US army expands AI-aided targeting in next generation command, control experiments

The US Army is scaling up its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype experiments, introducing AI-aided target recognition for the first time during this week’s Ivy Sting 2 exercise.

“We’re using the aided target recognition capability that we’ve built out to say, ‘That’s a tank.’ We spent the last week training the AI models to recognize what we would call hulks out in the impact area — old vehicles that we shoot at — and we’re training [it to say] ‘That thing, I think that’s the tank,'” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commander of the 4th Infantry Division. “Now it identifies that as a tank, which generates the fire mission. The complexity has continued to grow.”

According to Breaking Defense, Ivy Sting 2 builds on September’s Ivy Sting 1, which tested a limited fires thread connecting target acquisition, staff coordination, and the gun through a beta version of the Artillery Execution Suite (AXS). Unlike the first iteration, which only involved a drone and a hill observer, Ivy Sting 2 incorporates AI to aid target recognition, six distributed command and control (C2) nodes, and multiple guns.

Ellis emphasised the potential of AI but noted the importance of human oversight.

“As we employ those things, there’s pieces of it that get kicked out for a human to decide on. There’s cases where the machine can say, ‘Look, I’m very highly confident that this is a tank’ and then the human looks at that and work the targeting threads.”

Future iterations, including Ivy Sting 3, will add more nodes, a battery of guns, and tackle complex challenges like airspace deconfliction.

“The goal in the division is not to just optimize the way we were already organized with new technology. It’s actually use this technology in a fundamentally different way,” Ellis said. “What we’re going to walk away with … is how do we employ this new technology in a way, how can we change our operational approach to embrace the new technology, not necessarily take the new technology and just optimize the way that we’ve always done things?”

NGC2 is also influencing Army cybersecurity and data practices. 

“Our approach to how we rapidly evaluate our cybersecurity posture, is something that we’ve absolutely improved upon from an institutional perspective. We’re now at a point where … the speed at which we’re able to on ramp [new capabilities] into our accredited environment is measured in days at this point in a process that normally would take nearly up to a year," Joseph Welch, executive NGC2 lead, explained.

Welch noted that the initiative is breaking down barriers between tactical and enterprise data.

“Now, ‘it’s all just Army data’ and it’s accessible at every echelon,” he said.

By Sabina Mammadli