Department of Defense (DoD) investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) related efforts has amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars over the past five years. Driving this high level of investment is AI/ML’s potential to unlock revolutionary new capabilities for the warfighter. Use cases explored by the DoD include Project Maven’s imagery analysis, CADO’s SmartSensor, and DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE). While these programs have shown AI/ML’s utility and promise, they have only been deployed in isolated or developmental environments. Moving forward, to truly realize the potential of operationalized AI/ML technology, more complex and real-world representative use cases are required.
One such use case within the DoD is Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). The goal of CCA’s is to develop and deploy autonomous combat aircraft to augment and enhance today’s resource constrained fighter pilots. While the DoD has successfully deployed AI/ML on a more limited scale, the CCA effort represents a large increase in mission and system complexity. The program will require seamless integration of unmanned aircraft, manned aircraft, advanced sensing methods, high performance edge computing, manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T), AI/ML aircraft control algorithms, simulation-based training for operators and rapid AI/ML algorithm retraining for securely updating autonomy at the speed of relevance. As a result, the CCA ecosystem will require government, manned aircraft providers, unmanned aircraft providers, and autonomy software developers to work together in an agile and open way. The work in this paper aims to begin the CCA ecosystem development process by decomposing and describing critical components. After defining and describing these elements, the authors then begin exploring policies, standards, and management practices required to ensure effective CCA deployment. Ultimately, the work presented in this paper helps begin defining the CCA ecosystem’s components and their interfaces to ensure delivery of powerful new warfighter capabilities.
Keywords
AGENT-BASED SIMULATION, AI
Additional Keywords
Collaborative Combat Aircraft