FutureTAK: Digital Engineering for Team Awareness at the Tactical Edge

The United States Air Force (USAF) adversaries are rapidly deploying next-generation capabilities across key technological domains. In such a hyper-competitive environment, it’s necessary to reduce the cycle of innovation from years to weeks, or even days, to maintain competitive advantage and preserve our national security interests. To maintain this advantage, the USAF, and Department of Defense (DoD) must implement innovative methods to ensure that our forces can win in the high-end fight. Technology advancements are transforming how we collaborate with each other, which is impacting engineering practices worldwide. Digital Engineering (DE) is one of those advancements; DE supports a framework that ensures tremendous acceleration of organizational technology changes so that they can occur faster while retaining high quality and security. DE allows improved risk-taking in a secure digital environment, increased rapid fielding of prototypes, with minimal negative impacts. This will be impactful for situational awareness for US tactical forces in conflicts with near-peer competitors. The Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) has provided warfighters with unique capabilities in this domain while being adopted at an increasingly faster pace. TAK Server and its design use traditional software development approaches, which results in software that's hard to administer, update, and scale in the edge environment. The TAK family of applications, to continue to be sustainable at the edge, suggests adopting an improved approach that would allow managing the Cursor of Target (CoT) as a conceptual model, rather than an application layer, from which different implementations can be derived. Such a concept is aligned with the DevOps approach as described by former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force in the paper “Taking the Red Pill”. In this paper, Dr. Roper introduces the “digital trinity” - digital engineering and management, agile software, and open architecture, being the next big paradigm shift for military tech dominance. He advocates for a tech acquisition shift to determine when a model becomes so realistic that we can accept it as a full substitute for reality. The open-source FutureTAK Server (FTS) has embraced this approach, delivering to the open-source community every month for the past 24 months. There is an opportunity to invest the proper resources to bring DE practices to the TAK platform. The scope of this effort will focus on the FTS digital engineering approach, introducing FTS version 2.0 with state-of-the-art technical architecture, the ability to run on edge devices, self-healing, and configuration and administration all on Zero Touch deployments. This will validate digital engineering techniques for major defense and non-defense customers (TAK community) and should result in more opportunities for meeting Dr. Roper’s “digital trinity” vision, by enabling digital engineering services to create a digital workforce within the DoD.