CIA, SOCOM gearing up for rapid capability assessment with an eye toward ‘field-forward’ ops
CIA personnel and American special operations forces are preparing for a collaboration event with members of industry and other subject matter experts in pursuit of new capabilities that could support so-called “field-forward” operations.
The spy agency and SOF community are known to have worked closely together during the Global War on Terror. Today, with the proliferation of emerging technologies, these secretive arms of the U.S. government are trying to prepare for future ops in more “data-dense” environments.
U.S. Special Operations Command’s Science and Technology Directorate and the CIA’s S&T organization are collaborating with the SOFWERX and ICWERX innovation hubs to host the upcoming “Rapid Capability Assessment” in Chantilly, Virginia, which is slated for April, according to a special notice posted online.
The gathering is a follow-up to an Innovation Foundry event that was held last year.
In the special notice, officials described field-forward ops as “the real-time or near real-time collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information in the field or at the source to support mission planning and tactical decision making,” noting that these types of efforts often depend on advanced tech such as diverse sensors, smart systems, distributed networks, communication platforms, and AI tools — which create opportunities and vulnerabilities for special operators and intel specialists.
Focus areas for the rapid capability assessment will include advanced analytics, mapping building infrastructure, novel energy sources, data communications and exfiltration, and edge device optimization.
Plans call for exploring how “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)-like” systems and “Mixture of Experts” models could assist with intelligence analysis, while ensuring “ethical and secure deployment,” according to the notice.
Teams will also examine methods of integration with intelligent building systems — such as lighting, fire suppression and HVAC — as well as efficiently generating, storing, and managing power in “low-profile installations” and “confined or off-grid” environments.
Additional focus areas will include “globally dispersed, low-power edge sensors that can operate independently while triggering more complex systems” through tipping and cueing; secure, high-throughput, and low-signature data transmission in fixed and mobile environments; and maximizing the processing efficiency of edge sensors capable of “triggering more complex systems through alerting, tipping, and ranging,” per the notice.
Official hope the gathering will yield a subsystem-level architectural breakdown of the capabilities developed during the event, insight into vendors’ expertise, and a technology development roadmap, among other desired outcomes.
SOCOM and the CIA may hold follow-on technology “sprints” and evaluations or move to negotiate contract awards, according to the notice.
For the rapid capability assessment event, dubbed RAC17, officials are seeking applications from subject matter experts in fields like AI and machine learning, communications tech, data science, edge computing, Internet of Things, IT, robotics and autonomous systems, sensors, smart buildings and infrastructure, and wearable technologies, among other specialties.
Applications are due Feb. 26.
