Just last month, Breaking Defense reported that the Ukrainian military currently has a kill ratio of 1:5 in their ongoing war against Russia. That means for every one Ukrainian warfighter lost in the fighting, five Russian warfighters are killed – although the number has been disputed by other sources.
Much of this imbalance between the two nations has been attributed to drone combat, with Ukraine’s drones accounting for approximately 95 percent of Ukraine’s recent kills. This shows just how large an impact and influence drone combat has had on modern military operations.
Candidly, I do not believe that any global military has kept pace with the rapid changes that group one and group two unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – smaller drones that operate at lower altitudes – have brought to the battlefield over the last several years.
However, the adoption of drone swarms and advancements in group one and group two UAS systems has had more of an impact than simply putting another weapon in the quiver of modern militaries. They’ve also revolutionized intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities on the battlefield.
As ISR capabilities become more accessible down to the squad level, the overall amount of real-time close ISR increases on both sides. Today, warfighters have to assume they are being watched in real time.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a reliable way to deny an adversary’s ISR capabilities at the squad level yet. Worse, the U.S. has struggled to similarly deploy UAS en masse to enable this granular level of intelligence gathering. That’s because the United States Department of War (DoW) faces network limitations in forward-deployed environments.
While one UAS will work flawlessly, putting several on the same network creates challenges. The DoW needs to better manage its networks and data paths to keep pace with the ISR capabilities of peer and near-peer adversaries.
More Data Than Ever Before
The move to cheaper, mass-attack platforms means the battlefield will be saturated with potential threats. While there was plenty of time and space to operate in the past, that’s no longer the case. Winners are going to have to be able to sense, make sense, and act at scale and more rapidly than the other guys.
The DoW has historically owned the skies, working quickly to establish air superiority and deploy airborne surveillance platforms to identify threats. However, deploying proliferated UAS systems means transmitting more data than ever before. These systems generate an enormous amount of high-resolution, real-time video intelligence that must be sent for analysis before insights can be gained and actions taken.
Unfortunately, in theater, radio data networks struggle to keep up with bandwidth demands; LTE isn’t always practical; and SATCOM is spotty, making reliable data transport a challenge. The solution is to perform as much data processing as possible at the point of presence and backhaul only what is needed.
This is why the future involves a shift to edge processing.
In this environment, AI solutions on board military systems and platforms in theater will fuse and crunch the information that is most important in the moment. This data processing and analysis will be done on the battlefield, right where it is needed. Only the minimum effective data will be backhauled.
Analyzing Data When and Where It’s Needed
Shifting data processing to the edge will give commanders greater visibility, faster recognition, and enable them to take more rapid, decisive action by delivering persistent, AI-enabled surveillance and a unified operational picture from the tactical edge to command. This will also reduce manpower requirements while increasing coverage, detection range, and decision advantage across numerous types of missions and operations.
Ultimately, the ability to fuse and analyze the data from numerous ISR sensors at the edge, even in bandwidth-constrained environments, will be instrumental in numerous mission sets and operations against peer and near-peer adversaries. These include:
- Force Protection – Detect and track threats early while using automated alerts to reduce warfighter burden and maintain continuous, reliable coverage in all conditions.
- 360-Degree Persistent Perimeter Awareness – Detect, identify, and track threats before they reach critical zones while leveraging automated alerting and silent notifications to reduce warfighter fatigue. Maintain continuous security coverage in dynamic and low-visibility environments.
- Airborne and Aerial Security – Extend surveillance beyond line-of-sight using unmanned aerial systems, delivering real-time video and sensor data directly into tactical networks to enable rapid deployment of airborne ISR with immediate, actionable intelligence.
- Airfield and Critical Infrastructure Security – Integrate airborne, ground, and fixed sensors into a unified view for comprehensive coverage of a wide-area perimeter around airfields and critical infrastructure with a minimal footprint, detecting incursions across key zones and enabling a coordinated response.
- Maritime and Littoral Operations – Deliver persistent surveillance across coastal and littoral environments, tracking vessels and personnel from shoreline to inland positions while creating a continuous, connected operational view that extends maritime awareness to command centers.
- Stand-Off Surveillance – Enable earlier assessment and response via long-range threat detection using integrated thermal and visual sensors, and provide reliable overwatch for both mobile and fixed units in complex environments.
- Detection, Detention and Alerting – Automate detection and classification using AI, reducing manual monitoring and accelerating response times to deliver immediate alerts and targeting cues across forces, improving coordination and enabling faster, more effective threat response.
However, for these capabilities to be useful on the battlefield, they need to be simple and easy for warfighters to use.
Creating an Integrated, Turn-Key Solution
The warfighter already has enough on their plate, having to execute the mission and focus on the enemy. They don’t need the added complexity of trying to kludge together communications and sensor solutions on the battlefield, or struggling to deploy software solutions. Integrating, deploying, and operating software at the tactical edge needs to be simple and intuitive.
Late last year, Sigma Defense Solutions acquired Aries Defense. This acquisition added new capabilities to the Sigma portfolio that enable these advanced ISR and force protection capabilities by automatically managing and deploying the numerous different software applications used on the battlefield. This enables software to be thought of as capability packages and mission profiles, enabling it to be used effectively without significant effort from warfighters in the field.
Together, the solutions from Sigma Defense and Aries Defense create a complete end-to-end pipeline that enables warfighters to easily and rapidly deploy and leverage software on the battlefield, even in places where networks are denied, degraded, or untrusted. This enables warfighters to focus on the mission while still having access to all of the data, systems, and applications they need for success.
Sigma Defense’s sophisticated CJADC2 solution, Olympus, creates a pipeline that enables the quick and easy deployment of software solutions in theater – even in network-denied or degraded environments. The Aries Defense NEOS solution then feeds data from the dismounted edge into that architecture, creating a complete end-to-end data pipeline that extends from the battlefield to the command center.
The addition of Aries Defense and its NEOS solution to the Sigma Defense portfolio puts everything a warfighter needs right at their fingertips, when and where they need it. And these solutions simply work, without having to hastily assemble solutions or deal with integrating technologies from numerous different vendors.
The author, Eric Donovan, is the Director of Engineering for the Aries Defense Division at Sigma Defense Systems.