"First time in the sawmill, boys. Let's rack 'em up and knock 'em down." - Major Gale "Buck" Cleven
The Air Force Association Warfare Symposium Special Edition
Welcome back to the Nexus Newsletter. If you can’t tell, we love Masters of the Air. No series better typifies the warrior spirit of the American Airman.
Top of mind: AFA Warfare Symposium
Our team will be at booth 835 at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, on February 12-14, 2024. If you’d like to discuss some of the most critical challenges facing the Air Force, please schedule a meeting with our team of experts. These challenges include collaborative autonomy, a vital component of programs like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and the Air Force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative. Getting these strategic capabilities to Airmen with the speed necessary for mission success requires the best software tools and commercial best practices forged by years of experience in the automotive industry, where autonomous systems are already deployed at production levels. To this end, we have suggested the Air Force establish a robust approach to software development, testing, and sustainment alongside its efforts to define operating concepts and requirements.
As a warmup for our meeting, we recommend you check out our inaugural Nexus Talks featuring AFWERX’s Lt. Col. Bryan "Rage^N" Ralston, Autonomy Prime Lead at AFWERX. Rage^N discusses autonomy and the Air Force's Operational Imperatives, how AFWERX is working to bring commercial autonomy to the Department of Defense, and efforts to accelerate the test and evaluation of autonomous systems.
News we’re reading
Autonomy is everywhere in defense these days. Make sense of the latest headlines by reading key quotes from recent articles of interest, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition’s government team, below:
Air and Space Forces Magazine I New Report: Wargames Show CCA Could Have Huge Influence in a Pacific War
Key quote: “Mitchell Institute’s wargame illustrated how the Air Force could use a mix of lower-cost and moderate-cost CCAs to disrupt a peer adversary’s A2/AD operations and enable crewed and uncrewed aircraft to perform counterair missions over long ranges with reduced attrition”… finding that, “Air Force and defense industry experts playing in Mitchell’s 2023 wargame favored using lower-cost, less-capable, expendable CCAs.”
Our take: “Could” is the key word. During last year’s AFA Warfare Symposium, Secretary Kendall and other senior officials associated with the program announced that CCAs would be “relatively cheap, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be expendable.” There still seems to be a contradiction between estimated unit costs, desired combat effectiveness, and acceptable level of risk for a platform in its earliest stage of development. Take, for example, the MQ-9, which costs around $30M/unit. It has been at the forefront of attritable aircraft, having been shot down numerous times in the Middle East. This is not a slight; the platform is deployed into contested environments, which would otherwise put Airmen in harm’s way. However, recent changes in the approach to the employment of the MQ-9 platform, based on modernizing software, will showcase how the Air Force can deliver new capabilities to AFSOC while managing unit costs. We acknowledge that the development of aircraft like CCA isn’t cheap. We also know that autonomy isn’t either. The commercial automotive industry has utilized access to data, enterprise development tools, and simulation to drive down lifecycle costs for AV development. We believe there is a way to reduce lifecycle costs for CCAs by focusing on a joint enterprise approach to software development by optimizing human resources to focus on specific developmental building blocks, breaking department data barriers, and using simulation at scale.
The War Zone I Drone Warfare’s Terrifying AI-Enabled Next Step Is Imminent
Key quote: “In the present, digital image recognition is part of our everyday lives with advanced algorithms put in place to do all kinds of things from unlocking your iPhone to finding photos online. Modern surveillance, in general, makes massive use of automated target recognition of many types — from visual to radar to signals. Machine learning can 'teach' software how to not just detect certain objects in images and videos, but how to classify those objects into different subcategories and apply complex follow-on logic based on what is detected and identified with varying certainty. These concepts are making sifting through increasingly massive mountains of data possible”.
Our take: In other words, Automatic or Aided Target Recognition (ATR, AiTR) can be built with open-source tools. Look no further than the events playing out in Eastern Europe as proof, where Iranian, Russian, and Ukrainian low-cost weapons systems are complicating air superiority and iterating at an ever-increasing rate. The increased use of sophisticated decoy systems will further complicate this challenge. The Department should apply lessons learned in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Nagorno-Karabakh to deploy low-cost and attritable weapons at scale. Encouragingly, the Department is advancing its Replicator Initiative. However, achieving Replicator’s ambitious goals will require the Department to democratize operational data, provide enterprise development resources, and develop a multimodal synthetic environment to train sensor fusion technologies.
Air and Space Forces Magazine I AFSOC Flies 3 Reapers With One Crew In Shift Towards Near-Peer Conflict
Key quote: “The key takeaway was the importance of the integrated team of military, civilians, contractors, and industry partners to identify challenges, work solutions, and better inform requirements for the future of the system.”
Our Take: AFSOC’s five-phased Adaptive Airborne Enterprise Plan is a monumental shift in utilizing unmanned aerial systems and will create new opportunities to integrate additional technologies to extend a commander’s reach on the battlefield. Other benefits of these systems include automating intelligence functions and reducing the exposure of human operators to enemy activity. The advancement of these capabilities also reflects the close coordination and collaboration between AFSOC A5/8 and SOCOM SOF AT&L PEO Fixed Wing. Again, we see a great example of how shortening the communication chain from operator to acquirer can drive more effective, efficient, and timely outcomes. This type of collaboration and communication will be critical as the services expand beyond command and control and develop initial phases of semi-autonomous and autonomous systems where the technology is more complex, and outcomes are more costly. This is a team effort.
Defense One I The Pentagon has been learning the wrong lessons for three decades
Key quote: “With a thirty-year, all-in bet on smaller, exquisite, and expensive forces whose flaws have been concealed by rosy policy assumptions such as we would only fight one short, high-tech war,” … “We must unlearn the lessons of the Gulf War and recognize that weapons must be able to be produced quickly at scale, that the size of the force matters, and that the technological revolution depends on a bottoms-up and not top-down architecture.”
Our take: We agree. The roots of this problem are the long tail of the requirements process and a concentrated focus on technologically exquisite weapons programs deemed “too big to fail.” Autonomous or semi-autonomous systems don’t need to be large ACAT I programs. Instead, they can be smaller budget programs such as ACAT IIIs where a modification or smaller development programs can be free from some of the regulatory restrictions of larger programs. This can enable a more refined and focused approach to solve specific operational challenges, integrate into unique pipelines, or isolate risks. Focusing on a portfolio of these programs allows the department to make more bets and increase the speed of development, deployment, and iteration. A similar approach was proposed in a recent report by the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.