A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors. Graphic courtesy of Raytheon.
With Project Convergence, the Army has sought to further its integration into the Joint Force and change the way it fights, with an eye toward greater speed, range, and accuracy — particularly for long-range precision fires. Army leadership is looking particularly to close the gaps around sensor-generated intelligence — specifically how it’s sensed, made sense, and acted upon.
To that end, Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) was selected in June for a competitive, prototype phase in the continued development of the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. Awarded under an Other Transaction Agreement, TITAN seeks to turn battlefield intelligence into targeting information. A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors.
In particular, the tactical ground station aims to support long-range precision fires, a key ambition of Project Convergence and a defining element of Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).
The ability to make sense of sensor data and use it to drive battlefield decisions “is the critical component that is leading the way for all-domain operations,” said Chuck Taylor, vice president of Decisive Ground Operations for RI&S’ Army and Special Operations portfolio. Ideally, it should be possible to use any data from any sensor in any domain in order to identify high-payoff targets — “and that is what the TITAN node does at the tactical edge.”
Under this approach, input from a range of sources will be fed into the TITAN system, which will then apply artificial intelligence to process that data. Combining different types of data with the support of AI, “speeds up the decision-making process and the accuracy about where a target is in order to put an effect on it,” said Scott McGleish, executive director for Space and C2 Systems at RI&S.
With this approach enabling long-range precision fires, the Army will be able “to see farther than we’ve ever done before. We’re going to effect further than we ever have,” Taylor said.
All sensor data from all services
The Army’s move to a cloud-like environment will help enable TITAN and unlock the information sharing possibilities specifically for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data.
“When you’re plugging in into this environment, where you have intelligent search engines that are operating at scale, you’re going to change the way that each one of the services are actually ingesting this information,” Taylor said.
Near-simultaneous ingestion of sensor data from satellites, aircraft, and ground and naval sensors “is one critical component enabling not only long-range precision fires, but all forms of operational maneuver,” he said. “This is going to be enabling ‘near real-time, all the time.’ That’s a major contribution to joint all-domain operations.”
This, of course, will require a high degree of coordination. An effective use of TITAN will require extensive interplay between Army and the other armed forces in order to create that holistic picture.
Other government agencies and even coalition partners will need to provide that data, and the Army will need to focus on getting those gears to mesh.
“When you look at release authority, when you look at the rules of engagement, how is that all going to be processed in a timely manner?” McGleish noted. “There’s a lot of policy in there and a lot of inner workings that will have to get figured out between organizations.”
Raytheon for its part is looking to deliver technologies that will make those handoffs as seamless as possible.
“Modular, open-systems architecture is the bare minimum that we’re going for,” Taylor said. Regardless of the source of the data, “our algorithms and the systems that we’re using can ingest it and process it. That’s a key part of the ‘joint’ in this joint or coalition environment.”
Raytheon owns the kill chain
It takes a high degree of mission know-how to deliver on that promise. Raytheon executives point to their deep engagement in every aspect of the system as proof of their expertise here.
“Literally every sensor that’s going into this system is a Raytheon product,” said McGleish. “We own the whole kill chain. The ability to synthesize all those components “is a very strong qualification that the company has.”
At the same time, Raytheon is partnering with organizations with specialized capabilities to support certain needs such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“We are bringing in the best-of-breed in terms of human-machine integration,” he said, noting that is significant because it ensures that TITAN never takes the human out of the loop. Rather, “we’re empowering humans in the loop.”
Decades of experience now directed at TITAN
When all those pieces come together, the effect will be to enable commanders to make better sense of the battlefield, and to automate much of the work around target recognition. While machine-driven support for targeting seems like a high-stakes proposition, Raytheon execs make the case that their solution can meet the challenge.
A target intelligence package will analyze movements based on established tactics, techniques, and procedures. It will apply predictive analytics to understand the enemy’s actions.
A simple example: “An adversary typically turns left but this time they’ve turned right. That now becomes more of a concern from an offensive-threat perspective,” McGleish explained. With analytics accelerated by machine learning, that action then will trigger an alert.
At first soldiers will likely cross-check those alerts to ensure they are avoiding collateral damage. Meanwhile, the system itself will be training on its own outputs, ever refining its accuracy.
“Our commanders are going to learn over time to trust the capabilities that are put in front of them,” he said. “In the beginning there’s going to be some hesitation about how accurate it is, but as this develops and gets stronger, that percentage of inaccuracy is going to decrease.”
As they become more comfortable with the accuracy of TITAN’s outputs, they will be able to make quicker tactical decisions, with an ever-higher level of confidence.
From Raytheon’s perspective, TITAN represents the coming together of an established multi-domain portfolio of capabilities. This includes secure communications, advanced sensors, software, and smart effectors.
All this draws support from the company’s long-term investment in algorithms that connect the dots between sensors and sense-making. Raytheon has “decades of experience in taking all of the types of signals that are required to do the activities that we have done in the air defense community. Now we’re directing that into the TITAN system, ” Taylor said.
That deep history is key to the company’s trust proposition, its underlying argument that the outputs for TITAN will be accurate and reliable. “These are proven capabilities that we have, and now we’re expanding and building on those,” Taylor said. “We’re not starting from zero here.”
Enabling the Army of 2030
Raytheon will bring all this to life in the course of a 14-month prototype phase. During that time, “we’ll have increased maturity in the software,” McGleish said. At the end of the prototype phase, “we expect to have it on an advanced system platform, which is an FMTV (Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles), integrated with a shelter and user stations for soldiers.”
A space-ground kit will integrate the space-based data in a secure environment, “so they will be able to get the different feeds in there, while also crossing over to other government agencies besides DOD,” he said.
All this, in turn, will not just help commanders do their jobs more effectively. It will fundamentally reshape Army operations, in line with the big-picture goals laid out under Project Convergence and JADC2.
“TITAN is going to enable the Army of 2030 in multi-domain operations,” Taylor said. “This is the first time that we’ve got real confluence in bringing data from national to tactical, with tactical being able to influence both the operational and strategic. It is one of the Army’s premier enablers that supports JADC2.”
The Army itself has expressed an eagerness to bring this new capability out into the field.
In a TITAN-enabled future, the Army will be processing more data faster than its adversaries. Fewer people will be needed to parse vastly more information in much shorter timeframes, with a handful of individuals doing in minutes what used to take a team of analysts hours to accomplish.
With AI-driven insights, those outputs will include predictive analytics, giving commanders greater decision-making capabilities, and those insights will only get better the longer the machine learning runs. “It’ll get smarter over time,” McGleish said. “That confidence level is only going to increase.”
