Sept 15 Speaker- Dr. John Shaw, DARPA STO

USTLC Speaker Dr. John Shaw, DARPA, STO

Topic: SoSITE Integration Technology Results

• Date: Thursday, September 15, 2016
• Time: 5:30pm – 7:30pm
• Location: CTC, 2711 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 620, Arlington, VA

Dr. Shaw highlighted his work as DARPA’s  Program Manager for the System of Systems (SoS) Integration Technology and Experimentation (SoSITE) program. The SoSITE goal is to develop and demonstrate capability to maintain air superiority using SoS architectures—combinations of manned and unmanned aircraft, weapons, sensors and mission systems—that distribute aerial warfare capabilities across interoperable manned and unmanned platforms. The SoSITE vision is to integrate new technologies and airborne systems with existing systems faster and at lower cost than near-peer adversaries can counter them. SoSITE is developing architectures for distributed air warfare, as well as new technical integration tools to make that possible. Integration tools include automated compositional verification of SoS architectures and run-time generation of system interfaces.

This briefing was well received but also triggered a myriad of questions based upon the mix of manned and unmanned aircraft, JSF capabilities versus Chinese and Russian radars and sensor systems, Chinese and Russian 4th and 5th generation fighters that are “semi stealth” and “good enough”, and therefore could win a A2/AD engagement on sheer numbers.  Additional work remains in data link interoperability, cyber security and remote sensors.   Many suggestions were given by the TLC attendees.

I made it clear that some of the data link interoperability issues could be solved through micro hypervisors on the platform with virtualized data links between aircraft.  This would allow for selected platforms to retain their proprietary standards and security, yet share information on the airwaves via a data link virtualized template.