DARPA’s New Public Tools Teach AI Developers to Defend Against Attacks

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

For the military to trust commercially sourced or even internally developed artificial intelligence, the technology will have to be defended. Now developers have a set of open-source tools to learn new defensive techniques and to test their products against simulated attacks.

Techniques to defend already-trained AI algorithms, or models, are as new as the attacks themselves—in other words, “brand new,” said Bruce Draper of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In an attack, “the goal is to fool an AI system—make it behave incorrectly,” said Draper, DARPA’s program manager for the newly available set of tools called GARD. (It’s Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception.) In an interview, Draper said an attack might trick an AI system into misidentifying faces, for example, or even interfering with AI systems that detect conventional attacks.

Similarly to how AI is so broadly applicable, the team surrounding GARD hopes a common set of techniques will apply broadly across AI models.

“We’re trying to get the knowledge out so developers can build systems that are defended,” Draper said. That includes the military itself, other parts of the government, and the private sector. A related program will address the military more specifically. When utility companies upgrade their networks to protect from cyberattacks, for example, AI will likely factor in.

DARPA brought together researchers from IBM, Two Six Technologies, MITRE Corp., the University of Chicago, and Google Research to assemble the elements of GARD:

Building on a pre-existing open-source library of tools and techniques by IBM, the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, GARD “made it better,” Draper said.
Google Research pitched in a self-study repository with so-called “test dummies” to teach developers common approaches to defensive AI.
Data sets within GARD’s APRICOT library (Adversarial Patches Rearranged In COnText) are there to help developers try to attack and defend their own systems, such as by altering what an AI system observes in its environment.

DARPA isn’t alone in questioning the security of AI.

The Air Force’s cyber policy chief Lt. Gen. Mary F. O’Brien has said that to be effective, AI has to be reliable—troops have to trust it. In using AI to augment human decision-making, for example: “If our adversary is able to inject any uncertainty into any part of that process, we’re kind of dead in the water.”

Western militaries—already “late to the party” in the creation of AI—risk unforeseen consequences by adopting AI made for the commercial sector, said NATO’s David van Weel.

Meanwhile, the now-concluded National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommended in its 2021 final report that the Defense Department incentivize offices to adopt commercially available AI for business processes. The commission also acknowledged that “commercial firms and researchers have documented attacks that involve evasion, data poisoning, model replication, and exploiting traditional software flaws to deceive, manipulate, compromise, and render AI systems ineffective.”

For now, the defenses of commercially developed AI remain questionable.

“How do you vet that—how do you know if it’s safe?” Draper said. “Our goal is to try to develop these tools so that all systems are safe.”

Army’s Kurilla Tapped to Lead CENTCOM, Get Fourth Star, Reports Say

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The next leader of U.S. Central Command has reportedly been identified. Army Lt. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla has been nominated for a fourth star by President Joe Biden, according to Congressional records.

And while the Senate Armed Services Committee record specifies only that Kurilla will be “assigned to a position of importance and responsibility,” reports from the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press indicate he will take over as commander of CENTCOM if confirmed.

Kurilla currently serves as commander of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C.—the Corps deployed thousands of Soldiers to Afghanistan this past summer as part of the evacuation process.

Prior to that, Kurilla worked as chief of staff for Central Command. He also spent every year from 2004 to 2014 in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to his official bio. In 2005, Kurilla, then a lieutenant colonel, was wounded in Iraq during a firefight.

Kurilla’s nomination comes as current CENTCOM commander Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. is set to retire in the coming months. McKenzie’s tenure began in March 2019. He oversaw the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, culminating in the August evacuation that ended with 13 service members dying from an ISIS suicide bomb attack.

McKenzie also later acknowledged that a U.S. drone strike during the withdrawal mistakenly killed 10 innocent civilians. He, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, faced a bipartisan grilling on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the withdrawal.

Kurilla is likely to face plenty of tough questions in his own nomination hearing, as he is poised to take over a combatant command facing an inflection point.

Pentagon leaders have increasingly emphasized competition with China and Russia as the major challenges facing the U.S. in the years ahead, as the American troop presence in the Middle East continues to shrink. At the same time, though, officials have said the military’s task of countering terror threats from the region is far from finished. In recent days, CENTCOM has had to repel drone strikes and destroy a rocket site, presumably belonging to Iranian-backed militias.

With a reduced troop presence, officials have said they plan to rely on “over the horizon” capabilities to monitor terror threats. For places such as Afghanistan in Central Asia, the closest base from which the U.S. can conduct ISR operations is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hundreds of miles away. There have been reports that the Pentagon is working to secure basing rights in other nearby countries, but thus far, no agreement has been announced.

Stoltenberg: NATO’s Open-Door Policy Must Stay; Risk of Conflict in Europe ‘Is Real’

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Emerging from a virtual meeting with allied foreign ministers, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared ahead of a meeting with Russia that NATO’s open-door policy is sacrosanct. He also detailed the reasons why NATO believes new conflict in Europe is imminent.

“The risk of conflict is real,” Stoltenberg told members of the media Jan. 7 after a meeting to discuss Russia’s troop buildup on the border of Ukraine, which is believed to number some 100,000 with growing military capabilities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said NATO is a threat to Russia’s national security and that expanding eastward by admitting Ukraine and Georgia would only further heighten that concern. The treaty alliance, in turn, claims it is defensive in nature. It provides that any nation may pursue admittance, though all member nations must agree.

Russian and U.S. officials are set to meet in Geneva Jan. 9-10, followed by meetings of the NATO-Russia Council on Jan. 12 and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Jan. 13, to discuss Ukraine border tensions and to hear Moscow’s concerns about the alliance. The NATO-Russia meeting is the first since the summer of 2019.

“Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified military buildup in and around Ukraine” has serious implications for European security and stability, the secretary-general said. He said Russian forces are only strengthening a noose around Ukraine.

“The Russian military buildup has not stopped. It continues and [is] gradually building up with more forces, more capabilities,” Stoltenberg said, describing armored units, artillery, combat-ready troops, electronic warfare equipment, and other military capabilities.

Avoiding ‘Second-Class NATO Members’

Stoltenberg was clear that the alliance would not heed Russia’s demand to withdraw the invitation for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO—or for any country to pursue the path of its choosing.

“There’s no way NATO can compromise on the principle of the right of every nation to choose his own path, and that was very clearly stated by allies today,” Stoltenberg said, citing the NATO founding charter and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The act, signed by 35 European countries including the Soviet Union, plus the United States and Canada after two years of negotiations, was a non-binding set of articles that included respect for territorial integrity and refraining from the threat of use of force.

Stoltenberg said Russia’s military buildup, rhetoric, and recent history of invading Ukraine and Georgia made the possibility of new conflict in Europe serious but that NATO would not give into Russian demands. Among Putin’s recent demands has been that former Soviet member states or Warsaw Pact members who are not already in NATO not be allowed to join; and that NATO troops and capabilities in eastern flank countries be withdrawn.

Stoltenberg said that would create “second-class NATO members” devoid of the same defense and deterrence capabilities. There were other areas where compromise could be made with Russia, however, but only on equal footing.

“Balanced, verifiable arms control, yes. One-sided demands on NATO, no,” Stoltenberg said.

Ahead of the meetings with Russia, a Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine the United States and NATO should hold their ground with Putin.

“There should not be any compromise with Russia,” the official said. “They recognize only force. Weakness will provoke them.”

The official also underscored the open-door policy that led to Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008.

“NATO must show that doors are open and promises kept,” the official said, adding that no decision has been made to provide air and missile defense systems to Ukraine following the December visit of an American air defense team to Ukraine.

While Putin has sought to stymie the growth of NATO, create divisions within the alliance, and weaken defense and deterrence on the eastern flank, Stoltenberg said only the opposite have happened and that peace and democracy in Europe have benefited.

“The enlargement of NATO and the European Union has really helped, over the last decades, to spread and to strengthen democracy and freedom in Europe,” Stoltenberg said.

Following the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO reinforced the eastern flank, tripling the size of the NATO Response Force to 40,000 troops, adding air policing and battle groups, and increasing its presence in the Black Sea region. If Russia were to move on Ukraine, NATO would only further strengthen its position in the East, Stoltenberg said:

“We have significant capabilities, we have troops, we have forces, we have the readiness, we have the plans, to be able to defend and protect all allies.”

Court-Martial of Air Force 2-Star General Postponed Amid COVID Concerns

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Amy Hudson

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 6 to include the new start date for the trial.

The court-martial of Maj. Gen. William T. Cooley Jr., former head of the Air Force Research Laboratory, is postponed until April 18 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is surging across the country. The trial was slated to begin Monday, Jan. 10, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Cooley faces a single count of abusive sexual contact, with three specifications, under Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The charges stem from an Aug. 12, 2018, off-duty incident in Albuquerque, N.M., in which he is alleged to have made unwanted sexual advances toward a civilian. The civilian is not a military member or DOD employee, according to the Air Force.

Air Force Materiel Command boss Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. relieved Cooley of command Jan. 15, 2020, following the conclusion of an investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. After reviewing the evidence and convening an Article 32 preliminary hearing, Bunch referred Cooley to stand trial in April 2021.

Cooley has remained on Active duty during this time, working as Bunch’s special assistant pending the start of his trial. He is the first Air Force general officer ever to be court-martialed for sexual assault, according to an Air Force spokesperson. If the trial goes to completion, he will also be the first to ever face a full court-martial proceeding; only a few general officers have previously been referred to court-martial for any charge.

Jury selection in Cooley’s court-martial is set to begin Monday. A court-martial in a non-capital case can have as few as five and as many as eight jurors. Because a fair trial calls for a jury of one’s peers, the jurors will presumably have to be general officers. An Army one-star’s trial on sex charges in 2014 featured a jury of five two-star generals.

Cooley’s unprecedented court-martial proceedings are slated to last up to 14 days, according to an Air Force release. It comes as the Air Force is specifically focused on lifting barriers to women and minority groups. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall expressed alarm in September 2021 after recent climate surveys found that one-third of all USAF women have reported sexual harassment. He promised to address the issue with urgency.

Past DOD Leaders Say the Next National Defense Strategy Should Encourage Data, Tech Sharing

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Former four-star generals and a Trump administration acquisitions chief said the next National Defense Strategy, expected this spring, must create a framework to break down barriers in data sharing and to enhance tech transfer with allies and partners to maximize America’s deterrence.

Speaking in an Atlantic Council virtual discussion Jan. 5, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retired Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright; former head of the CIA and U.S. Central Command retired Army Gen. David Petraeus; and former Pentagon acquisitions chief Ellen Lord said talk is not enough to confront the complex set of security challenges posed by two nuclear-armed adversaries, Russia and China.

“Where’s the beef?” said Cartwright, indicating the NDS must outline measurable steps to broaden sharing with partners and allies. “If we can start to share unprocessed sensor data with all of our friends and allies—not just exclusive groups, but all of our friends and allies—then we bring to the table the one thing that our adversaries can’t: diversity,” he explained.

Cartwright argued that America cannot fear “giving up some piece of intellectual property.” Likewise, old practices to protect data must be modernized.

“We do have a cultural issue of ‘deny people the access to the knowledge and control it yourself.’ And that just doesn’t work anymore,” he added.

Lord extended the argument to expanding the defense industrial base to allies and streamlining technology transfer in the forthcoming NDS.

“We are not leveraging the defense industrial base, the manufacturing capability, all the know-how out there,” Lord said, calling for clear objectives for making technology releasable. “Then, being able to export, without getting too tied up in [International Traffic and Arms Regulations], to our closest allies and partners.”

Petraeus made the case that allies first need to be reassured after the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, of which he claimed allies “felt they had been informed rather than consulted.”

“We want to classify in order to share rather than to exclude,” Petraeus said, pointing to successful examples in the Iraq surge and Afghanistan coalition.

Petraeus also said a gulf of interoperability is growing in areas ranging from weapons systems to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Cartwright emphasized military space investment and warned that the adoption of commercial space technologies is not keeping up with China’s use of space.

“If we don’t start capitalizing on space the way our commercial sector has, we’re going to be left behind,” he said, citing recently departed Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten’s comments about China’s aggressive military space ambitions.

Cartwright identified commercial advances when it comes to reusing and and disaggregating space assets that he believes need to be incorporated into the government. He also argued for making all platforms maneuverable in all phases of flight to avoid threats.

Lord pointed to AUKUS, the nuclear-powered submarine technology agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as an example of sharing data and technology that needs to be more widely utilized.

“I think what we need to do is take that NTIB framework and build it out a bit,” Lord said, referring to the National Technology and Industrial Base, a group of vetted suppliers from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada—”so that we can much more easily export data and technology, so that we can build interoperable systems, so that we can sell a lot of the systems that we now use in the U.S,” she said. Selling systems used by the U.S. military would allow easier communication with allied and partner defense forces.

Broadening the defense industrial base and two-way sharing of research and insight also means an acknowledgment that good ideas come from beyond U.S. shores.

“Cybersecurity, intellectual property—these are complications—but we need a framework, and a lot of brains in the world are places other than the U.S.,” she added.

Air Force to Announce Working Group to Study Resilience, Mental Health

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Air Force is set to announce a new team in the coming weeks to study barriers to resilience and mental health, Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said Jan. 6.

Speaking during a “Coffee Talk” event streamed on Facebook, Bass said the new group, called the Fortify the Force Initiative Team, or FIT, will fall under the Air Force’s Barrier Analysis Working Group, or BAWG. FIT will be officially unveiled early this year, “probably within the next few weeks,” Bass added.

The BAWG has previously established seven subgroups to study specific barriers facing minorities in the service and to propose efforts to address those barriers. This new group will focus more broadly on the issue of resilience, Bass said, and will have advocates in herself and Chief Master Sgt. of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman.

“That’s going to be a team of Airmen and Guardians, for Airmen and Guardians, to help identify lines of effort that we can do to get after resiliency, mental wellness, mental health—all of those things,” Bass said. “And the goodness of those BAWGs and the goodness of FIT that we’ll have is myself [and] Chief Toberman will champion that and be able to provide a direct [contact] to our senior leaders so that we can actually kind of cut down the bureaucracy—to be able to get some solutions that you all see that we need to do when it comes to resiliency.”

The focus on resilience, not just mental health, is deliberate, added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.—leaders’ goal is to address resiliency “in different forms and fashions” before Airmen reach a crisis point.

“The key part here, and this is one of the areas that the CMSAF and I are working on, is we want to actually help provide our leaders with the tools to engage before a member has to go to see mental health,” Brown said. “At the same time, we want to make sure that we have mental health capability available to all our Airmen, and [we are] really looking and paying attention to those high-stress career fields.”

The Air Force’s issues with mental health have become increasingly prominent in the past few years. In July 2019, then-Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein ordered a one-day stand-down to address the rate of suicide in the ranks. The number of suicides among Active-duty and Reserve Air Force and Air National Guard members jumped from 80 in 2018 to 109 in 2019, then stayed there in 2020, according to Pentagon data.

And recently, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall indicated that he believes the issue of mental health is tied to other issues such as racial disparities and interpersonal violence, which the department has studied in the past year or so.

“I think every one of these is in some way an institutional failure,” Kendall said during a Facebook town hall in November. “It’s a leadership job to make sure people are educated about the issues they face. It’s a leadership job to make sure that people understand that when they do have a problem, that they can get help and that it’s OK to do that.”

Other Announcements Coming

The establishment of the new BAWG subgroup isn’t the only news that’s set to arrive in early 2022, Brown and Bass said during their talk.

Most immediately, Brown said, will be a memo “in the coming days” addressing the ways Airmen express themselves online.

“We often talk about dignity and respect,” Brown said. “We’re doing so much more on the internet, through cyber means, through social media. The things that we would say in person are the same things we’ve got to pay attention to … online. And I had a friend in college who said, ‘Never throw a brick and hide your hand,’ and I’ve always believed that—in the fact that … if you can’t say it to my face, don’t put it online. And it’s something that we’ve got to pay attention to as we go forward.”

Beyond that, Bass said the service will make its new enlisted force development action plan, previously distributed to command teams, more widely available.

“It is going to be a framework that keeps us grounded on: How do we develop the Airmen that we need in the future with a whole bunch of objectives?” Bass said. “We put ourselves on a two-year time period on that, but every one of us has an opportunity to be part of that development on how we’re developing the force of the future.”

And finally, Brown said that by the end of January, he hoped to issue modifications to the four action orders he released in December 2020 to support his “Accelerate Change or Lose” strategic approach. Brown offered only a few details on how the action orders would change, saying one order focused on bureaucracy needing to be adjusted to “actually flatten communication [and] … to increase collaboration.”

The Veterans Crisis Hotline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for veterans, service members, and their family members and friends who need help. Call 800-273-8255 and press 1, text 838255, or visit www.veteranscrisisline.net.

North Korea Claims Hypersonic Missile Test—INDOPACOM Says Otherwise

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

The North Korean official news agency claimed Jan. 6 that the regime successfully fired a hypersonic glide weapon the day before, but U.S. Indo-Pacific Command called the test a “ballistic missile launch.”

An official statement from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) claimed that its Academy of Defence Science fired a hypersonic missile Jan. 5.

Unlike a ballistic missile, which follows a predictable arc to hit its target, a hypersonic missile can change direction midcourse and travel much faster.

“The test launch clearly demonstrated the control and stability of the hypersonic gliding warhead which combined the multi-stage gliding jump flight and the strong lateral movement,” the DPRK statement said.

The statement said the missile made a 120-km (75-mile) lateral movement in flight from the initial launch and hit a target 700 km (435 miles) away.

Hypersonic weapons, which travel at speeds more than five times the speed of sound, launch like a traditional ballistic missile but can fly at lower altitudes, another feature making them more difficult to track and intercept. Both Russia and China claim to have developed hypersonic weapons, and the United States is conducting tests on a variety of its own.

Among the many challenges of fielding hypersonic weapons are the high temperatures at velocities greater than Mach 5 and tremendous forces on flight control surfaces.

INDOPACOM’s Jan. 5 statement condemning the “ballistic missile launch” said the missile test highlighted “the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s illicit weapons program” and panning it as another ballistic missile launch in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

“We are aware of the ballistic missile launch and are consulting closely with our allies and partners,” the statement read.

“While we have assessed that this event does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies, the ballistic missile launch highlights the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s illicit weapons program,” the statement continued.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Martin Meiners told Air Force Magazine the Pentagon is still assessing the specific nature of the launch.

“We take any new capability seriously, and, as we’ve said, the U.S. condemns the DPRK’s continued testing of ballistic missiles, which are destabilizing to the region and to the international community,” he said.

Meiners added that DOD will consult with allies as it determines next steps.

North Korea has been under the control of Kim Jong-Un for the past 10 years. Its last missile test was a submarine-launched cruise missile in October 2021. The Jan. 5 test was believed to be North Korea’s first ballistic missile launch of 2022.

DOD Wants Data Management Capabilities on the Front Lines

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Shaun Waterman

The Defense Department’s most advanced and successful initiatives leveraging its huge troves of data involve back-office or support functions—not warfighting, according to the department’s chief data officer. But DOD is pushing ahead with a recent program to bring data management capabilities to front-line combatant commands.

“We’ve moved to a place now where regularly in the senior-most decision-making forums led by [Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks], we are bringing up live data, instead of PowerPoint slides, to drive the conversation … to make decisions that typically would have taken hours if not days, in minutes,” Pentagon Chief Data Officer David Spirk told the George Washington University Cyber Media Forum on Jan 5.

Spirk spoke in the wake of an announcement Dec. 8 that his CDO office would become part of the office of a new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAIO). Upon stand-up Feb. 1, the new CDAIO office will also serve as the “successor organization” to the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the announcement said, and manage the Defense Digital Service. The CDO will continue to report to Hicks through the chief information officer as required by law but be “operationally aligned” to the new CDAIO.

The changes were designed to reduce the bureaucratic burden by bringing all these technological transformation efforts together “under one vision that a CEO can come in and lead,” explained Spirk. “It’s about speed. And if you don’t organize your data, if you can’t create repeatable, testable, and trusted data workflows from the tactical edge, all the way up to your senior-most decision-making boardroom activities, then you will just lag behind,” he said.

Entities such as the Deputy’s Workforce Council and the Deputy’s Management Action Group regularly make decisions using a set of DOD big data tools called Advana. Built with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Advana provides real-time information about finances and contracting, logistics and maintenance, and personnel and readiness, Spirk said.

Advana was developed in the DOD comptroller’s office, Spirk noted, adding, “When I first arrived [as CDO], everybody assumed I would build a competitor to Advana or try and bring it into the CDO, but I saw no need to. I saw a lot of promise in what they were doing and in their ability to scale to other types of [data] that weren’t just comptroller-related.”

Expanding, Spirk said, amounted to a current total of about 45,000 daily users across DOD, and Advana could form the heart of a huge effort to discover, list, and describe all DOD data sources in a single “federated data catalog.”

“Every PSA [principal staff assistant—presidentially appointed senior officials reporting directly to the Secretary or deputy secretary] is in the executive analytics realm and leveraging data and establishing their goals and monitoring those [goals] based on live data in the [Advana] system,” he said.

But Advana provided much more than just business analytics, Spirk added. “It’s an opportunity to transform how the principal staff assistants can prioritize their data requirements and how we can go ahead and begin leveraging [Advana] to gain access to those data requirements as we build the first-ever federated data catalog, with Advana’s data catalog being the hub of that.”

On the warfighting side, Spirk said his office was moving ahead with a program Hicks launched last year to push data management capabilities out to the combatant commands. The DOD AI and Data Acceleration initiative, or ADA initiative, aimed to provide a five-person team of data specialists to all the U.S. combatant commands to help them make use of Advana, Project Maven, and other big data platforms. Spirk said his deputy CDO, Clark Cully, was visiting each of the 11 combatant commands, “spending two days discussing what decisions they want to make—not the data management platform, not the tools, but really focusing on the unique decisions that each combatant command needs to make … based on geographic or functional missions.”

Those discussions—eight already completed and the other three slated for January—will lay the groundwork for the deployment of specialist teams that could bring the capabilities of Advana to front line warfighters, Spirk said.

But he added that the real value is in fusing “boardroom data” such as that provided by Advana with traditional warfighting data from sources such as intelligence collection platforms. He highlighted a series of exercises championed by Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, dubbed the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE.

“The magic really happens when we bring the boardroom data and the battlespace data together in real time,” Spirk explained. “And we could go into that single pane of glass, understand availability of resources—where those resources were associated with a threat, indication, and warning. So we could conduct an interdiction … before it became a problem,” he concluded.

The New $1M-a-Year Research Grants AFRL Hopes Will Speed Up Space Tech

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Proposals combining both basic and applied university research, with manufacturers looped in, could get technology to the Space Force faster. The theory is one that the Air Force Research Laboratory is testing in the pilot year of its Space University Research Initiative.

The lab’s leaders hope the SURI pilot program will also help it modernize how it manages space-related science.

AFRL awarded two teams grants worth $1 million a year for three to five years. A team led by the University of Buffalo will figure out ways to inspect and repair satellites and do some on-orbit manufacturing. Its counterpart led by Carnegie Mellon University will work on algorithms for tracking manmade space objects.

AFRL commander Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle stressed that AFRL is “one lab” serving “two services” in a press call in December announcing SURI. She pointed out that “many technologies are domain-agnostic.”

Research performed under SURI theoretically “can go directly to industry for transition,” said AFRL’s Andrew Williams. “We can take it into flight experimentation with our advanced technology funding line because we’ve already integrated the university researchers with the AFRL researchers to accelerate that transition.”

On-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing

Williams’ role of deputy technology executive officer for space, science, and technology is also new. Pringle described the role as bringing together space research “from all the nooks and crannies across the research lab.” For SURI, he’ll take part in the research landed by the proposal “Breaking the ‘Launch Once, Use Once’ Paradigm.”

Entered by Carnegie Mellon’s Howard Choset, the proposal draws on the expertise of fellow team members from Texas A&M University, the University of New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman. Williams said the proposed research includes aspects of:

Intelligent on-orbit inspection—in other words, “How can we use machine vision to … detect anomalies,” Williams said.
Dexterous on-orbit maintenance, meaning robots for repairing or upgrading vehicles.
Agile on-orbit manufacturing such as “using technologies like some 3-D printing concepts in order to add additional capabilities on orbit.”

Space Domain Awareness

The topic of space domain awareness is front of mind for the Space Force, especially as it expands to cislunar space around the moon.

With USSF being “responsible for tracking all of the manmade objects in space and providing information to all satellite operators on potential collisions … this responsibility becomes more complex,” said Shery L. Welsh, director of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is part of AFRL.

Led by the University of Buffalo’s John L. Crassidis, the SURI proposal, “Space Object Understanding and Reconnaissance of Complex Events,” or SOURCE, includes team members from Pennsylvania State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Purdue University.

The team is “really pushing state-of-the art techniques for analyzing sensor data,” Welsh said. She said the team will:

Create “sophisticated methods to detect the thousands of objects, confidently identify them, and predict their trajectories and understand their correct characteristics and activities.”
Develop “a scalable framework that has the ability to fuse data from many different disparate sources with orbital dynamic models.”
Conduct “studies to significantly improve … dynamic modeling capability beyond geosynchronous orbit … while incorporating tools from astrodynamics and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques as well.”
Investigate “new tracking approaches, which we desperately need, that significantly advance uncertainty quantification methods to enable accurate forecasting of space objects—as well as the tracking of maneuvering satellites.”