At a US army base in the Rocky Mountains, hundreds of engineers wielding laptops and Monster Energy drinks are helping the army do something Ukrainians have learned on the battlefield — make weapons talk to each other.
Coming from large defence contractors and small start-ups, the engineers have been sent to Fort Carson to join a huge hackathon called Operation Jailbreak aimed at fixing a problem that has plagued the army for years.
The hackathon came about at lightning speed after the chief executives of nine defence firms, ranging from General Dynamics and Boeing to Anduril and Palantir, received an SOS call from army secretary Dan Driscoll.
During a trip to Romania in April, Driscoll fielded complaints about a US counter-drone system being unable to connect to a US radar system. At a training event in Germany the next day, he saw US soldiers struggling to integrate different robotic systems, while the Ukrainians who were acting as the “red team” enemy in the exercise could connect their weaponry.
“The ‘Aha moment’ for this hackathon was specifically in Germany because the Ukrainians had become such valiant warriors,” Driscoll said.
“A lightbulb went off that everything I had seen in the previous 15 to 16 months was just not as integrated, not as simple, and not as effective for the warfighter.”
Driscoll called Alex Miller, the army’s chief technical officer, to come up with a plan. Over the next 24 hours, Driscoll called the CEOs and within a couple of weeks the companies and other defence groups had moved dozens of pieces of army weaponry to Colorado.
During a visit to the hackathon on Thursday, Driscoll saw many cutting-edge technologies, including a navigation system made by Tern that does not rely on GPS, and a Bumblebee V2 drone from Perennial Autonomy, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, which scored its first air-to-air kill against a Chinese-made DJI Mavic drone in Ukraine earlier this week.
Driscoll was impressed by a machine-gun-carrying robot that five companies made over three days that was plugged into a network of drones and counter-drones. The robot was controlled by an operator inside a tent serving as the kind of Base Defence Operations Centres used to protect US facilities in the Middle East.
The engineers modified their software to enable their weapons to interface with Lattice. The system produced by Anduril takes data from sensors on the devices and uses AI to produce a complete operational picture for the soldier operating it, allowing them to use one or two screens instead of the many more that were required before the integration.
Explaining what it was like before the hackathon, Captain Micah Maule, a member of the army team, said: “It is like trying to conduct an orchestra using Microsoft Teams when everyone has different sheet music.”
Following a demonstration of the robot tracking and targeting drones, Driscoll said it was “better than . . . a lot of the systems we had tried to build over years, spending hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Driscoll wants to send some of the solutions developed in Operation Jailbreak to Central Command, which runs US military operations in the Middle East, within a month to help counter Iranian drones.
“If we cannot push (everything) to Centcom in 30 days, we are failing,” he said.
He said some of the technologies could be used to protect stadiums during the World Cup.
Similar AI-networked weapons systems would also help in any conflict with China, he added.
“If a conflict kicked off, the faster that we can get our AI into the battlefield and out to the edge and maintain the compute to use it, that’s what can be a differentiator in a Taiwan scenario.”
Some systems from Operation Jailbreak will be added to a new Amazon-like marketplace the army has created to make it easier for allies and US law enforcement agencies to buy drones and counter-drone technology.
“The marketplaces will help generate predictable demand signals for companies and allow us to scale these critical systems in ways that we haven’t before,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Tolbert. “It’s also helpful when our allies and partners have systems that truly integrate with our own.”
In June, the army will announce the initial group of countries, including the UK, Romania and Poland, joining the marketplace. It will later add more weapons as part of an effort to reform the US foreign military sales system.
Speaking to some CEOs visiting the hackathon on Thursday, Driscoll said it was an “inflection point” in how the army works with industry. One year after saying that making military procurement more efficient would start with one big defence group going out of business, he said he now realised that the army shared much of the blame due to antiquated regulations.
Miller said the weeks-long event was successful because he invited only engineers. Brent Ingraham, the top army official for acquisitions, said one way that he would capitalise on the success of Operation Jailbreak was to empower Pentagon procurement programme officers to assume more risk.
John Baylouney, CEO of Leonardo DRS, a defence firm whose products include radars, was impressed by the hackathon but said the challenge was ensuring that the successes were translated into something permanent.
“It needs to find its way to a procurement path, it needs to find its way to a funding stream, it needs to find a way that shapes the architecture of the future for the army,” Baylouney said. “So many of these exercises in the past have not led to a pathway to a procurement.”
Driscoll said it was critical that the companies held him accountable.
“If we just do this sprint, everybody goes home, we call it a win, and we return to the old way of doing things as an army, shame on us.”
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