As commercial technologies become more advanced and widely available, adversaries are rapidly developing capabilities that put our forces at risk. To counter these threats, the U.S. military is developing systems-of-systems concepts in which networks of manned and unmanned platforms, weapons, sensors, and electronic warfare systems interact over robust satellite and tactical communications links. These approaches offer flexible and powerful options to the warfighter, but the complexity introduced by the increase in the number of employment alternatives creates a battle management challenge.
Current battle management systems often lack the benefit of automated aids to help warfighters comprehend and adapt to dynamic situations. Adding more elements to the SoS architecture—more unmanned aircraft, missiles and mission systems—will exacerbate the battle management challenge.
DARPA’s DBM program seeks to develop appropriately automated decision aids to assist airborne battle managers and pilots with managing air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. Specifically, the decision aids will be software tools integrated into each aircraft’s onboard systems to provide distributed adaptive planning and control and situation understanding.
Further complicating matters, in future conflicts U.S. forces may face degradation or denial of critical communications capabilities essential for coordination and shared situation understanding. Adversaries like Russia and China have developed sophiticated electronic warfare environments. With both the complexity of coordinating innovative systems of systems, and the sophistication of adversary capabilities expected to grow, automated decision aids become vital.
In search of a fix, BAE Systems is collaborating with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Their emerging solution, called distributed battle management (DBM), promises to enable complex teamwork between manned and unmanned aviation even in comms-deprived environments.
“To solve this challenge, we’ve developed cutting-edge, semi-autonomous software in a category called Distributed Battle Management (DBM), which is the process of providing timely and relevant information to operators and pilots when communication is not assured, so they can better manage and control air-to-air and air-to-ground combat in contested environments,” says BAE. Our automated, on-board software enhances mission effectiveness by providing warfighters with shared situational understanding, interchangeable roles, coordinated objectives for teams of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles in communications denied environments, and compressed, prioritized data transfer when communications are available.
BAE Systems has developed automated, on-board software, which is designed to provide information to the combatant in communications-denied environments. “The lack of automated decision aids severely hinders operators and pilots from making critical decisions with limited communications so they can adapt to combat scenarios,” said David Hiltz, director of the Planning and Control Technologies Directorate at BAE Systems. “Our DBM software delivers these automated decision aids that provide mission execution options and the ability to maintain a consistent mission representation and status across all platforms, which allows warfighters to make better, faster combat decisions to ensure mission safety and completion.”
In 11 days of flight testing in 2018 DARPA and AFRL demonstrated the DBM in seven live flights. Even when deprived of full comms capabilities, the system delivers shared situational understanding and coordinated objectives between multiple teams of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles. The DBM program is slated to run until July 2019, with a series of lab and field test events expected. Planners will decide then whether to field the capability and in what context.
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