The U.S. Air Force has awarded the 25 million dollar contract to Raytheon for a collaborative game to enable the evaluation and refinement of air attack options 9x faster than current methods.
As noted by the company, a Raytheon BBN-led team was recently awarded a contract, with a potential value of $25 million over three years, to work on the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Fight Tonight program. Fight Tonight will enable military leaders to rapidly determine the most effective way to achieve objectives during complex air attack scenarios by evaluating plan effectiveness against many possible situations and outcomes using faster-than-real-time executions of red and blue strategies.
Using a technique of collaborative gameplay and layering—building options and parameters onto a master scenario—the system will help operators identify visually which options have the greatest likelihood of achieving commander’s intent, even in the face of uncertainty. This collaborative technique with auto-exploration and AI assistance will shrink planning time from an average of 36 hours to four. Additionally, by layering possibilities, gray space can be identified—what things haven’t been considered that deserve a closer examination—such as adverse weather, an interruption of communications, or unanticipated adversary tactics.
“Today’s planning requires large teams of people to create a plan—often in a siloed manner—that is based on a likely scenario,” said John Myers, Raytheon BBN principal investigator for the effort. “But the battlespace is dynamic, which leads to obsolete plans once an actual engagement is underway.”
The Raytheon BBN-led team includes Breakaway Games, Raytheon Missiles & Defense, and Raytheon Intelligence & Space. The work will be completed in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Rome, New York; and Hunt Valley, Maryland.
