A hackathon produces AI-enabled cJADC2 solutions for the battlefield
Whether on the front lines, at battlefield command headquarters, or in the Pentagon, the military’s success largely depends on its ability to be effective at combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (cJADC2). But cJADC2 requires up-to-the-minute battlefield data from a wide range of sources, along with the ability to pull out and analyze the most relevant data.
Leidos recently contributed to software systems that advance the military's ability to both get more real-time front-line data and wring more meaningful analysis out of it. And rapidly, Leidos experts on the development teams did it in five days.
The solution is a “combat reporter” — a system capable of sifting through all the noise, finding what matters, and summarizing it in language that a commander can quickly digest.
It happened at the BRAVO 11 Bits2Effects hackathon, organized by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Chief Digital and AI Office, Defense Innovation Unit, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Army Pacific Command, and the U.S. Air Force.
“The hackathon was a chance to build something in five days that moves the needle on important use cases,” says Charles Ott, a Leidos solutions architect specializing in national security applications, one of the Leidos experts who participated in the hackathon.
The hidden meaning in M2M
Ott's specific challenge was helping commanders pull meaningful information out of a vast sea of battlefield data. He notes that most of the data pouring in are machine-to-machine (M2M) — or generated by devices swapping acknowledgments and other low-level communications tasks of little significance to a commander.
“Just think about the number of messages zipping around the battlefield coming from everything from jets to hand-held radios,” says Ott. “There’s a portion of those messages that have important meaning to someone who needs a picture of the battle, but it’s not in a human-readable form.”
The solution that Ott and others on his team at the hackathon worked out is something he refers to as a “combat reporter”—a system capable of sifting through all the noise, finding what matters, and summarizing it in language that a commander can quickly digest. It’s a solution built around a large language model (LLM), a type of generative AI that can process and produce information in plain language.
“The LLM can quickly learn how to take live data from tactical systems and bubble it up into analysis,” says Ott. “Then a commander can query the system in plain English to get answers to questions like what are the high-priority targets, and who is engaging what target with what resources.”
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Ott notes that working with LLMs and other AI requires vigilance against “drift” — the tendency of AI over time to start producing occasional false or misleading responses. The challenge of building trustworthy AI is one taken on by Leidos’ Framework for AI Resilience and Security (FAIRS). This method approaches AI so the results are predictable and resilient and don’t put humans or missions at risk. Ott adds that there are several ways to achieve that extra reliability with an LLM, including retraining the model with better data, giving the model less leeway to be “creative,” or turning to a different LLM.
Weaving a resilient communications web
Ott points out that being able to pull battlefield data into an LLM requires ensuring that the different machines transmitting the data aren’t using proprietary protocols that the system can’t access.
“Open architectures that provide interoperability are becoming more important, especially to execute cJADC2,” he says.
In fact, coping with the different protocols that might be encountered on the battlefield was the aim of the second application Leidos experts tackled at the hackathon. Joint-developed by Edson Dos Santos, a Leidos senior software engineer, the effort was built around STITCHES — a DARPA-developed project now overseen by the U.S. Air Force that can automatically develop software to connect two machines speaking different protocols.
“It’s a way to find a communications path from point A to point B,” explains Dos Santos, “even if the data has to first be translated into many different protocols to get there.”
To show how STITCHES could be put to good use on the battlefield, Dos Santos and his hackathon team came up with software that can provide real-time communications between aircraft and artillery units relying on incompatible communications protocols.
“Now a jet can tell the artillery unit what targets are in and out of its range, and the artillery unit can redirect an aircraft to a different target,” he says.
The software can plug in the people at the tip of the spear and turn all of them into cJADC2 contributors.
Edson Dos Santos
Leidos Software Engineer
This protocol conversion capability can turn the various communications chains on the battlefield into a single, large communications web, says Dos Santos. One enormous advantage to that web is the ability to find ways around electronic jamming attacks.
“A web is resistant to that threat,” he explains. “If the system detects that a communications path is blocked, it can reroute the data through a different path in the web to get around the jamming.”
Faster than agile
Beyond the individual applications developed at the hackathon, points out Dos Santos, the effort demonstrated how quickly software that may be badly needed on the battlefield can be developed.
“Traditional software can take months or years to field because of the time it takes to develop software, integrate and test in labs, and ultimately deploy it to units,” he says. “Instead, we need to be faster than agile to solve problems at the speed of the battlefield."
One way to speed up the development of key battlefield applications, suggests Dos Santos, is to create a series of templates for different types of applications that can be quickly adapted to specific needs. “When a new problem comes up, we can automate much of the development by using the right template,” he says.
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Another strategy, he says, is to embed some software engineers near the front lines so they can get immediate, first-hand feedback from the people who need the solution.
If you’re not getting information directly from the people who best understand the problem, then you’ll be fixing what other people think the problem is. If you’re there, you can solve things in real time.
Edson Dos Santos
Leidos Software Engineer
Of course, not all software engineers would be eager to get that close to the action. But Dos Santos insists he’s ready.
“I’ve been in the heat and mud, and I don’t mind,” he says. “I’d want to be there to have people tell me what their pain points are, and provide solutions to fix them.”
