quantum computing and quantum sensors, where there has been a lot of recent activity.

“Many companies have been formed in the last two years in that, so we’re looking in those areas as well,” Moran said.

So what has Lockheed been getting out of its venture capital investments?

Unlike other investors, Lockheed isn’t funding companies in the hopes of getting a massive financial return. Instead, it wants to invest in startups with big commercial potential, which are developing technologies that could give Lockheed a strategic edge in areas like cyber, space, artificial intelligence, autonomy, 3-D printing and data analytics.

“The perfect investments for us are those that are scaling and growing through commercial activity but at the same time are maturing, hardening, becoming more reliable as a result of the volume and scale that the commercial space can bring,” Moran said.

For instance, Lockheed has made investments in commercial radar and lidar companies closely aligned with the automobile industry.

If those products end up being successful and are integrated into hundreds of thousands of cars, that drastically decreases down the price for customers like Lockheed who could use the system for defense applications and creates a bigger pool of money for the startup to reinvest in its own infrastructure.

While a lot of venture funds are used by companies to pave the way for a future acquisition, that isn’t the case for Lockheed, which would rather keep those firms as potential suppliers based in the commercial sector.

“A home run would look like an entire portfolio of companies we’re working with like Terran Orbital,” the nanosatellite company that Lockheed has partnered with on Defense Department and NASA contracts, said Moran.

Through Terran Orbital, “we found a really capable technology that had immediate or near term application to things that we’re running with our government customers,” he said. “We could both grow them, grow our ability to enter new markets or hone our abilities in existing markets.”

That news come from Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the Air Force’s $15 billion Advanced Extremely High Frequency program.

The fifth satellite in the current generation, known as AEHF-5, passed Thermal Vacuum Chamber (TVAC) testing, used to recreate the conditions the satellite will operate under in space. The satellite also completed acoustic testing that simulates the vibrations caused by high intensity, low frequency sound waves experienced during rocket propulsion.

“TVAC and acoustic tests are critical milestones in the production cycle of a satellite, where we have one shot to get it right, so we take every precaution to ensure the vehicle is ready for the harsh space environment,” said Michael Cacheiro, Lockheed’s vice president for protected communications said in a May 21 statement. “The team and the satellite performed flawlessly, and AEHF-5 is now in system level testing.”

AEHF satellites are critical to the United States and its international allies, such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The jam-resistant system provides global, survivable and protected communication between strategic commanders and tactical warfighters operating in all domains.

Lockheed Martin is currently under contract to deliver six AEHF satellites. AEHF-4 is set to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V from Cape Canaveral later this year.

AEHF-4 will complete the minimum constellation of satellites needed to bring global Extended Data Rate (XDR) connectivity online. According to Cachiero, XDR provides roughly 10 times more communications throughput than the Air Force’s legacy satellite systems.