a change in mindset from … more hands-on aircraft command style stick and rudder flying to more of a mission management style of flying” and “hav-ing to concern themselves with even-tually larger numbers of platforms and assets and resources,” he said. “There [is] a lot about it that is different. Every time we do an experimental event, we’re getting good lessons learned and feedback, and it’s going toward the changes that we make as we continue to develop these capabilities,” he said. The final two phases of the program will involve a single crew controlling formations of drones from mobile and austere locations and then finally cre-ating new effects-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance units, which could include drones, forward deployed ground forces and cyber and space operators “that can col-laboratively employ UAS capabilities in permissive, contested or denied environments,” the release said. Another demonstration is planned for this summer, the focus of which will be air-to-ground handover of small UAS, Olman said. “A2E rep-resents the ability for air assets to be able to forward project air power for our ground teams to be able to take advantage of, and so we’re going to be going through the air-to-ground handover pieces.” The command will also be testing out a collaborative mission autonomy software called Golden Horde, he said. Developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Golden Horde will be loaded onto Group 2 UAVs, “which are then going to be col-laborating with one another to go autonomously search for a target that will be located out on the range.” Greater autonomy “allows us to create even more separation between either our humans and our autonomous platforms or our high-value assets and the autono-mous platforms,” Olman said. Currently, crews must “main-tain some level of close proximity” to the drones they’re operating, he said. “We’re effectively tethered to our uncrewed systems, and that tether provides an operational risk and it provides limitations.” “What the autonomy is going to do is allow us to put a lot more dis-tance between those high-value assets and the autonomous vehicles that they’re releasing or communicat-SPECIAL OPERATIONS ing with, because now those smaller platforms can just drive out on their own with their own mission-type orders … which they will execute and then report back if and when needed based off of the param-eters that are preset,” he said. A lot of small-and medium-sized companies are breaking into the autonomy space, and AFSOC is col-laborating with Special Operations Command to develop a government reference architecture “that will then allow vendors to build those instances of autonomy with their platforms, whether they just build software or if they build hardware that comes with autonomy on it,” Olman said. “It will allow them to provide that and plug it into our architecture.” The demonstration this sum-mer is the first time AFSOC is “dip-ping our toe into those waters” with autonomy, “and it’s really exciting for the team because autonomy is really one of those areas that is prob-ably going to … change the nature of what we do and how we do it mov-ing into the future,” he said. ND
National Defense Digital May 2024: Page-25
