Experimental Project Aims to Enhance Military Mobility and Awareness

Image: Military Experiment for Enhanced Mobility and Awareness

The U.S. Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) is funding an experimental project called the 10X Dismounted Infantry Platoon Project, or “10X,” which aims to increase a platoon’s mobility and awareness by a factor of 10. The project is managed by the National Advanced Mobility Consortium (NAMC) and involves integrating artificial intelligence-enabled robotic vehicles, drones, and robots with an infantry platoon.

The 10X project is scheduled for a full demonstration in September 2024 at Fort Moore, Georgia. NAMC has brought together eight of its members, including Auburn University, Bounce Imaging, Charles River Analytics, Inc., DPI LLC, KEF Robotics Inc., Lockheed Martin, Persistent Systems LLC, and Raytheon BBN, to participate in the experiment.

General Dynamics Land Systems’ S-MET (Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport) will be integrated within the experimental 10X project, which aims to improve a platoon’s performance on the battlefield by a factor of ten. However, the focus is not on making the platoon ten times more lethal; instead, the project is primarily concerned with enhancing the platoon’s mobility, mission planning, and situational awareness.

The 10X project is relatively small in scale, with a total funding of approximately $3.2 million. It is designed to strike a balance between conducting expensive, large-scale exercises with new weapons and smaller, more frequent events. The project will build up to the final demonstration through six different events planned for the remainder of the year and next year, starting with simulation-based experiments to integrate the drone, robotic vehicle/dog, network, and control technologies.

The experimental platoon will be paired with General Dynamics Land Systems’ S-MET, which is designed to unburden foot soldiers by carrying their supplies and mission essential equipment. Boston Dynamics and Ghost Robotics will contribute their Spot and Vision 60 robots, respectively, to provide ground surveillance, reconnaissance, inspection, load carriage, and weapons capabilities. DPI will bring its Tandem cargo UAS to potentially provide aerial resupply capability.

Persistent Systems will supply a beyond-line-of-sight mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to enable command and control of the various ground and aerial assets. KEF Robotics will provide machine-learning-enabled navigation, hazard detection, and avoidance software to support the integration of the C2 problem.

The experimental platoon will be tested in a notional urban environment during the final demonstration in September 2024. While the project does not expect to achieve a ten-times performance improvement in lethality or other metrics, it aims to identify the gaps that are inhibiting progress towards that goal.

The scope of the 10X project is limited, acknowledging that the Pentagon knows very little about how the compendium of advanced defense and commercial off-the-shelf technologies it has recently decided it urgently needs will work together or work at all. The project focuses on battlespace awareness, identifying meaningful or superfluous data collected by drones and robots, and integrating that data into a mission planning system in real-time.

The 10X project is not concerned with the operational picture beyond an urban scenario. NAMC’s chief technology officer, Andrew Dallas, has stated that they have done some limited gaming of the scenarios a 10X platoon might face but that the primary focus is on familiarizing soldiers with the technology and integrating the disparate platforms.

The project faces challenges in integrating the various platforms and ensuring that the command-control networks and communications work within normal human operation without the platforms. However, the first steps towards a ten-times more aware and mobile military platoon have been taken, and the experiment will provide valuable insights into the potential of advanced technologies in enhancing military capabilities.