SOCOM WARRIOR 'HYPER-ENABLED OPERATOR' CONCEPT INCHES CLOSER TO REALITY.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: SPECIAL OPERATIONS

Nearly a year after announcing a new effort to "hyper-enable" commandos with a slew of new technologies, Special Operations Command is making progress, officials have said.

"Hyper-enabling the operator could mean a lot of things--getting them better body armor, getting better boots, get them better helmets," said Jim Smith, the command's acquisition executive. But "when you hear U.S. SOCOM talking about hyper-enabling the operator ... we're really talking about the cognitive space."

The concept--which focuses on four pillars of technology including communications, computing, data/sensors and human-machine interfaces--is about pushing tailored information to a dismounted operator or unit at the tactical edge, he said during remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict conference.

The command intends to look at multiple technology areas including data, presentation and computation, he said.

Having readily available information for warfighters on the battlefield mirrors technology found in self-driving cars, Smith said.

"[You have] got to have a lot of computing power on the car" itself, he said. "You can't be reaching back to the cloud every time you're trying to figure out if something is a stop sign or a pedestrian."

It's "the same thing for our operators. How do I get them computing power at the edge, the right comms pipe?" he said.

The initiative spans across all of SOCOM's forces, he added, to include logisticians, medics and psychological ops personnel. "I'm talking about the full spectrum of SOF operations," Smith said.

Already today, people across the world carry "exquisite" personal devices that can tell someone exactly where they are, he noted.

"None of us worry about maps anymore," he said. "When we go into a new city, we're not carrying any of that information with us. We count on our device to tell us, 'Hey, here's the best restaurant.... Don't stay in that hotel, try this one instead.'"

Such on-demand information technology would be enormously useful for an operator in Eastern Europe or in the Indo-Pacific region, he noted. A commando would be able to instantly tap into social media feeds to gauge nearby threats or to see what kind of criminal activity is going in the area, Smith said.

Right now, operators who want that kind of information first have to wait for it to be distilled by analysts in potentially a far-off location and then provided as products to the...