LESSONS FROM UKRAINE: Exploring Technology for SOCOM's Urban Missions.

• Author: Easley, Mikayla

TAMPA, Florida--U.S. Special Operations Forces know from experience in places like Iraq and Afghanistan that urban combat presents a host of tactical and logistical challenges. Russia's struggles in Ukraine not only reinforce that fact but provide important data that industry can use to develop technology to support future U.S. missions.

Modern cities are challenging environments for special operators, said Bartlett Russell, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Buildings, underground spaces, civilians and other objects clutter the area, only adding to the list of elements a commando needs to worry about.

"You have a lot of density, a lot of obstruction, a lot of things--not just buildings, but things--in city environments," she said. "It's also an unstable environment, so there might be a lot of debris and things left behind like burnt out cars."

The complexity also creates large amounts of data to sort through, another distraction for a warfighter who is trying to locate targets, she added.

Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corp. who studies land warfare and Russian military capabilities, said establishing and maintaining situational awareness in a city is crucial.

"[The Russians] don't have great situational awareness now. They have some--which is better than they had in the beginning," he said.

Because urban warfare often favors the defenders with knowledge of the area, providing geospatial data directly to special operators during raids can help them navigate the city, locate threats and adjust routes to avoid barricades and enemies. To address these challenges and keep them focused during urban missions, industry has built a range of, situational awareness tools, advanced communications, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities--all augmented by artificial intelligence.

U.S. adversaries have improved their ability to perform GPS-denial and GPS-deception attacks with jammers and spoofers, said Kevin Betts, director of position, navigation, and timing, or PNT, for defense contractor Leidos' Innovation Center.

Leidos is addressing the threat by building visual PNT for places where an adversary can disrupt radio frequencies used to determine position coordinates.

"Let's just assume there are some environments--especially in urban warfare--where the adversary is just going to be able to overwhelm the radio frequency signal no matter what you do," Betts said. "And so, how...