‘Collaborative autonomy’ development not moving fast enough for SOCOM
TAMPA, Fla. — Officials across the services are racing to get disparate military platforms to talk to each other, an effort buoyed by the idea that the speedy transfer of information across multiple domains and automated systems will give U.S. forces an advantage on the battlefield.
For America’s most elite forces, the development of such a network — one that doesn’t rely on equipment-specific software — is not moving fast enough, according to one of U.S. Special Operations Command’s top acquisition officials.
Other parts of the military have echoed those concerns. Earlier this month, the Army announced a “hackathon” alongside major defense companies meant to connect decades-old equipment the service still uses with new, incoming technology under a common software architecture.
Top Army officials, citing the war in Ukraine, said they hadn’t been moving fast enough to connect these systems and the service had been plagued by years of manual, “bespoke” integrations that not only failed, but were costly to implement.
“The ability to quickly integrate autonomous behaviors on multiple different platforms in multiple different domains, without it having to be specifically built for that platform, is something that I’d like to see move faster than we are right now,” David Breede, deputy director of acquisition for SOCOM, said Monday at the annual SOF Week conference.
Breede cited “collaborative autonomy,” a concept that tasks multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to work in tandem to achieve a shared goal.
U.S. officials often highlight Ukraine’s counter-drone capability as an example of an integrated communication system, which includes a network of sensors and weapons Kyiv has built out of necessity to down onslaughts of Russian drones.
“But it requires a good mix of different systems to be able to operate and talk to each other and share data, share information so they can both benefit from that shared understanding of the environment, and then act on that information that they’re receiving from the environment,” Breede said, responding to a question from the audience about which technology SOCOM needed most right now.
“Keeping that capability individualized to the specific platforms themselves is not helpful with that,” he added.
Breede caveated his answer by saying it depends on which of the several program managers that compose SOCOM’s acquisition arm you ask, noting that their offices — which cover digital applications to maritime operations — have decision authority for the vast majority of programs the command executes.
His response mirrored Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s comments, who said the service hasn’t “been moving fast enough” to get military systems to talk to each other, which is why the Army pushed industry to share their interfaces and develop a common communication network between platforms in its “Right to Integrate” effort.
While several government organizations, including SOCOM, are working out how to build a connected architecture, “we’re still moving very slowly in that area,” Breede said, specifically citing an example of integrating automated target recognition between a small drone and an unmanned surface vessel “so that they can both use that same algorithm and talk to each other and share that information.”
