Piecing Together the Future Battlefield with Mosaic Warfare at DCS

Warfare is not as simple as it once was when sovereign nations waged armed conflict against one another until one opponent declared victory. Now, highly advanced technology and combatants have modernized the concepts and methods for war.

New characteristics of the concept of battlespace have increased the complexity for the warfighter. This requires situation-adaptive responses, selective collection and processing, and real-time data analysis over a prevalent network of “things.” There are a vast array of devices and platforms that make the once definitive boundaries of the battlefield diverse and transient, and the environment of it far more dynamic.

Philip Perconti, Ph.D., director at the U.S. Army Research Lab, and Timothy Grayson, Ph.D., office director at Strategic Technology Office DARPA, will present their ideas on how to address these new and ever-changing characteristics in plenary sessions highlighting the first two days of SPIE’s Defense and Commercial Sensing Conference, held April 14-18, 2019 in Baltimore, Md.

Dr. Philip Perconti (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army)

Perconti will discuss “The Future of Battlefield ‘Things,’” a comprehensive outlook on the complexity of warfare in the digital age — where deception is the norm and boundaries are varied. He will discuss the approach proposed by the Army Research Lab’s Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) program.

IoBT is a collaborative research program with university and government partners designed to bring together multiple disciplines to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the enormous collection of networked devices that are, and will be, available. The IoBT consortium addresses fundamental research questions about the classification of the multitude of devices and how they will be able to adapt quickly to fluctuations in order to meet mission needs on future battlefields.

The “Mosaic Warfare” concept combines unmanned and manned systems to work seamlessly in real time. It will use rapid interoperability and AI to network these to create an evenly distributed and resilient system that, eventually, will work at mission speeds. Grayson will discuss what key technologies will enable this to be a reality and what challenges need to be addressed.

Dr. Timothy Grayson (Photo courtesy of DARPA)

Grayson will introduce a “Mosaic Warfare” concept that proposes the means to conduct joint multidomain battle at unprecedented speed. Grayson brings his extensive government experience into the research analysis of the concept that utilizes existing platforms to conduct multi-domain battle with speed and adaptation, networking sensors, command and control, and effects to form “kill chains” that adapt to dynamic threats and environments.

SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2019 (DCS) will take place at the Baltimore Convention Center April 14-18. Additional information can be found at http://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/defense--commercial-sensing.