World War II brought the principle of
air superiority to the forefront of winning a modern war. These days we might
take for granted that the United States, with the biggest arsenal of high-tech
military planes and missiles on Earth, has the air power to win any conflict.
While perhaps true, the incredible cost and complexity of the equipment and
infrastructure of current systems concern military strategists. In addition,
open systems hardware and software technology is enabling potential enemies to
build very sophisticated systems of their own, often at far less cost.
DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), as most readers of ExtremeTech
will know, has a long history of innovation (yes, government agencies can innovate). Formed in 1958 in the
Eisenhower administration as a direct response to the Soviet launching of
Sputnik, it has played key roles in the development of the modern multitasking
operating system (MULTICS), GPS technology,
and the ARPANET, forerunner of the little worldwide network we like to call the
Internet. Today, DARPA is concerned that our technological superiority may be
threatened by potential adversaries using more modular and less
expensive approaches to defense systems building. For example, the
staggering $1.5+ trillion projected cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter over
its 55 year lifespan emphasizes two key areas of concern: the huge cost and
timespan to build these weapons systems, and that their inherent complexity may
not allow them to adapt to fast-changing technology.
DARPA recently announced a new program that
they call a “system of systems” approach. System of Systems Integration
Technology and Experimentation (SoSITE) aims to take a distributed approach to
air weaponry, while also taking advantage of rapid advances in commercially
available technology. The system would bring together manned and unmanned
aircraft, missiles, sensors, and mission systems into a very sophisticated
network with distributed intelligence.
In this model, less expensive unmanned platforms could
venture into enemy territory, with intelligence to identify potential targets
and feed that back to pilots flying behind the lines and acting more as “battle
managers.” Unmanned platforms could be simpler, less expensive still, and
have dedicated tasks. Some could be silent and loaded with sensors for
intelligence gathering, some could be loaded with electronic warfare systems
(such as jamming), and some could carry simpler bombs and missiles. The whole
thing is integrated by a system called Distributed Battle Management, which
provides the pilots in manned aircraft to make well-informed decisions on how
to deploy these different weapons while still flying his or her jet — and with
less danger to the pilot and the $100 million plane he or she is flying.
SoSITE
also looks to bring an open architecture approach to the systems. Most weapons
programs take years to build some proprietary interface standard for control,
maintenance, subsystem communications, avionics, and so on. When new technology
becomes available, often it’s not easy to adapt it to the existing proprietary
interfaces, and it takes too long. Along this line, DARPA is working with the Air Force on their
Open Mission Systems efforts, and the Navy’s FACE (Future Avionics Capability
Environment). These programs are looking to bring some of the same things open
standards do to commercial products – more competition for better solutions,
faster development time, portability of applications across systems, and
reduced cost.
A
major concern with using open architectures is that it can provide various
points of entry for cyberattacks. DARPA’s approach is to build robustness against
cyberattack as a design principle rather than as an add-on. One approach to
this, for example, is hiding key parts of the software in random places in the
system, making it much harder to find in an attack. Rather than devising some
new techniques for cyber protection, in keeping with the “off-the-shelf”
integration ideal, the design goal is to build the current state-of-the-art
protection technology into the system.
While
this new modular, distributed approach may be the future, DARPA doesn’t see SoSITE
fully replacing existing projects, like the F-35 Fighter program. It also
doesn’t see it creating a fully unmanned air force anytime soon. Instead, it
sees the new programs as a way to rapidly integrate commercially available
technology, increase the speed of developing sophisticated new weapons systems,
and maintain technological superiority – all while decreasing the human and
financial risk of deploying air power.
