SOCOM VEHICLES SPECIAL OPS COMMUNITY CHASING NEW GROUND MOBILITY SYSTEMS.

AuthorHarper, Jon

Officials from U.S. Special Operations Command are pursuing now ground vehicles and enabling technologies to help commandos roll into battle.

More funding is expected for cutting-edge capabilities, noted Logan Kittinger, deputy program manager for the family of special operations vehicles.

"We've typically been focused only on incremental improvements to the vehicles... due to the budget," he said at this year's annual Tactical Wheeled Vehicles conference in Monterey, California, hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association. "But the budget is increasing for us in our ground mobility office, so we need to start moving away from incremental only approaches [and] start looking at game-changing technology."

Marine Lt. Col. Raymond Feltham, program manager for the family of special operations vehicles, noted that the president's fiscal year 2020 budget request calls for more than a five-fold increase in research, development, test and evaluation funding for the command's tactical vehicles.

"What we are trying to do is really leverage our RDT&E," he said. If "we leverage all the goodness that you're doing out here in industry and our sister services, I think really we can go a long way," he added.

Artificial intelligence and autonomy are key capabilities that SOCOM wants for its trucks.

"By 2030, 2035, you're really going to be seeing a difference in the way we fight," Feltham said.

AI could assist with a variety of tasks including operating platforms in environments where satellite-based navigation could prove challenging, he said.

"That is going to... get [forces] in autonomously through machine learning, but also get 'em out when things have gone maybe not the way we wanted them to go in a GPS-denied environment," Feltham said. "That's probably the battlefield that we're going to be facing."

Autonomy could also reduce manpower requirements for logistics and resupply missions, especially when special operations forces are spread out over large areas, noted Army Col. Joel Babbitt, program executive officer for SOF Warrior.

"Let's get out of the paradigm of lots of little vehicles with lots of support people running around vulnerable on the battlefield," he said during a panel discussion at this year's annual Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict conference in Arlington, Virginia, hosted by NDIA. "Let's instead get vehicles driving themselves."

The first ground mobility platform that SOCOM aims to equip with autonomous capabilities is the light tactical all-terrain vehicle, or LTATV, Kittinger said.

The system is used for a variety of...

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