HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The new U.S. military team designed to allow the agency to see deep into a battlefield will initially work to create a sensor architecture as well as process and disseminate the vast amount of data collected by those sensors, according to the Army Futures Command Chief General James Rainey.
The Interoperable Ubiquitous Sensing Team will grow from the Assured Position, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT, taking its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanding the mission to focus on broad deep sensing capabilities.
APNT/Space CFT has ‘solved the very hard problem and that is the transition to [program managers] and [program executive offices] now, so that created some space,” Rainey said March 26 at the Association of the US Army’s World Forces Symposium.
Monteleone and four to five newly created billets will be added in Washington, D.C., because “that’s kind of the center of gravity of the detection of all the domains,” Rainey said. However, the majority of the team will remain in Huntsville, Alabama, where APNT/Space CFT is based.
The All-Domain Sensing CFT is expected to reach initial operational capability within six months, Rainey added.
While many details have yet to be finalized, Rainey said the team “will work on the detection architecture within the Army and within the joint force.”
“We’ve found ourselves in a situation where we don’t actually have a sensing problem, we have a ‘doing something’ problem with all the sensing happening across the joint force,” he explained.
Another area of focus involves processing and disseminating data from a large proliferation of different sensors to quickly understand the battlefield, which in turn helps leaders make quick operational decisions, Rainey said.
“The military cannot continue to create human analysts to keep up with the volume of data. We have to bring [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to endure,” he added. “Not to replace people, but how can we take a thousand pictures of what might be a tank and get them down to 10 or 100 that then our people can distinguish?”
Rainey noted that industry can help.
Deep sensing will also improve reconnaissance and surveillance as well as long-range fire targeting.
Platforms could also include things like high-altitude, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms, other drones, or manned spy planes with more capable sensors. The Army is experimenting with all of these possibilities.
The service is currently looking at capabilities like high-altitude balloons to determine where they might reside within formations and how units could use them at places like the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. For example, the military is experimenting with high-altitude balloons in the agency’s major Project Convergence experimentation event this month.
The Army will continue to review and evolve cross-functional teams as it continues to modernize and transition programs from development to field systems.
Army Futures Command, established more than five years ago to address the service’s most difficult modernization challenges, created cross-functional teams to focus on different capabilities the service needs to fight in a multi-domain environment against high-altitude threats. level and advanced opponents.
The original teams focused on long-range precision fire. next generation combat vehicles; future vertical lift. the network; positioning, navigation and timing; air and missile defense; soldier mortality; and the Synthetic Learning Environment. The idea was to convene a whole range of Army officials, from training and doctrine writers to support experts to acquisition officers to systems administrators, to ensure the success of a program.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist who covers land warfare for Defense News. He has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
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