As Lockheed Martin [LMT] marches down a path to better integrate key commercial technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence into its products for the warfighter, the company’s boss has also tasked his team with applying these capabilities to other national threats, such as fighting the increasing number of large wildfires.
James Taiclet, chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, said the company is looking at how to integrate sensing, command and control, and existing assets together to predict if a forest fire is going to start and if it does, how best to detect and then stop it.
Satellites can be used to sense the start of the fire and where it is spreading, and artificial intelligence-enabled command and control can help prepare for an event and respond and task assets, he said on Wednesday during a discussion with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The final piece is the assets to deploy against the fire, which Lockheed Martin already has with its Firehawk helicopters and C-130 aircraft, he said.
The combination of “out-of-control wildfires and forest fires” and the resulting loss of forest that absorbs carbon “is kind of a collision of…human security, economic security and climate security,” Taiclet said.
The current solutions to fighting these fires are fragmented between the states and counties, which don’t have enough assets either, he said.
“So, my challenge to our team is…we should be able to do a product and present it to our customer, whether it’s the Interior Department or the Commerce Department, and offer them firefighting-as-a-service,” Taiclet said. “We could own the assets, we can make the helicopters, we can make the C-130s, we can send up the satellite, and sell it by the month, or sell it by the fire. But there should be a national solution that’s more creative than what we have today. And why aren’t we leading the charge on this?”
Taiclet added that “There should be a technology roadmap” for this.
The government’s buying mechanisms aren’t set up for such a business model, he said. For Lockheed Martin to finance its investment here would require the government to subscribe to the service, but “they have a really hard time with the 10-year subscription that we would need to finance that,” he said.