APRIL 2022

Special operations
Technology
The latest technologies being sought and bought
for the evolving future missions of SOF warfare
in the age of great power competition.
 When it comes to security and reliability, a 6-year
head start matters. Build on the most mature cloud today.
 1
1
NEW TECH BUDGET REQUEST IS THE DEFENSE
DEPARTMENT’S LARGEST EVER

2 AIR FORCE SPECIAL OPERATIONS LOOKS TO

REINVENT ITSELF ON THE CHEAP

3 GENERAL ATOMICS UNVEILS NEW DRONE THAT

CARRIES 16 HELLFIRE MISSILES

4
THIS ARMY RESERVIST’S FORMULA PREDICTS
THE INSIDE LAYOUT OF BUILDINGS FROM
SATELLITE PHOTO

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
5 SOCOM MEMBERS GOT AN ALL-STAR CRASH
COURSE IN AI
 Chapter One

NEW TECH BUDGET REQUEST IS

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT’S
LARGEST EVER
Pursuing China, the Pentagon aims to bump spending for artificial intelligence and 5G.

BY PAT R I C K T U C K E R

DEFENSE ONE | 1
 Efforts to outpace China are driving up the share
of Pentagon spending devoted to emerging science
and technology, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen
Hicks said in March.
The Biden administration is requesting $130
billion for the department’s research, engineering,
development, and testing for 2023, nearly 10 percent
up from last year’s request. Of that, $16.5 billion will
go toward emerging science and technology.
“And we make other significant investments in
more mature artificial intelligence and 5G programs,”
said Hicks.
The budget request will establish the Office of
the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence officer,
which will oversee the Joint Artificial Intelligence
Center, the Defense Digital Service, an expansion
of Project Maven, and the Artificial Intelligence
Data Accelerator program, among other endeavors.
It also allocates $250 million for continued 5G
experimentation, with test and evaluation for AI.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
This president’s request will be the first to fund
the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, a
core focus of Defense Undersecretary for Research
and Engineering Heidi Shyu, who has sought to
field new, experimental technology in the hands of
troops sooner, to facilitate better design and quicker
deployment.
“This budget also invests in artificial
intelligence and machine learning-
enabled battle management systems
to improve soldier lethality.”
– Vice Adm. Ronald Alan Boxall
The request also includes $1.7 billion to develop
“next generation air dominance” technology, which
could include a sixth-generation fighter, new types of
drones, or both. The aim is an arsenal that “outpaces
our competitors in the high-end conflict,” said Navy
Vice Adm. Ronald Alan Boxall, the director for force
structure, resources, and assessment of the Joint Staff.
DEFENSE ONE | 2
 There’s also money requested for microelectronics,
a core research priority for several years now, and
cybersecurity pilot programs. Those investments
will fund five additional Cyber Mission Force teams
within U.S. Cyber Command to “hold targets at risk
and defend against malicious actors.” Funding is
also requested for cyber ranges for better testing and
training. “Finally, this budget lays the foundation
for [U.S. Cyber Command] to have ownership of the
mission and cyber mission force,” Boxall said.

A large part of that request will go to new software

and data tools to link different weapons, platforms,
and services, part of the U.S. military’s Joint All-
Domain Command and Control vision. That includes
$11 billion for network modernization, which Adm.
Christopher W. Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, called “so critical to command and
control another one of those functional battles that
are so important to us.”

Said Boxall, “this budget also invests in artificial

intelligence and machine learning-enabled battle
DVIDS | SGT. TARYN SAMMET

SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY DEFENSE ONE | 3

management systems to improve soldier lethality.”
Read that to mean: tools to better coordinate data
between soldiers, drones, vehicles, etc.; and to make
recommendations to commanders based on rapidly-
incoming data. “Our investments in multidomain
platforms, resilient communication systems, and
ground air and maritime delivered fires will increase
lethality of our joint force and enhance our ability to
deter threats in all domains,” he said.
To fund these tech priorities, the Defense
Department is cutting other areas, retiring some
ships and cutting the number of stealth aircraft
it was seeking to procure. It’s also cutting a
controversial sea-launched cruise missile, capable of
carrying a variably, low-yield nuclear warhead.
Critics of the missile—among them then-
presidential candidate Joe Biden—had argued that
it was unnecessary and dangerous. But the planned
cancellation drew criticism from the Heritage
Foundation’s Tom Spoehr and Fred Bartels. “The
previous administration determined that a nuclear-
capable sea-launched cruise missile was needed
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
for the purpose of deterring Russian use of nuclear
weapons in Europe,” they said in a statement.
“Cutting this program leaves the U.S. without an
option that is critically needed to deter Russia’s
growing nuclear arsenal—and not to mention China,
which has a significant advantage in this kind of
nuclear capability.”
Overall, said Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord,
the proposal keeps money flowing right where it’s
really needed: to confront China.
“We had no illusions about Putin as anything but
an adversary but if you look long-term, big-picture,
whatever you want to call it, China still has the
economic power, the military power to really be
our primary challenge. We are not taking our eye
off that ball in the [National Defense Strategy] or in
the budget. But what we did do… we paid the most
attention to the things that are foundational like
space and cyber and the industrial base that are not a
China investment or a Russia investment. They’re an
investment in our capability across the board,”
he said.
DEFENSE ONE | 4
 Chapter TWO

AIR FORCE SPECIAL

OPERATIONS LOOKS
TO REINVENT ITSELF
ON THE CHEAP
Cargo planes that drop cruise missiles from pallets and
land on water show how air special operators are trying
to trick out what they’ve already got on the tarmac.

BY PAT R I C K T U C K E R

DEFENSE ONE | 5
 Long known for supporting ground operations, Air
Force Special Operations Command is now looking to
plague adversaries in new ways—and to do it on the
cheap, the force’s commander says.

That will mean creating new capabilities and

finding new uses for things either already in the
inventory of AFSOC or easily obtainable, Lt. Gen.
James C. “Jim” Slife told the Global SOF Foundation’s
Air Warfare Symposium in Florida.

By next year, for instance, AFSOC’s Commando
II Amphibious Capability project aims to turn its
signature C-130 airlifter into an amphibious plane
that can take off and land on water.
“We’re in a good place with this,” Slife said.
AFSOC is also working with the Air Force Research
Lab on Rapid Dragon, which will enable a cargo
plane to drop a pallet of AGM-158 JASSM missiles
from its back ramp, fire them off in midair, and
put 450-kilogram warheads on targets more than
ISTOCK | EWG3D
a hundred miles away. C-130s will get packs of six
JASSMs; C-17s, packs of nine. A successful test in
December sank a barge in the Gulf of Mexico.
Why drop cruise missiles on pallets out of cargo
planes when you can just shoot them off of the wings
of fighter jets?
“You don’t have to plan to shoot cruise missiles
out of C-130s and C-17s, but if your adversaries have

SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY DEFENSE ONE | 6

to honor every cargo airplane as a potential high-
volume, precision-fires platform, it creates different
kinds of problems for our adversaries,” Slife said.
Silfe said that AFSOC will have to figure out how
to create those new problems under tighter budget
constraints. Unlike other parts of the U.S. military,
and particularly research and engineering, the
budget for Special Operations Command isn’t getting
bigger as the military moves away from the use of
special operators in places like the Middle East and
looks to bulk up conventional service components to
better deter China and Russia.
Col. Jocelyn Schermerhorn, who leads the 1st
Special Operations Wing, said AFSOC welcomes new
technologies but must focus on adapting existing
planes and gear.
“We will always need to advance and look at
different technologies and how we employ them. And
that will be a continuous theme. But anything that
we have in the pantry has got to come out. We’ve got
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
a limited budget and there’s only so much we can do
so,” Schermerhorn said at the event.
Slife said all this will require a culture shift for
pilots, maintainers, and crew. “In the force of today,
there is nobody below the rank of colonel or chief
master sergeant that has lived in an AFSOC that has
done anything other than support missions on the
ground,” he said.
But AFSOC’s future depends on allowing airmen
to work with innovative platforms on their own and
giving commanders more authority to implement
solutions, Schermerhorn said.
She recalled watching maintainers at Joint Base
Andrews improvise after dropping a single screw
that slowed down an important repair job.
“They figured out a way to create their own
wrench…and it’s a $1 part that enabled them to
reduce the time it took to make those changes” from a
half-hour to five minutes, she said.
DEFENSE ONE | 7
 Chapter THREE

GENERAL ATOMICS UNVEILS

NEW DRONE THAT CARRIES
16 HELLFIRE MISSILES
The Mojave, marketed for special forces, doesn’t need a traditional runway to launch.

BY M A R C U S W E I S G E R B E R

DEFENSE ONE | 8
 General Atomics unveiled a new drone in December
that can carry 16 Hellfire missiles and take off from a
dirt road or even an aircraft carrier.
Called Mojave, the drone is meant to appeal to
special forces fighting in the types of conflicts that
have dominated the U.S. military’s attention for the
past two decades.
“We think this is a very efficient way to get you
persistence and get somewhat runway-independent,”
David Alexander, president of General Atomics
Aeronautical Systems, told reporters.
GENERAL ATOMICS
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
At a time when defense companies are touting
fast-flying hypersonic missiles, stealth bombers, and
intercontinental ballistic missiles geared toward
fighting a war with a peer competitior, the revelation
of Mojave shows defense companies are still making
weapons for counterinsurgency.
Breaking Defense first reported the existence of the
drone in November.
Mojave looks like an MQ-1C Grey Eagle body got an
MQ-9 Reaper tail with more canted vertical stabilizers.
Two and a half years ago, Alexander said, GA
engineers envisioned a drone that would eliminate
the need for a runway by taking off vertically like a
helicopter. But that meant sacrificing either payload
or flight time.
“You’re fighting physics and you end up with
something that doesn’t persist,” he said.
So the company instead decided to build a drone
that looks similar to its Reaper and Grey Eagle, but
DEFENSE ONE | 9
with changes to the wings and landing gear that
allow Mojave to take off from a much shorter runway.
The drone is powered by a 450-horsepower turboprop
engine. It flew for the first time earlier this summer
and has been progressing through flight tests.
Mojave needs less than 600 feet to take off.
“We think we can get down into the 400[-foot]
range with some practice,” Alexander said.
The drone could even operate from an aircraft
carrier, with no need for the catapults that launch a
naval air wing’s other fixed-wing aircraft, he said.
“All you’ve got to do is get that carrier going at least
20 knots and you can take off and land within about
300 feet,” Alexander said.
The company believes its drone should be part
of U.S. Special Operations Command’s “Armed
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
“All you’ve got to do is get that
carrier going at least 20 knots and
you can take off and land within
about 300 feet.”
– David Alexander, President of General Atomics
Aeronautical Systems
Overwatch” effort to buy a turboprop that supports
troops on the ground with intelligence and
firepower.
“We haven’t given up on that,” Alexander said.
“We’re still pushing it. I think…it’s a mistake not to
include an unmanned aspect to that program.”
General Atomics declined to name specific parts of
the U.S. military or allies it has spoken with about the
new drone, but acknowledged that some U.S. defense
officials have seen it.
DEFENSE ONE | 10
 Chapter FOUR

THIS ARMY RESERVIST’S

FORMULA PREDICTS THE INSIDE
LAYOUT OF BUILDINGS FROM
SATELLITE PHOTOS
The ability to predict the placement of stairs, rooms, etc.,
could be a big help to tactical teams.

BY PAT R I C K T U C K E R

DEFENSE ONE | 11

ISTOCK | VONKARA1
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
When Navy SEALs or other operators plan raids,
a lot of work goes into bringing down the number of
unknowns—say, how many people are in the house,
or where they might hide to stage an ambush. A new
formula promises to help with the latter by predicting
a building’s internal structure from its external
appearance.
The formula was one of the five winners of the
most recent Dragon’s Lair competition, a search
for innovative ideas held quarterly at the Army’s
Fort Bragg in North Carolina. It was developed by
Christian Lance Relleve, a Navy architect who is also
a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve.
Factors such as building materials, symmetry
and the placement of entries and exits can indicate
the location of key internal features like stairs,
and supporting walls, even bathrooms. Small and
high-placed windows are much more likely to be
bathrooms whereas larger ones are more likely to be
offices, etc. The roof color also suggests the material
used and the location of supporting structures
DEFENSE ONE | 12
underneath. Relleve told Defense One that countries
run by autocratic regimes, in particular, make heavy
use of repetition: a string of buildings of similar size
and shape are likely to have similar internal plans.

Relleve began working on the formula in 2019

and soon drew the attention of defense contractors.
Instead of selling it, he sought military support to
keep developing to develop it on his own.

He said that his formula can predict a more-or-

less symmetrical building’s internal structure with
roughly 70 percent accuracy, but he acknowledged
that it doesn’t work well for buildings that are DVIDS | SPC. AMBER COBENA

asymmetrical.
The next step will be to apply machine learning
to the dataset of building types and features to train
algorithms to predict internal layout more accurately
and quickly.
The military has said that urban warfare will be
a defining characteristic of future conflict. Being
able to predict the layouts of buildings would be a
big boost to not only dismounted tactical teams of
soldiers but also in planning more precise drone
strikes. He next wants to work on an “economy of
force” calculator to output predictions for how much
human or fire-power might be needed to destroy a
certain target in a certain location causing minimal
risk to surrounding entities.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY DEFENSE ONE | 13

 Chapter Five

SOCOM MEMBERS GOT AN

ALL-STAR CRASH COURSE IN AI
Over a unique six-week course, participants met virtually with tech leaders to talk about AI’s future.

BY PAT R I C K T U C K E R

DEFENSE ONE | 14
 Troops and civilians with U.S. Special Operations
Command participated in a unique course this
summer with MIT academics and other technology
leaders to discuss AI and how it might shape the
future of combat and other areas of human activity.
The six-week course allowed more than 300
SOCOM representatives, including members of senior
leadership as well as other, lower-ranked officers and
civilians, to understand broad future trends in AI
development, commercial deployment, and more.
“What we did for them is bring together at MIT
some of the best known thought leaders in the
world of AI and have them provide their unique
perspective,” Sertac Karaman, a professor in the
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT
and one of the course’s organizers, told Defense One.
Those thought leaders included longtime Google
CEO Eric Schmidt and former Defense Secretary Ash
Carter.
The discussion included how operators might use
tools like computer vision in the near future, “not just
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
to detect vehicles here or there, but try to make sense
of the imagery in a conceptual way,” Karaman said.
They also discussed other emerging AI capabilities,
like the near future of natural language processing,
which is a key focus area for SOCOM.
Other portions of the course were devoted to AI
safety and how to pursue new capabilities while
adhering to the Pentagon’s AI ethical principles. On
Wednesday, SOCOM head Gen. Richard Clarke told
lawmakers that one of the key features of the course
from a SOCOM perspective was to help senior and mid-
tier SOCOM personnel “learn what the AI principles
were so that they could ask the right questions.”
The participants “were very interested in the
robustness and ethical aspects… they were very
careful with: How do they take AI and fit it into the
ethical framework that they already have at DOD?”
Karaman said.
But the participants also had a lot of questions
about how high-tech adversaries might deploy AI
DEFENSE ONE | 15
 in new and surprising ways, particularly on future
battlefields against adversaries not bound by any
ethical guidelines. Questions like, “What is the best
way to counter that? How do we understand what
kind of capabilities [adversaries] might deploy? How
do we stay ahead so that we don’t get… blindsided by
our adversaries?” Karaman said.

It’s the sort of course that could expand to other

areas of the Defense Department, where Karaman
hopes it will go on to influence aspects of acquisition,
one of the key points he made during the course.

“I did tell them, for example, China is able to acquire

any technology that’s built by any company inside China,
but that’s not the case for the United States,” he said.

“We [meaning the United States] are still quite far

ahead in terms of deploying some real AI capability
that would really tilt the scale. But there’s a whole
issue of integrating new technologies into DOD.”

It’s an area where the Defense Department must

DVIDS | LISA FERDINANDO
urgently catch up to the commercial world, he said.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY DEFENSE ONE | 16

 PATRICK TUCKER
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
Patrick Tucker is technology
editor for Defense One. He’s also
the author of The Naked Future:
What Happens in a World That
Anticipates Your Every Move?
(Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker
was deputy editor for The Futurist
for nine years. Tucker has written
about emerging technology in
Slate, The Sun, MIT Technology
Review, Wilson Quarterly,
The American Legion Magazine,
BBC News Magazine, Utne Reader,
and elsewhere.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS TECHNOLOGY
MARCUS WEISGERBER
GLOBAL BUSINESS EDITOR
Marcus Weisgerber is the global
business editor for Defense
One, where he writes about the
intersection of business and
national security. He has been
covering defense and national
security issues for more than a
decade, previously as Pentagon
correspondent for Defense News
and chief editor of Inside the
Air Force. He has reported from
Afghanistan, the Middle East,
Europe, and Asia, and often travels
with the defense secretary and
other senior military officials.
DEFENSE ONE | 17
ISTOCK | RASIHUSIN