ANNUAL
REPORT

DoD currently uses a manual process to plan and schedule logistical movements across the globe in all domains. Factors such as vehicle capabilities, personnel, cargo priorities, maintenance constraints, and weather are weighed manually to meet mission taskings, creating scheduling challenges. To optimize energy use across aircraft, the C3 AI ALO application uses information such as sensor and mission data to create prediction models that help DoD leaders establish more efficient flight protocols, lowering fuel consumption without compromising combat capability. The application has increased the accuracy and reliability of fuel consumption predictions, which can reduce the impact of fuel emissions on the climate by enabling more efficient fuel use.

Access to secure, trusted, and reliable small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs) is essential to national defense. The majority of affordable and capable commercial drones are manufactured overseas while Section 848 of the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) prohibits the use of parts produced in covered countries. The Spirit by Ascent Aerosystems is a compact, all-weather, coaxial sUAS. It is modular, allowing for various battery and sensory configurations, with an open-source software stack and includes custom payload integrations. The Spirit can be used for ISR, precision delivery, communications relay, and target identification.

Access to secure, trusted, and reliable sUAS is essential to national defense. The majority of affordable and capable commercial drones are manufactured overseas while Section 848 of the FY 2020 NDAA prohibits the use of parts produced in covered countries. The Freefly Systems Alta X was originally created for professional filming and can be used for ISR. It is a versatile multi-rotor aircraft designed around open architecture, endurance, and payload capacity. It can be folded to half its deployed size for easy transportation by a single operator.

Existing standoff weapons fly pre-planned routes but encounter highly dynamic environments, leaving them vulnerable to sophisticated air defense systems. To improve the efficacy and survivability of our long-range weapons, a minimum level of autonomy must be incorporated into their design. This solution provides collaborative mission autonomy algorithms, or agents, that command large numbers of long range air vehicles (weapons, sensors, etc.) in order to penetrate contested airspace in a survivable and effective manner, reacting in real-time to changes in the environment or losses in forces.

The DoD lacks insight into the commercial threat intelligence databases that enable real-time analysis and decision-making by cyber operators. As part of an ongoing series of projects that started with Cyber Threat Intelligence in 2017, this project expands on existing CYBERCOM efforts to maintain situational awareness of threat activity with a solution that would augment threat intelligence feeds with non-traditional and non-IT-based cyber data sets. Spycloud is one of four vendors that successfully demonstrated integration of their platform into military cyber operations and into the U.S. government communities of interest. The capability is easily scalable to other government teams within the cyber operations communities due to the lightweight nature of the software delivery mechanisms and the training and engineering loads required to operate the toolset. The other two prototype participants are on track to transition within the next fiscal year.

The DoD lacks insight into the commercial threat intelligence databases that enable real-time analysis and decision-making by cyber operators. As part of an ongoing series of projects that started with Cyber Threat Intelligence in 2017, this project expands on existing CYBERCOM efforts to monitor threat activity with a solution that would augment threat intelligence feeds with non-traditional and non-IT-based cyber data sets. CA Services is one of four vendors that successfully demonstrated integration of their platform into military cyber operations and into the U.S. government's communities of interest. The capability is easily scalable to other government teams within the cyber operations communities due to the lightweight nature of the software delivery mechanisms and the training and engineering loads required to operate the toolset. The other two prototype participants are on track to transition within the next fiscal year.

The NCR's security is, in part, protected by an air defense system that monitors aircraft through a network of visual and infrared cameras. These cameras are at the end of their service life and are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. In just 18 months, Teleidoscope provided an AI-based visual recognition and identification system to replace the current systems. These new systems provide a greater than 10x increase in capability compared to the existing systems. The timeline for fielding the improved camera system was accelerated by several years by a $16.77M funding award via the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) Fund in May 2023.

The U.S. Navy's mine countermeasure (MCM) fleet is rapidly approaching the end of its service life, and the Navy is seeking to leverage autonomy with new sensors and modularity that allow for continuous improvements. Huntington Ingall Industries prototyped and delivered small form-factor unmanned undersea vehicles with open architecture and modularity principles for subsystems. The HII REMUS 300 will replace the MK 18 Mod 1.

The DoD lacks access to small, lightweight, multi-band Software Defined Radio (SDR) solutions for the warfighter at the edge. This solution provides digital cloud connectivity through multi-band communications that is end-user device (EUD)-agnostic, easy to use, affordable, and fully integrated into DoD and other government cloud network ecosystems.