Air Mobility Command enlists AI to better spot and track threats to military bases

Air Mobility Command is set to deploy a commercial AI platform that supplies a “street-level threat intelligence view” and is custom-designed to help military officials better assess real-time risks — like small drones — anywhere forces deploy, two sources familiar with the work told DefenseScoop.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s innovation hub, AFWERX, recently awarded Washington, D.C.-headquartered startup Base Operations a Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract for the new tool, which will visualize physical security threats across the globe using public and proprietary source data and modeling assets.

“For the U.S. Air Force, we will develop enhanced capabilities using custom datasets for small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) incident tracking, foreign land ownership analysis near military installations, and port security around AMC coastal bases,” company CEO and founder Cory Siskind told DefenseScoop.

“This addresses the 350 sUAS detections reported across 100 military installations last year, including concerning incidents like the Chinese national apprehended at Vandenberg” Space Force Base in California, she noted.

As Siskind suggested, this deal unfolded at a time when unauthorized drone activity — including over military bases or other sensitive sites around America — has been trending upwards and presenting serious national security concerns. Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen and legal permanent resident, was arrested late last year and charged for flying a drone above Vandenberg and violating defense airspace regulations. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding this contract announcement and whether it was directly motivated by recent reports of unattributed drone incursions over U.S. military facilities, AFWERX spokesman Rob Bardua said “Open Topic contracts are awarded based on Defense Need, Technical Approach and Commercialization.”

The Air Force’s innovation arm “is focusing its investments to rapidly transition emerging commercial and dual-use technologies to remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world,” Bardua said.

Air Mobility Command will be the primary customer for Base Operations’ platform under this new contract award. That command is broadly responsible for providing airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation, and global air mobility support to the joint force.  

“AMC’s specialized teams — Contingency Response Elements, Contingency Response Teams, and Airfield Assessment Teams — often operate in degraded environments where traditional intelligence is fragmented or unavailable. Our platform gives them a single pane of glass for data-driven threat intelligence,” Siskind noted.

The company is customizing the platform to pull datasets from multiple categories — such as waterborne threats near coastal bases, foreign land ownership and acquisitions near sensitive military installations, and small drone flight pattern tracking — with payload analysis and saturation mapping for high-incident areas. 

The technology will apply natural language processing to extract insights from more than 25,000 global data sources.

“The system processes data from 200+ million incidents worldwide, transforming raw intelligence into actionable security assessments in minutes rather than days,” Siskind said.

Base Operations’ platform will also help the command identify emerging risks, monitor threats across thousands of locations in a single dashboard and improve severity assessments, via the “BaseScore dynamic risk” index that will continuously update threat levels to reflect what’s happening in real-time.

According to Siskind, “current threat intelligence scores often rely on overly simplistic high/medium/low risk ratings determined by black box algorithms, raw crime numbers lacking context, or annual statistics that don’t reflect current reality.”

BaseScore “solves this with a precise 0-100 threat assessment scale that allows confident comparison of any location worldwide,” she said.

Before this SBIR award, Base Operations focused primarily on offering corporate security options to customers in the private sector.

“This Direct to Phase II award represents our first formal DOD engagement, but we’re exploring government use cases where we can add value quickly given our sole-source authority,” Siskind told DefenseScoop.

With this sole-source designation, defense organizations can purchase the Base Operations platform without competitive bidding — thus likely accelerating procurement and deployment.

“Our [contract award with AFWERX] moved very quickly — under three months — due to the urgency of the problem space, relevance to DOD objectives, and the streamlined Direct to Phase II SBIR contracting process,” Siskind said.

Sources did not disclose the value of this SBIR contract.