WASHINGTON — The Army has already sent so-called jailbroken systems to the Middle East as part of its ongoing 30-day hackathon, according to top officials.
The effort stems from Operation Jailbreak, a sprint that began in early May and will conclude on June 6 to open up the interfaces of legacy and new equipment with the goal of making them interoperable to share data and information. Jailbreaking is a term that refers to reworking or eliminating the manufacturer software restrictions on systems.
“We have already been pushing updates from here down to Central Command,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told reporters Thursday. “One of the first couple systems that were jailbroken was really our command and control, our C2 platform, and the ability to actually tie in a lot of the counter-UAS, the counter unmanned system, radars, cameras, and effectors. Our goal is that all the positive benefits that come out of Operation Jailbreak are in the fight within 30 days and then what the secretary has also challenged us on is what is the next sprint look like. Who should be included that from the joint force and from our partners and allies.”
Miller later clarified that given the relative pause in fighting as part of Operation Epic Fury, none of the systems sent to the region have been used in an offensive capacity yet. While only a couple of patches were sent, the goal is to get the rest there in 30 days.
Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll added, “the ‘aha’ moment for this hackathon was specifically in Germany, because the Ukrainians have become such valiant warriors … when they were showing me their Delta command operating system, a light bulb went off that everything I had seen in the previous 15, 16 months was just not as integrated and not as simple and not as effective for the warfighter.
“When I testify and talk about what we’ve learned from Ukraine, and their speed, and their flexibility, and their adaptability, fundamentally, what they’re doing is they’re doing a hackathon as a country every single day and they are breaking through any problem that they need to, to fight off the Russians, and this is our best attempt to mimic what they are doing so well,” he continued.
Driscoll noted the takeaway from the Ukrainians was the US side was not acting fast enough.
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“I would say that if we have not been able to push a lot of these, or most of these updates to CENTCOM within 30 days, we are failing,” he told reporters.
While the Ukrainians spurred the idea, the reality of the ongoing conflict with Iran also served as a real world catalyst.
Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, director of the Pathway for Innovation and Technology, told Breaking Defense during a recent visit to Fort Carson that “in this case, it became an … acute problem that because of the ongoing war, or the ongoing conflict. Counter-UAS and [Integrated Air and Missile Defense] became like, whoa, we need to do this now, we have troops in contact. We want to be able to bring in the newest and best capability rapidly into our ecosystem.”
Driscoll said the hackathon now allows the Army to take new systems and work them into command and control structures to sync up with radars and sensors, all of which have previously never communicated with each other.
“These new interceptors can now use those signals to go track inbound Shaheds [drones] in a way that just months ago was technically difficult for us,” he added. “Now these 23,000 pieces of equipment that we pushed into theater can add in extra protection for our soldiers.”
The hackathon is taking place at Fort Carson and is focused on fires systems, with the actual hardware platforms provided by Portfolio Acquisition Executive Fires.
“A system is going to have multiple, multiple pieces to it and then an unknown number of pieces of equipment from industry as well. The contractors are also bringing equipment in to work the integration piece there shipped,” Capt. Brian Parker, logistics lead for Operation Jailbreak, told Breaking Defense at Fort Carson.
While CENTCOM is the priority right now, the Army wants to be able to do this for other regions in the future. Down the road, the goal is to create a repeatable process where, in the fight, soldiers can link systems together that previously didn’t talk to one another.
The hackathon also spurred an Application Programming Interface marketplace, the first of its kind in the Department of Defense where interfaces can be documented and shared for interoperability.