Lockheed Martin on Monday said it tested its DIAMONDShield battle management system in the Navy’s recent Valiant Shield 2022 exercise in the Pacific Ocean near Guam.
The ninth Valiant Shield training activity that occurs every other year ended on June 17. It focuses on joint training and multi-domain operation in a blue-water environment among various U.S. forces and this year took place in the Joint Region Marianas, which includes Palau, Naval Base Guam, Andersen Air Force Base, and the Mariana Island Range Complex.
Under this experiment, Lockheed Martin’s DIAMONDShield system was paired with four Virtualized Aegis Weapon System (VAWS) nodes deployed across hundreds of miles.
Lockheed Martin worked with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to experiment with using artificial intelligence to allow faster decision-making at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. The company argued this allows the Navy to make decisions in seconds or minutes rather than hours.
In this exercise the company posted 14 engineers in the field to integrate DIAMONDShield and the VAWS into a series of offensive and defensive scenarios that incorporated the Lockheed Martin High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE).
“DIAMONDShield is a suite of software applications that leverages Artificial Intelligence in the Command & Control cycle. DIAMONDShield provides operators the ability to strategize, target, plan, task, execute and assess Joint operations,” Andrew Cook, Lockheed Martin’s technical lead supporting Valiant Shield, told Defense Daily.
Lockheed Martin said the AI technology in DIAMONDShield analyzed operational command and control data in real-time during dynamic fires to provide commanders with “decision aids to recommend assets to respond to incoming threats.”
Cook told Defense Daily this means DIAMONDShield provides options as recommendations “based on operator pre-planned parameters and decision automation can be scaled based on their needs.”
He said the exercise goal was to display the recommended course of action and relevant information that went into the decision-making process.
“The key is that the recommendations were dynamically updated in real-time to provide optimal solutions, ensuring that the decision makers had the most up-to-date information,” Cook continued.
After commanders decided how to engage, the VAWS combat system routed targeting data and orders to front-line assets like the HIMARS and PAC-3 MSE.
“Using machine-to-machine interfaces, VAWS transmitted the information digitally across existing military service data stovepipes—a concept known as coordinating digital force orders,” the company said.
Cook said Lockheed Martin paired DIAMONDShield with the VAWS and used its certified fires capability to disseminate orders based on how the selected shooter expects to receive it currently.
VAWS is a version of the Aegis tactical software deployed on cruisers and destroyers scaled down and tailored for a modular application. Cook said VAWS uses modern software architectures to decouple the software from the hardware, allowing the Aegis software to be used on a hardware akin to the size of a briefcase as opposed to a refrigerator-sized device on a ship.
“While the Aegis configurations on ships have strict requirements on how it’s deployed to maintain its overall certification, experimental nodes enable opportunities to bring some of the Fire Control capability to non-traditional Aegis users,” Cook said.
This includes functionality like disseminating firing orders, calculating predicted fire control opportunities and coordinating maritime targeting.
Therefore, in this case the company said a Marine end user was able to execute the commander’s intent without manually translating the order into Marine doctrine, regardless of which service it came from.
Lockheed Martin argued this saved user time since they did not have to read coordinates over a radio and reduced error without the chance of misinterpreting spoken instructions.
Cook underscored the planning automation in DIAMONDShield that normally consists of a manually intensive process “has shown a reduction from 70+ hours to a few hours or sometimes minutes.”
He added that during the Valiant Shield experiment several applications within DIAMONDShield were able to support the decision making process by mining through initial plans and real-time data updates as the battle unfolded to provide recommended courses of action in support of Joint Fires.
While Cook could not disclose any specific time improvements, he described some of the specific benefits of this capability.
“Being able to automate moving target coordinates from one system to another rather than manually inputting can save time, especially when considering multiple targets. These processes typically take a lot of time with operator manual input so the goal was to automate as much of this as possible, while enabling the operator to still be aware of the process and provide them the ability to override if needed.”
Cook also said they used four VAWS in the experiment because it allowed multiple echelons of command within the Joint Task Force to “digitally connect and experiment with land, maritime, and expeditionary units across the theater as the foundation for a Joint Fires Network.”
At two of the locations, DIAMONDShield was added to enhance command and control of the air domain from those nodes.
“The experiment was able to support integration of both offensive and defensive fires so the use of a particular effector was dependent upon available assets and the optimal course of action for mission accomplishment,” Cook added.
This was the fifth exercise Lockheed Martin has worked on with Indo-Pacific Command, starting with Talisman Sabre in 2019. Each exercise builds on the last one’s lessons learned to validate and enhance capabilities to aid in Joint All-Domain Operations.
“Through experiments like Valiant Shield, we are learning collaboratively with our customers to advance Joint All Domain Operations, with the intent of delivering capability faster to the warfighter,” Joe Ferrara, Lockheed Martin’s advanced concepts director supporting the exercise, added in a statement.
“Real-time feedback from the operators that live this daily is invaluable. You see what works well for them, what features they might struggle with, and what we could do to make their jobs easier and faster. As an industry partner, we are constantly trying to understand the most pressing needs, engineer solutions to them, and incorporate feedback on what we built. The faster we can get that feedback, the faster we can turn around new innovations,” Cook said in a company statement.