TAMPA, Florida—At least part of the public’s fascination with special operations forces concerns the cutting-edge gear they use. Some of it gets its start at the SOF Week conference here, where operators peruse state-of-the-art products and lay out their wishlist. This year, many requests from Special Operations Command centered on “making big things small,” like a DNA forensics lab or an emergency room; or “make a small thing large”: the amount of data that troops can transmit on battlefields where emissions can get you killed.
Special operators often work in very small teams and secretly. So if someone gets wounded, medical help can’t easily be summoned. Extending the so-called “golden hour,” that critical time after injury when trauma care is most successful, is key. One official described a need for man-portable technologies to extend that golden hour “canopy” well beyond a day. It’s a massive technical and science challenge—in part, because blood for transfusions must be refrigerated. The U.S. military is funding research into blood substitutes, but, the official said, there may be other useful technologies as well.
SOF are also looking to shrink their operational footprint and blend in with local communities. Humvees and combat vehicles are big, obvious, and require a long maintenance tail. To be less obvious and more nimble, SOF operators often rely on modified commercial vehicles, called “non-standard vehicles,”—like regular trucksoutfitted with armor, gun mounts, electronic warfare capabilities, or other gear.
But sneaking battle-modified commercial vehicles into countries where U.S. forces are operating covertly can be difficult and even risky. So SOCOM is looking for a way to allow operators to modify easily-obtainable commercial vehicles themselves, developing a kit “where we’re basically taking the SOF [commercial vehicle] modifications, instead of having them built already into a vehicle, having this kind of transportable kit,” said another official.
CSI lab on a phone
In TV detective shows like CSI, forensic detectives spend long portions of each episode in a lab examining biometric data like fingerprints or DNA, or trying to hack phones. It may look high-tech but it really isn’t. Today, according to another SOCOM official, fingerprint collection still involves old-fashioned lifting kits. SOCOM has spent eight years trying to replace that with a digital system to collect fingerprints without the need for dust or even contact, said another official.
“We’re getting some new tech out there for the contactless collection of the fingerprints,” they said.
When hunting for targets within civilian populations, operators work to keep track of people by taking biometric data, such as DNA and iris scans, and sending it off to a database. But DNA samples require cold storage, which makes it difficult or impossible to get the sample back to the lab.
“We’re looking for a man-portable, rapid DNA solution” for missions that may be too sensitive to bring such equipment, said the official.
Even sending iris scans, which just involve bits and not atoms, can be difficult in low-connectivity areas, so SOCOM is looking for ways to use scans to verify identities without connecting to a faraway database.This year, SOCOM is hoping to launch a research project in a “university-type setting” to test a new method.
They’re also seeking a way to detect certain chemicals—like illegal narcotics—with a phone instead of a lab. That likely reflects the White House’s newly militarized approach to fighting drugs. SOCOM is looking for a technology that “can put [chemical detection] into everyone’s hands so they can understand, ‘Hey, I ran into a huge thing of fentanyl, but I didn’t know this was fentanyl at the time. So either I had to bring a collection back, and maybe it doesn’t get back for 30 days. How can I identify that at the edge?’”
Smart headgear
SOCOM is also looking for smart glasses that can help the wearer identify faces around them—something like Meta’s but not made by a data-hungry social media company.
“We really just want to be able to take that full-moon video, be able to detect a face, be able to match a face and report back to the operator.” This would enable operators in a strange town to receive messages like: “‘Hey, that guy up there, you probably should have gone and talked to him. He’s on our watch list.’”
The shocks of combat can cause brain damage in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. SOCOM is launching a program to outfit helmets with sensors to better detect when such an injury might have occurred. Combined with other biometric data and perhaps AI, the system could anticipate future health problems, enabling operators to address them in their most treatable phase. “How can we correlate data from wearables” and “other sensors that you may already have on your body–whether it’s a blast-exposure monitor or some other piece of kit—to see if there’s things that we wouldn’t pick up as humans that might be indicators or signs to tell us more about how to protect our soft operators?” one official said.
Smaller AI for small drones
As Defense One has covered, today’s consumer-facing AI solutions typically rely on cloud and high-volume data connectivity to perform their astounding feats. (It’s no wonder why big enterprise cloud companies have such a big interest in the future of AI.)
The U.S. military, particularly the special operations community, has a longstanding need for drones with on-board intelligence—not just to fly, navigate, and evade, but to analyze intelligence or reconnaissance data. This could allow a drone to detecting a particular phone user, rather than just pass data to someone in a trailer for analysis.
“Some of that processing has to occur on a [unmanned system] so that [the data the drone is] sending down is smaller…Digital signal processing sort of goes along hand in hand with signal identification classification and geolocation,” said another official. That’s increasingly important in an environment where adversaries, including non-state actors, have more and more sophisticated tools to avoid U.S. intelligence collection.
“You know, violent extremist organizations, they’re getting more complex.”
Caveats
As if all of that wasn’t challenging enough, SOCOM also has a growing need for tech that works well not just one for one team or service element but across the entire force–and that can be shared with international partners (as appropriate) said Melissa Johnson, SOCOM’s acquisition executive. She said that SOCOM’s program managers are “all working different programs, different contractors, sometimes for a different component. It’s a different individual requirement [for each]. But the way you thread that all together is through open architecture and open mission systems interoperability.”
Open architectures are also critical to keeping up with high-tech adversaries like China and Russia that are constantly updating their own tools and techniques.
“The character of war is changing fast. So how do you keep up or even get ahead?” Johnson said. “You have to be able to quickly go, ‘Hey, that sensor, it might be working today in a certain [area of responsibility] under certain conditions.’ But if the threat changes, you need to make sure that either you can make the changes within that sensor, or put a different sensor on there without the system being down for a year and costing X millions of dollars.”
SOCOM is also more and more in favor of tech built from components not made in China, said David Breede, SOCOM’s program manager for special reconnaissance systems. He urged industry to “make sure that your own infrastructure is also cyber secure, not only what you’re delivering to us but then the supply chain, too, the security, right? We’ve seen several things over the past year. So that will tell you that supply chain is pretty important. You want to know where your pagers are getting built,” he said, to knowing laughter.
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