It takes just a moment to add a new app to your phone, but adding a sensor to a military radar display takes years. That’s why air-defense troops must bounce between multiple systems, wasting precious seconds as they scramble to identify incoming drones.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to a recent experiment led by U.S. Central Command.
In just two weeks, private companies managed to integrate multiple sensors onto a single display that Army troops tested in upstate New York—thanks in part to CENTCOM officers who paved the way by negotiating past bureaucratic blocks and assuaging company execs worried about intellectual property rights. While the tech won’t be sent to the Middle East just yet, officials hope it will serve as a building block for future efforts.
The event began with a week in which companies worked out how their devices would share data to a display. Then, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4, soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division tested the rig at Fort Drum against “adversary” drones. The unit was selected to test the kit because it currently provides counter-drone support in the Middle East.
Army air-defense leaders have said that it takes multiple sensors to identify enemy drones, which can approach friendly forces in a variety of directions, speeds, and courses.
Putting all those sensors onto one platform is typically an arduous process, said Master Sgt. Clark Davis, senior non-commissioned officer for CENTCOM’s chief technology office.
“If you look at program-of-record systems through the acquisition and software development timeframes, most systems take 18 to 24 months to integrate anything—and that’s fast” for the Defense Department, Davis said.
One previous attempt to integrate a company’s sensor into an existing Terminal High Altitude Area Defense radar took 24 months, added Maj. Bryan Cercy, who works with Davis.
In principle, integrating multiple displays onto a single screen should be simple, said Schuyler Moore, CENTCOM’s chief technology officer. Private companies do such things all the time, such as when mobile developers share their applications on a phone’s operating system.
But the Defense Department isn’t used to it, Moore said.
“The department hasn’t necessarily always had to flex that muscle of doing it really quickly in the way that the tech sector has,”she said.
One obstacle may be technical talent. Age is another problem, with some sensors having been built decades ago before it became standard to make it easy to share data, said Col. Nate Huston, CENTCOM’s director of innovation. Getting them to interact with a brand-new display is like “trying to use your first-gen iPhone in today’s world,” he said.
To change that, the Defense Department needs to get better at encouraging companies to develop products that can be swapped out, Huston said. “We just have to think more and more creatively about how we incentivize interoperability.”
Bureaucratic hurdles were another factor, as were companies hesitant to share data lest they lose intellectual property.
“We were working through a lot of concerns,” Cercy said.
He credited Army senior leaders’ focus on the problem for helping to get companies on board.
The resulting system will not deploy to the Middle East just yet, said Moore. However, it sets the stage for a second effort that will focus on helping soldiers identify threats faster amid the many signals pinging on their screens. It’s the sort of effort that could help prevent deadly attacks like the January one that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded dozens more in Jordan. The Wall Street Journal reported that air-defense troops misidentified the enemy drone as a friendly one.
“The second piece will be to take all of the data that we have pulled from this week and start working on that quicker tag of hostile or non-hostile,” she said.
While the sensor systems that CENTCOM tried in the recent experiment are built for the larger drones that soldiers face in the Middle East, the platform for sharing sensors could also eventually integrate sensors for the smaller first-person-view drones common in Ukraine, Moore added.
“We’ve discovered in conversations with a lot of the vendors that they have the ability to drop down to smaller sizes if we were to give them the chance,” she said.
Moore said her team is also closely focused on what Ukraine is doing against drones, and has talked multiple times with Security Group Assistance Ukraine, the U.S.-led body that coordinates aid for Ukraine.
“We have, in many ways, been watching Ukraine for the last three years as it goes through Christmas future of what we would experience in our theater,” she said.
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