FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Maj. Brandon Rose is aware that the technicalities of battlefield data transfer are the “less sexy side” of modern warfare, but, he said, they’re the kind of thing that’s “going to become the things that win or lose wars.”
“Our ability to stay ahead with our data and to inform the commander and to utilize tools to keep us out of grinding on an Excel sheet or a PowerPoint slide and actually think and stay agile mentally, that could be the difference,” Rose, G-3/5 at the XVIII Airborne Corps told Breaking Defense at the Mission Training Complex here, where the corps just finished its latest Scarlet Dragon exercise.
The XVIII has been conducting Scarlet Dragon iterations quarterly since 2020, each time refining operational capabilities and processes in the way of sharing data and closing kill chains from intelligence to targeting for data-centric warfare.
This latest version, which ran the week of March 30, experimented with incorporating commercial, rather than military-only, datasets and tasked soldiers with planning for sustaining combat operations for more than 14 days.
“A lot of it is looking at the commercial data side and comparing that to some of the tools that are already available to the corps through existing platforms. What is the viability? Can this be incorporated? That’s a big one for us,” Rose said.
Through the corps’ work with Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s invasion they discovered the need and desire for commercial data sets, learning they were behind the curve.
At the time, title policies and US code were limiting factors on what a commander could do at the time with purchased data sets.
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“Adjustments were made, observations were made and then the lawyers started having those dialogs about, well, what can we get away with and what’s legal and what’s not? Again, it just highlighted a lot of things that need to be changed with the architecture and the data structure. That was a big thing that came out of it,” Chief Warrant Officer 4 Sean Benson, senior GEOINT technical officer for XVIII Airborne Corps, told Breaking Defense.
Rose and Benson were unable to share details about Scarlet Dragon, as it’s a classified exercise, but they said each iteration is an opportunity to solve new problems.
“We’ve had to iterate and figure out what worked, what didn’t work, different pathways, different APIs [Application Programming Interface], different cross domain solutions, to find out okay, this is the best one, this is [the] more reliable one, okay, let’s turn the spigot on full blast to see what we get. That’s sort of an iterative process with the data on the commercial side,” Benson told Breaking Defense. “That’s how we pivoted a little bit to current scenarios or current events, to using that same data pathway to bring it in and then provide that context in real time.”
Data Transfer In Contested Environments
Scarlet Dragon tests not just the XVIII’s methods for sharing data, but doing so when an adversary is watching closely, looking to target them through their technical emissions.
“How are we passing data? We’ve harnessed and grabbed on to this idea of data centricity and data driven decisions, but we also have to recognize that cost of we potentially have a big footprint, so how do we minimize that, but still have access to the things that we want to do,” Rose said. “Getting down to an actual target effector, we’re trying to find ways that are low probability of intercept/low probability of detection. That’s always recognizing that the EMS [electromagnetic spectrum] is against us at all times.”
Officials explained that they are looking at the best paths given what’s available, akin to a PACE plan for communications, which stands for primary, alternate, contingency and emergency.
“That’s exactly what I’m testing with the [Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited] architecture is just that, is a PACE plan to pull in large streaming data sets,” Benson said. “I think lessons learned from current events is going to come back [and] be like, you know what, this didn’t work, we happen to be denied during these times a day or whatever. Or at least expand the understanding from a PM or a PEO perspective on what they need to invest in.”
This Scarlet Dragon already put one of the Army’s newest intelligence fusing systems through its paces to stress test how it is pushing data.
“I think we identified several issues across the way with just purely how does data move from the TITAN system or to the TITAN system, how does it interplay with some of the systems that we are using,” Rose said of the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, the Army’s next-generation ground system.
Events such as Scarlet Dragon have pushed the corps, and by extension, the Army and joint partners, to begin thinking more about these questions that might be overlooked.
“In terms of data, [there’s] a true understanding of what our data workflows look like that inform our staff processes and so our ability to understand what types of decisions the commander will need to make and then work backwards through our workflows to understand where we can find efficiencies or where there may be an alternate route that we can test,” Rose said. “It speaks to some of those lessons learned of when you’re operating in an environment where not everything is accessible, finding a way.”
Getting To A Single Dashboard
As the corps continues to refine data paths, the enduring effort of successive Scarlet Dragons will be focusing on the quality of data collected from all directorates that will eventually feed into a visualization for the commander.
A predictive logistics dashboard and visualization for commanders to increase combat power relies upon good quality data — currently a challenge.
Logistics reporting, Rose said, comes up from the lowest levels of the battlefield. By the time it gets to the corps or equivalent echelon level, that data could be 18 to 24 hours-old and inaccurate.
One of the key aspects Scarlet Dragon has always tried to explore is how does information go from low to high, Rose said. In other words, smaller units at the tactical edge that could be operating in a somewhat unclassified manner, all the way up to corps on highly sensitive systems.
In fact, they’re examining how to utilize secure but unclassified-encrypted devices at the company level to be able to feed into systems such as Maven Smart System in a more rapid manner to provide more accurate information and accounting.
“If we’re looking at how do we share information or pull logistics information or even location information from a host nation force or a partner force that isn’t operating on the same networks that we are, those cross-domain solutions, how we go from low-to-high and back-and-forth is a continual issue and it’s always something,” Rose said.