Drones, helicopters, aircraft, rocket launchers and armored ground vehicles can all now find and destroy enemy targets across multiple domains in a matter of seconds, a technological and conceptual breakthrough now reshaping concepts of Combined Arms Maneuver as the Army prepares for Future Warfare.
Project Convergence & Combined Arms Maneuver
The Army’s emerging ability to truncate sensor-to-shooter time in warfare situations down to a matter of seconds was demonstrated during the last several years at the services’ breakthrough Project Convergence exercise, a technological breakthrough enabling forward operating mini-drones to network with larger unmanned systems, helicopters and even ground weapons to find, analyze and destroy targets in real time across multiple domains.
Drawing upon an AI-enabled system known as FireStorm, multiple networked Army platforms were able to gather massive amounts of intelligence information, analyze, organize, and prioritize seemingly limitless and disparate pools of incoming data. Firestorm gathers streams of data, identifies moments of relevance, bounces information off of a seemingly limitless database to not only pinpoint and verify target specifics but also identify and recommend the optimal weapon, effector or method of attack.
This high speed process, giving human decision-makers life-saving crucial data in seconds, is a long-sought after Army goal which is now coming to fruition. The intent is to get inside of the enemies’ decision cycle and “act” decisively in advance of an incoming attack. It can well be described as a land-based iteration of a now famous process for fighter pilots made famous years ago by former Air Force Col. John Boyd. It’s called the OODA Loop, for Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action, a series of steps which, if completely, accurately and quickly, enables a fighter pilot to win a dogfight and destroy the enemy. Whichever fighter pilot completes the OODA Loop faster is the one able to prevail in an air-to-air engagement.
The Army’s Project Convergence adapted this conceptual paradigm to multi-domain land-and-air war with great success. Initial progress with this breakthrough, evolving over just the last several years, represents the culmination of literally decades of Army technological efforts to enable cross-force networked connectivity across multiple nodes in real time in combat. A “system-of-systems” interoperable network, after all, formed the inspirational foundation for the Army’s Future Combat System effort decades ago.
