WASHINGTON — Aerospace titan Lockheed Martin has flight-tested what could become a new artificial intelligence feature on its F-35 Lightning fighter, designed to identify unknown contacts for the pilot, the company announced this morning.
“The successful demonstration … marks the first time a tactical AI model has been used in flight to generate an independent Combat ID on the pilot’s display,” the company said in its release.
The Lockheed release was sparse on details of how the AI works, but it said that during a test at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, “a Lockheed Martin-built and trained AI/machine learning model resolved ID ambiguities among emitters, improving situational awareness and reducing pilot decision making latency.” In a military context, “emitters” typically refers to radio-frequency emissions from communications systems and radars, as opposed to infrared or optical sensing.
The AI identification algorithm was compact enough to run on the F-35’s onboard computers. Then, back on the ground, Lockheed said engineers “used an automated tool to label new emitters, retrain the AI model to learn the new emitter class within minutes, and reload the updated model for the next flight, all in the same mission planning cycle,” the release said.
Lockheed developed the system, which it calls Project Overwatch, on its own initiative using Internal Research And Development (IRAD) funding, rather than for a specific Air Force contract, a spokesperson confirmed to Breaking Defense.
Since the F-35 is a stealth fighter designed to engage adversaries from much farther away than the human eye can see, the pilot relies on software to turn complex sensor readings into easily identifiable icons. The more sophisticated the software, the more quickly and clearly it can present the information to the pilot, who can then focus on making use of the information to survive instead of making sense of confusing data.
Identifying unknown emitters this way is a major preoccupation for modern militaries: A novel radio-frequency transmission can indicate anything from an entirely new threat to a well-known radar switching to a different mode. The Air Force runs a global system to take in data on such emissions, transmit it back to the analysts at the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., and then send updated “Mission Data Files” to aircraft around the world. For older aircraft not designed with modern software in mind, this process can take months, but for an ever-growing number of systems, the 350th can run through it in hours.
Lockheed seems to be pitching the AI as a significant upgrade to the existing system.
“This is a demonstration of 6th Gen technology brought to a 5th Gen platform,” said its VP for F-35 combat systems, Jake Wertz. Those buzzwords boil down to arguing that Overwatch gives the “fifth generation” F-35 at least some capabilities equivalent to the next-generation F-47, being built by rival Boeing.