In future wars, the Army expects to fight on complex multi-domain battlefields in which almost every piece of equipment is connected to all others through a battlefield network.
Vehicles, weapons, individual soldier gear down to radios and night-vision goggles all are increasingly networked and present innumerable access points for enemies to invade and disrupt the Army’s “internet of battlefield things,” or IoBTs.
Now the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has launched a program to develop ways of understanding, employing and exploiting IoBTs in future conflict.
“The ability of the Army to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the vast array of internetworked things that will be present of the future battlefield is critical to maintaining and increasing its competitive advantage,” an ARL announcement says.
“The explosive growth of technologies in the commercial sector that exploits the convergence of cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile communications, networks of data-gathering sensors, and artificial intelligence presents an imposing challenge for the Army.”
Technologies considered part of the Internet of Things (IoT) provide current and potential future enemies with sophisticated technology, but the Army cannot find sufficient counter-technologies in the commercial world.
ARL on March 3 launched a broad, collaborative initiative to develop technologies and systems that will allow the Army to both employ and exploit the Internet of Things while protecting its own networks. The lab wants to define establish a baseline IoBT for future Army operations.
As defined in the program announcement, an IoBT is a set of “interdependent or interconnected entities or ‘things’ … that are dynamically composed to meet multiple missions, tasks or goals; adapt in order to capture and process data, predict behaviors … and are likely to operate autonomously … necessarily interacting with humans, the environment and networks in order to enable predictive analytics that deliver intelligent command and control and battlefield services.”
That is a hefty, all-encompassing definition covering sensors, computers, weapons, vehicles, robots, network infrastructure and data storage and processing, intelligence and human soldiers. Basically any device that is hard-wired or connected wirelessly to a communication network like the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) or the Internet. The proliferation of those devices among adversary populations creates millions of potential bad actors with the means to access and disrupt Army battlefield communications.
“The Army must tackle wicked problems wherein objectives and constraints evolve in unpredictable ways,” ARL says. “Complexity arises from the increasing heterogeneity, connectivity, scale, dynamics, functionality and interdependence of networked elements, and from the increasing velocity and momentum of human interactions and information.”
While the Army, as a part of the U.S. military Joint Force, operates sophisticated battlefield networks like WIN-T, technology in future wars will have advanced beyond current systems. The Army will have to fight future wars under the assumption that its enemy is equally networked and that its own communications are constantly under attack.
“Events now unfold in internet time,” ARL says. “In this context, future IoBTs will be significantly more complex that today’s networked systems, and novel mathematical approaches and techniques will be needed to represent them, reason about them, understand their behaviors, and to provide predictive analytics in diverse and dynamic environments.”
The best way to generate interconnected networks of battlefield equipment and weapons is through a collaborative effort combining public and private sector research organizations, ARL says. Multi-disciplinary research will focus on three main areas: discovery, composition and adaptation of IoBTs, autonomous IoBTs to enable “intelligent” services to the Army and distributed, asynchronous processing of “things.”
The “Collaborative Research Alliance” (CRA) will consist of private sector and government researchers working jointly to solve complex problems.
“The overall objective is to develop the fundamental understanding of dynamically-composable, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs to enable predictive analytics for intelligent command and control and battlefield services,” ARL says.
Source selection for the IoBT programs will consist of two parts, according to the ARL program announcement. Interested parties are invited to submit whitepapers outlining their lines of research or potential solutions. ARL then will invite those applicants that pass muster to submit detailed proposals.
“The purpose of requesting Whitepapers is to minimize the effort associated with the production of detailed proposals for those Applicants that have little chance of being selected for funding,” ARL says.
Several informational meetings and information sessions will be held before the July proposals deadline. An award for five-years of work with an optional five-year extension should be awarded in September, according to ARLs published program schedule.
Of course, the award and contract period is subject to the availability of funds. ARL has requested $5.3 million for the core 10-year program and another $67.6 million for the as-yet unfunded “enhanced program.”