NAVSPECWARCOM YIR
U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO BY TECH. SGT. GREGORY BROOK
U.S. NAVY PHOTO
Above: U.S. Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) personnel emerge from the sea at twilight during a training exercise. Right: U.S. Navy SEAL team members conduct a maritime interdiction operation boarding a vessel to conduct search and seizure during Exercise Trident 17 on Hurlburt Field, Florida, May 10, 2017.
NSW has a truly unique culture where excellence is the expected norm and innovation is continuously pursued at all levels. Innovation is in our core values, our ethos and, quite frankly, in our DNA. As such, our highly creative force is constantly feeding the innovation of tactics, techniques, procedures, and utilization of technologies adapted to the battlefield. It is a culture that is the envy of even the most innovative corporations. Because innovation is in our DNA, we do not only focus on incremental or sustaining innovation, we have a team and processes to focus on our pursuit of “Big I” Innovation. That is the categorization of our innovation efforts focused on NSW’s strategy to develop future capabilities to disrupt the future battlefield across the spectrum of conflict, to ensure we are not disrupted by the adversary, and to provide unique and niche solutions to our nation’s hardest security problems. Our “Big I” efforts also include in-depth pursuit of applications of accelerating technology sectors to our existing capabilities to provide immediate exponential improvements of 10 times or greater to increase our mission effectiveness, reduce operational risk, increase readiness, and increase business efficiency. By harnessing and capitalizing on commercial investment in specific technology sectors, we are able to see those trends in development and application and then apply them to our operational imperatives and mission objectives to develop pathways for partnered development of dual-use technologies. Our efforts in artificial intelligence/machine learning (ML) and autonomy, augmented and virtual reality, and the application of Internet of Things are focused on hyper-enabling NSW-Joint SOF operations. This comes in many applications, one of which is autonomy of robots, drones, and undersea vehicles to conduct mission critical tasks both today and in more challenging operational environments of the future. Our operational imperatives of increasing precision
with certainty, reducing risk, and moving from a constrained footprint or scarcity model to an abundance model, drive some of our early investments in these sectors. In the backdrop, our SOF operator as the leader, mature decision-maker, and tactical expert requires an interface to effectively utilize the technology growing in complexity and autonomy. The hyper-enabled NSW team will be a human-machine team in many ways that we previously teamed with other capabilities such as the Combat K-9, but will be more complex. It will be saturated with data and intelligence and will require a greater understanding of how to increase the speed of decision making while decreasing the cognitive load on a leader under combat conditions. We see AI/ML as a significant path to autonomy of a suite of networked systems to enable battlespace awareness, increase capacity of a small SOF team, automate traditional operator/enabler functions, enable operations at a distance, and reduce the risk to our force. Our work in AR/VR has multiple fronts. First, we are focusing on our training, mission planning, and rehearsal simulation environment. Being able to replicate a training environment as many times as desired without overtaxing our high-demand, low-density assets has a significant rate of return. This is driving our way ahead for AR/VR in training for tasks involving Joint Terminal Attack Controller, Static Line Jump Master, etc. As our operator adoption of this technology
In some cases, it is about the creative use of technologies in adaptive manners and our ability to effectively ideate, explore, experiment, and then rapidly assimilate the technology for our advantage. 39
