In the summer of 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Indiana National Guard hosted the fifth-ever Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event. These events are designed to mature and assess promising capability prototypes, and the DoD leverages them to enable joint technology accelerations across the department.
Monitoring Air Space is Complex and Becoming More So
The T-REX event had a specific focus on helping the DoD maintain its air dominance. In today’s airspace, drones, terrain issues and legacy communication capabilities can make conventional air defense targeting difficult and increase the complexity of threats from the air. For instance, information about aircraft activity is collected from multiple sources. Unifying that data and getting it into one platform for analysis can be challenging. Additionally, operating in siloed or disconnected environments essentially blinds an analyst to impending threats.
GDIT participated in the T-REX exercise by leveraging our Defense Operations Grid-Mesh Accelerator (DOGMA), a solution we developed with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support U.S. air defense systems. DOGMA integrates cloud and AI technologies with satellite connectivity capabilities in order to streamline data processing, analysis and decision making. With the DOGMA solution, we enabled analysts to access the data they needed, pass it to other collaborators and perform analytics at scale at the edge and in the cloud.
In the midst of the exercise, we were then asked to expand DOGMA’s capabilities to include monitoring of unmanned aerial systems as well. This required us to quickly pivot and retrain our monitoring models to accommodate drone activity, which the team did in under a week. Because DOGMA was built on reference architectures and does not use a fixed platform, we were able to quickly shift and create more dynamic capabilities for the exercise.
During the exercise, our team ultimately used DOGMA to track more than 350 commercial aircraft and unmanned aircraft systems. We analyzed nearly 9 million aircraft position measurements to determine aircraft locations and to predict where those aircraft would be in the future. Making predictions about where an aircraft will be, versus where it is presently, requires true real-time data collection. Using these capabilities, the DOGMA project team was able to accelerate decision-making tasks from 30 minutes to just 3 seconds.
Additionally, during the exercise, we were also asked to demonstrate how DOGMA could operate at the edge. So, over a weekend, we evolved the models and everything else inherent to the DOGMA solution and deployed it at the edge. Put simply: We showcased how to get real-time data from an antenna feed directly to an edge compute platform.
Quick Pivots Demonstrate DOGMA’s Long-Term Utility
What’s important about what was accomplished during the exercise is that we leveraged DOGMA to perform mission-essential analytics. As part of that work, we built a data pipeline that allowed us to easily share predictions to other command and control systems for greater flexibility. This information-sharing ability also removed the single-point of failure risk associated with working in disconnected environments because it allows 100% observability, and 100% monitoring of all models tied to the DOGMA solution. The result is secure and resilient connectivity, even in challenging environments.
Our DOGMA demonstration at T-REX underscored the solution’s agility for a variety of defense scenarios as well as our team’s responsiveness to changing customer requirements, including secure AI for edge workloads.
More Collaboration, More Capability
When building DOGMA, the team used post-quantum cryptography to secure sensor data moving from the edge to the cloud. For the next phase of production, we will add additional layers of security, including Zero Trust, so that we can more easily and collaboratively filter and share data with mission partners in an integrated common operating picture.
DOGMA and its evolution at T-REX, together with our visions for it in the future, are all reflections of the importance of working closely with customers to achieve, advance and accelerate the art of the possible. And we can’t wait to continue that work.