Making the 'connected battlespace' a reality

Making the 'connected battlespace' a reality
by Staff Writers
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jun 09, 2023

On a mountaintop in the Utah desert, at a demonstration for the U.S. Army, Chadwick Ford and his colleagues proved two things.

The first was that their communications system could help the military in its effort to connect the battlespace and use data to make better, faster decisions.

The other was that they were masters of the workaround.

The 48 hours leading up to the test were tough. The helicopter equipped with their system had an engine failure en route to the site. The pilot landed safely, and the team scrambled to recover their technology as they looked for another aircraft.

Nothing panned out.
Finally, after researching topographical maps and a making series of calls to local police, park services and a few other authorities, they had a solution. Rather than fly their system to the specified altitude, they would truck it there instead.

They arrived at the mountaintop and set up their equipment on the ground, only to encounter one last problem: No signal.

The system needed a little lift. The team found it in the back of their Humvee.

"There was a mop bucket. This plastic, beautiful yellow thing," said Ford, an associate director and part of the Connected Battlespace and Emerging Capabilities team at Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies business.

They put a mounting bracket on top, popped the system into place and ran the demo, transmitting targeting data to a command center more than 200 nautical miles away.

"We were able to not only meet the mission but exceed the parameters," Ford said. "What they saw was our resiliency to figure it out and make it happen with duct tape - or in this case, a mop bucket."

That demonstration, part of the Army's EDGE 22 exercise, now stands among many examples of Raytheon Technologies' work to help the U.S. Department of Defense and its allies connect the battlespace.

Here are a few others.

Sense
Typically, a sensor needs to capture a certain number of pixels to provide an identifiable picture. Raytheon Technologies' newest sensor needs only one.

That sensor, known as RAIVEN, uses artificial intelligence to boost the power of the company's existing electro-optical/infrared technology. It allows users to see up to five times farther and clearer, and to identify objects faster.

"What we're doing with RAIVEN," chief engineer Jake Ullrich said, "is adding a different element of intelligence behind each pixel."

RAIVEN identifies objects by recognizing their spectral signature - a fingerprint-like measure of the way they reflect light - and comparing it to a database. Artificial intelligence enables it to process large amounts of data quickly, giving commanders more time to make decisions.

"That's what makes RAIVEN so smart," Ullrich said. "Now we can start to ID things very, very quickly - before we can even really see them in a traditional sense."

The company plans to flight test the first version in 2024. It will be compatible with many platforms across the military domains, thanks to its use of open-systems architecture.

"We really wanted to do our part to bring as much capability to help with the joint problem between services and platforms," Ullrich said. "I'm most excited about putting this new revolutionary capability into the warfighters' hands, so that they're much more prepared, and they're safer."

Make sense
With powerful and intelligent sensors, the military will need to be able to transmit and understand more data than ever. To that end, Raytheon Technologies engineers are building what Scott McGleish calls "the brains of JADC2."

McGleish is an executive director responsible for the company's work to develop TITAN, the U.S. Army's Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node. The ground station will collect terabytes of data from sensors in space, at sea and on land, then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to translate that data into information to improve the accuracy of long-range precision fire.

"It's going to improve warfighting capabilities on the ground," said McGleish, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, "and minimize collateral damage."

The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon Technologies a contract to develop a prototype. If selected for the next phase of development, McGleish said their product could be used beyond the Army because it was designed to work on any platform, with any software, and for any branch of the service.

The team is conducting a three-month test of hardware and software on a vehicle at a military base. That follows a year of soldiers testing the system on a digital battlefield through another Raytheon Technologies product called RCADE.

RCADE uses predictive modeling to run thousands of measurable scenarios in hours rather than the weeks it would take with less advanced methods. The ability to simulate quickly and accurately shows Raytheon Technologies engineers not only build and field the technologies it takes to pull off the JADC2 initiative - they can also help military customers figure out what they need and predict how it will all work together.

"I believe that joint-scale conflict is the most challenging part of what the Department of Defense is trying to do," said Tom Goolsby, one of the creators of RCADE, "and I think we're very much at the cutting edge of enabling the joint forces to experiment with concepts to do it."

Act
The point of collecting, analyzing and sharing all this data is so militaries can decide quickly how to react. Often, that reaction includes the use of effectors, a term that includes missiles, mortars and non-kinetic weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves.

Among Raytheon Technologies' most advanced effectors is the StormBreaker Smart Weapon, an air-launched munition that can glide more than 45 miles and strike moving targets, even in severe weather that would scuttle most guidance systems. It is the first fully network-enabled weapon in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, meaning it can collect data and share it with other platforms while in flight.

"If you release the StormBreaker weapon, another pilot could take control, or you could pass it to a ground controller, and that's all enabled through that weapon's data link," said Steve Milano, director of air systems. "Further, once the weapon is in flight, it can provide what's called a 'weapon in flight target update' back to the platform or the controller so that you can make decisions based off the information the weapon is receiving."

The weapon's advanced computing and network capabilities allow his team to take what they learn at test flights and use modeling to predict how the weapon would react in millions of scenarios, with variables including the aircraft carrying it, the environment where it's operating, and the target it is seeking.

"We are continuously pushing the edge of the envelope for the weapon from its network-enabled capability, its sensing capability and its ability to acquire targets," Milano said. "These are the things that are going to come together to be the next generation of air dominance."

Bringing it together
While Raytheon Technologies engineers are working on projects that span every domain and stage of conflict, they all have the same goal of helping the military envision what's possible - and then bringing it to life.

"The biggest, the most important thing that we can do," Goolsby said, "is come at these problems from the perspective of our customer. It's been continually awesome to feel like we're helping the Department of Defense solve some of its hardest problems."