The “right solutions” for future conflict must have multi-domain capabilities and be intelligent and interoperable to communicate and transfer data between systems.
By
Breaking Defense on January 19, 2022 at 9:29 AM
The future of warfare and the Defense Department’s latest concept of operations—specifically all-domain operations and distributed operations—will be written by unmanned systems operating at the tactical edge, either individually or as part of a swarm, with interoperability for both manned-unmanned and unmanned-unmanned teaming operations.
In this interview with Wahid Nawabi, chairman, president and chief executive officer of
AeroVironment, we discuss how expensive military assets can be replaced and augmented with more affordable and attritable unmanned systems enabled by the meshing of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning and edge computing.
Breaking Defense: Describe the evolving threat environment that the unmanned systems of today and tomorrow need to be targeted at. What are the rapid, multi-mission capabilities needed?
Nawabi: The evolving threat is what you saw in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in 2020 where lethal, armed drones made by Chinese, Israeli, and Turkish defense companies literally disabled an entire military. Armenia had all their tanks on their front lines and within 48 hours they were disabled. It was done primarily with not-that-complicated, cheap, low-tech lethal drones fired by the Azerbaijan military.
That’s just a glimpse of what the future battle will look like against state-run, near-peer or peer adversaries like China or Russia. It could happen in Eastern Europe, Taiwan, parts of Korea, and elsewhere. Our adversaries are doing this already and the U.S. and its allies have to be ready for that conflict today.
I’m afraid that the Defense Department’s current approach of working with large defense primes like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, or General Atomics, who don’t have much technology in these areas nor the capability and agility to get there fast and affordably, is not the solution.
The solution comes from companies like AeroVironment and many others like us who specialize in intelligent, unmanned systems. We recognized this a while ago and have strategized our entire investment profile portfolio in that direction. We’ve got 80 percent of the raw material, as I call it, to deliver that capability and meet the evolving threat environments of the future in the next two years.
Breaking Defense: If these low-tech, cheap, unmanned systems are able to do so much damage, then why do we need more expensive, complicated, and smart unmanned systems for all-domain operations that can identify, classify, prioritize, and engage all on their own?
Nawabi: Two reasons why. One, that conflict involved two not-so-sophisticated adversaries. Russia and China are not the same as Azerbaijan when it comes to their sophistication and technology. That’s by far the number one reason why.
Number two is even though the systems that Azerbaijan used were low-tech or perceived to be rudimentary, they were not multi-domain and operated only in the air domain. For our near-peer and peer adversaries we need multi-domain systems with much higher levels of autonomy and the ability to operate in both GPS-denied environments and in contested airspace. Azerbaijan was not faced with any of that. The U.S. would be faced with that if we were to get into a conflict with China or Russia, which have intelligent, multi-domain capabilities.
Breaking Defense: To address that, AeroVironment says it is delivering the “right solutions” to enable all-domain operations. What are they? What are you specifically investing in?
Nawabi: As I mentioned, the right solutions have to be, first and foremost, multi-domain because our adversaries have multi-domain capabilities[...]
[...]The second piece is that the right solutions also have to be intelligent, meaning that these systems have to work together as a team—both manned and unmanned, and unmanned-unmanned[...]
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