📢 Our new defense socials & Nexus 24 agenda!
A new way for our subscribers to stay connected to our defense work 👀
Welcome back to the Nexus Newsletter, Applied Intuition Defense’s biweekly newsletter covering the latest in national security, autonomy, and software-defined warfare.
In today’s edition, we have an exciting announcement that will let our subscribers follow our defense work more closely. Plus, we’re unveiling our Nexus 24 agenda and our takes on some recent news stories.
📲 Follow our new Applied Intuition Defense social media handles!
In February, we launched our Applied Intuition Defense website and now we’re excited to announce our new defense-focused social media handles!
Follow along on our LinkedIn, X, and YouTube accounts to see how we’re accelerating the software-defined force. We’ll post our latest defense news, events, blogs, our Nexus Newsletter, and more content on our new accounts.
🗒️ Our Nexus 24 agenda
We’re just two weeks away from our annual thought leadership forum bringing together military officials, industry leaders, visionaries, and operators at the forefront of artificial intelligence and software-defined warfare. In addition to announcing a few more speakers, we also just added our agenda.
Here’s a sneak peek at our first panel. You can see our full agenda and information on a post-event reception by clicking here. There’s still time to register!
🗞️ News we’re reading
War on the Rocks | Techcraft on Display in Ukraine
Key quote: “Gone are the days when mastery of a specific technological device remains the key to tactical success. They face an operational environment where they must integrate technological solutions as rapidly as industry makes them. Soldiers can continue to contribute to tactical success in the Army by expanding their skillsets, and Army leaders can be deliberate in growing their soldiers’ techcraft. Leaders should invite soldiers to the table when developing solutions, enable them with resources, lead them through innovation processes, and share ideas with others.”
Our take: We cringe when we hear others in the defense tech industry dismiss warfighter engagement as pointless since commands “don’t have money.” That’s a horribly cynical view of how industry should engage the user. Do you believe the innovations that helped the Allied prevail on the beaches of Normandy 80 years ago weren’t informed by users’ experience during the failed landings at Dieppe? User feedback is an important part of our business strategy because it helps us better understand ground-level requirements and develop relevant solutions faster. We don’t assume all user feedback will reach our partners in the acquisitions ecosystem. Delivering grounded and relevant solutions informed by the most recent developments on the battlefield isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s just common sense.
US Army | Army Digital Engineering directive
Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo recently signed the Army’s latest directive on digital engineering (DE), outlining the path ahead for the service to adopt DE best practices and achieve better outcomes in terms of acquisition process and delivered capability to soldiers.
Key quote: ““In the design and development process, users model requirement tradeoffs and assess their impacts. DE enables program managers to better understand subsystem interdependencies, rapidly determine cost drivers, assess technical and performance risks, and ascertain the impact of design changes. These technologies allow for the digitization of test processes and permit testers to verify proper functionality of systems. Importantly, DE underpins these efforts by eliminating the need for physical prototypes and enabling the Army to make critical decisions and close capability gaps in a more cost-effective manner. As a system moves into sustainment, users and maintainers rely on DE to provide early feedback and train virtually with the support of rapidly developed materials and manuals; sustainers to anticipate, understand, and address deterioration and obsolescence issues; and Soldiers in the field to print spare parts as needed.”
Our take: As requirements for combat vehicles (i.e. operational demands, new technology, cyber vulnerabilities, etc.) evolve faster than current program cycles, there will be a paradigm shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDV) that readily and reliably adapt to these changes. Platforms will have an intentional yet living set of rules, interfaces, and acquisition approaches to quickly, safely, and continuously update software as these changes occur. That the Army is signaling this in policy is encouraging for all stakeholders.
The Government increases competition by allowing innovative entrants with cutting edge tech while safeguarding against vendor lock by using open standards. OEMs will also greatly benefit from the cost savings associated with the avoidance of integration issues and rework, especially on competitive, firm-fixed price development contracts. At the end of the day, our Soldiers get the best capability US taxpayer dollars can buy, at the speed needed to be operationally successful.
Defense One | ‘Swarm pilots’ will need new tactics—and entirely new training methods: Air Force special-ops chief
Key quote: “Experiments with ever-larger drone swarms are revealing a need for new concepts of operations and new ways of training human operators, the Air Force Special Operations Forces Command says.
…
‘We're gonna have to break some old paradigms,’ [Lt. Gen. Tony] Bauernfeind said. ‘We really have to reinforce to ourselves that it's going to be a human on the loop, not in the loop’—that is, the operator will monitor a drone's execution of its assigned mission rather than steering the thing. ‘Cognitively, it will require us to train our air crews in a new way.’”
Our take: Creating operational trust for “human on the loop vs human in the loop” is very similar to the commercial automotive industry’s process for increasing levels of automation in cars. Through the years of working with the world’s largest automotive OEMs, we have learned a few things that may be applicable to AFSOC.
Levels of automation: The automotive industry has incrementally approached automation, focusing on specific behaviors, areas for improvement, and developmental methodologies to drive success and improve safety. The development of Automatic Target Recognition on today’s battlefields could be similar to that refined through years of work with Lane Keeping Assist (LKAS) technologies. So while the dream of heterogeneous swarms of drones may not yet be feasible today, the technology and expertise is already in place to make rapid advances in automating specific areas relevant to the tactical and operational edge.
Validation of vehicle behavior: The automotive industry has implemented a robust verification and validation approach to ensuring that the continued development of autonomous systems and behaviors follows a very specific and traceable Operational Design Domain, or ODD. The ODD is a core pillar of development, which enables more efficient development and the traceability of problems to conduct root cause analysis and allows for the establishment of higher degrees of trust in these systems.
Quality feedback and efficient development: The automotive industry has experienced numerous pain points in developing autonomous vehicles at scale, such as data management, triage, fleet management, and utilizing simulation to augment and increase the speed of development. Successful companies implement a continuous cycle for development, testing, validation, and deployment to ensure an ever-improving and sustainable product which can adapt to changing environments.
But moving humans off the loop is not the only “old paradigm” that needs to go. Incorporating levels of AI and autonomy to augment human-centric manual processes in the loop will need to be met with a parallel development cycle to complement the continuous development of new technology and integration of that technology into new tactics to improve AFSOC’s competitive edge on the battlefield.
The future is here with software-defined systems capable of adapting capabilities to meet changing enemy tactics. Similar to adopting tactics changes in camouflage, denial and deception, adaptive schemes of maneuver, or the introduction of new weapons onto the battlefield, the development cycle feeding software-defined systems will need to move closer to the edge. The relationship and proximity of engineering teams capable of implementing efficient, effective, and iterative software employment will be critical to their success.