Today’s evolving battlespace demands integrated and real-time operational intelligence requirements to achieve mission success. Government agencies and departments are becoming more interdependent to execute their missions. Interoperability is a key enabler for finding and maintaining custody of high-value objects, such as ships and aircraft, across domains and joint forces. This requires the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of War (DoW) to work jointly to improve object identification confidence within mission timelines.
We asked BAE Systems’ Engineering Director Jeff Rice and Director of Business Winning and Strategy Patrick Lutali from our C4ISR Systems business about object custody solutions. They share mission needs, technology challenges, and methods to implement object custody today.
What is object custody and why is it crucial in the modern battlespace?
Lutali: Object custody means the ability to track and maintain accurate identification of high-value objects at all times. It ensures that targets are identified, tracked, and engaged over extended distances and durations.
This is essential for government departments and agencies to execute their missions effectively, particularly in the context of the long-range kill web (LRKW).
LRKW refers to the sequence of events and processes involved in detecting, identifying, tracking, targeting, and engaging adversarial targets from a distance. For the tactical warfighter community this is usually depicted as several steps: find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. Intelligence operators may also refer to this as the generalized Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) set of activities. In both cases the mission is carried out by using a systems-of-systems enterprise made up of sensors, platforms, weapons, and communication networks. Closing a kill web means the completion of a mission.
What are the key mission challenges associated with object custody?
Lutali: That’s an important question to address. The DoW and IC need to develop strategies for improving mission execution across the LRKW. The challenges include automatic target recognition advancements, network availability and throughput, and prioritization coordination. These challenges arise from the need for timely coordination between departments and agencies, the increasing number of objects to track, and the growing amount of data sources. These can be categorized by interoperability, prioritization, and human work capacity which I can break down further.
- Interoperability: For joint forces to execute missions successfully, timely coordination between departments and agencies is required. This pushes systems to integrate in a way not currently achieved.
- Prioritization: With multiple stakeholders requesting collection for their prioritized high-value objects, new solutions must be developed to assess these requests in vastly shorter timelines than the current systems.
- Human work capacity: Due to the increasing number of objects to maintain custody of as well as the growing number of data sources, analysts need solutions to make sense of data faster. This will reduce cognitive workload and enables analysts to focus on the right information at the right time.
How is technology enabling object custody and what are some of the technical challenges?
Rice: Addressing these high-level mission challenges requires understanding the technical challenges that underpin them. Technology can play a significant role in improving object custody by leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation. These solutions can help analysts process vast amounts of data, reduce cognitive workload, and focus on critical information.
The need to modernize current tactics, techniques, and procedures stems from expanding demands. This includes the growth in information sources as well as increasing operational speed. A shared understanding of what the technical issues are among government stakeholders and industry is needed to build the right solutions. Some of these technical challenges we see are around automation. Let me share what that means.
- Workflow modernization: Across the IC and DoW communities, analysts are working with design and development teams to re-examine workflows with the goal of significantly reducing the time it takes to identify, request collection, process, and fuse information to maintain object custody. Trusted automation can triage the data to not miss critical indicators.
- Automatic object recognition: Techniques for the automatic recognition of objects provide the ability to comb through increasing amounts of information. Although machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches have advanced, there are still many challenges associated with the wide number of objects of interest where object custody is important.
- Fusion/data ontologies: The demand to resolve data from multiple information sources into a single entity with high confidence and accuracy drives the requirement for new data fusion techniques. The combination of automated recognition and fusion highlight the need to make object definitions understood by all users. For instance, each service and agency may currently use different standards which impacts how systems communicate with each other. If one department calls an object a “car” and the other calls it an “automobile” this can ultimately affect speed and relevance of information. This reduces the confidence of an object’s identification.
- Data transport: Moving vast amounts of data across networks is difficult, yet essential for maintaining object custody. Careful consideration must be given to network designs, data management locations, migration decisions, and approaches that compute the value of information. This can be used to determine the most important data to move within available bandwidth.
Test, evaluation, and fielding timelines drive these initiatives to maintain a strong focus on technology insertion, community adoption, and use of new tools.
With this challenging landscape, how is BAE Systems approaching and implementing object custody today?
Rice: Object custody is a multipronged approach that involves investing in a range of topics across all technology challenges. We are already producing automated solutions by bringing in a wide range of data sources to achieve highly accurate object custody. These technologies are accelerating the development and fielding of new capabilities. Some advancements we are focused on include:
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence: Leveraging machine learning and autonomy-based solutions can help automate significant portions of object custody reporting workflows, provide rapid data exploitation, and anticipate activity through predictive analytics. These algorithms can sort through the increasing volume of information to find objects of interest for intelligence analysts and warfighters.
- Open system architecture: Adherence to open standards-based architectures remains fundamental for the rapid deployment of new solutions to operational environments. Applying leading-edge research in an open architecture allows for the selection and adaption of algorithms from across the object custody user community.
- Integrated data approach: Object custody increases the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration in how data is handled. With this comes increased focus on data standards, alignment of data object definitions, and solutions that can more readily bridge between them.
- Modeling and demonstrations: Modeling and simulation in operationally realistic environments has come to the forefront to help accelerate the fielding of new technologies. Testing in hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop environments allows for immediate feedback to development teams, leaving fewer challenges to be discovered in field testing.
BAE Systems is already creating next-generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance exploitation and resource management systems which use multiple-source intelligence signal processing, all-domain analysis and data fusion, predictive analytics, machine learning, and automation to fill gaps in today’s military intelligence analysis capability.