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Project Alpha Expedites Search for Ideas for a Changing Military
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http://www.mitre.org/news/digest/defense_intelligence/05_04/di_project_alpha.html

May 2004


One day unmanned military vehicles can be made to swarm like ants and strike and disable enemy targets. Robots equipped with sensors will be capable of performing most combat functions—and thus will save money and lives by marching toward the battlefields of the future. And a "space elevator" that would enable surveillance vehicles or other payloads to be sent up in space via cables will improve our knowledge of troop movements and enhance warfighting capabilities.

These feats are all just ideas at the moment, but they are not as outlandish as they may sound. Not to the members of Project Alpha. And not to the Department of Defense (DOD).

By looking into new futuristic ways of conducting war, Project Alpha, (a division within the Joint Experimentation Directorate at U.S. Joint Forces Command) is helping the U.S. armed forces adapt to changing ways of defending the country against various (and often unconventional) threats. Project Alpha teams—which consist of representatives of MITRE, the military, and private industry—are working to speed up the process by which promising ideas can be identified and presented to DOD officials.

"Project Alpha has brought new ideas into the U.S. Joint Forces Command because the teams were asked to think outside the traditional paradigm of military planning," says Shane Deichman, chief of the Concept Exploration Department at the Joint Experimentation Directorate's Joint Futures Lab in Norfolk, Virginia. "By looking beyond the horizon of current concept development efforts, they are stimulating the development of new ideas to enhance the capabilities of our future joint warfighters."

Don't look for swarming entities or soldier robots just yet, though. Project Alpha teams are focusing primarily on ideas that might be ready somewhere between 2010 and 2020, though they also consider ideas of potential use outside that time frame (either sooner or later) if they're promising enough. What differentiates Project Alpha from many research efforts is that the teams are designed to work quickly. The teams identify potentially good ideas and present them to the DOD within four or five months of starting research.

"Of course the process of taking an idea from concept to acquisition typically takes at least four years. This involves developing the concept, experimenting with it, refining and validating it, developing prototypes, and getting approval to go forward with an acquisition program," says Russell Richards, the Director of Project Alpha, who operates out of MITRE's Norfolk site. "Then the acquisition program itself adds several more years to the process. The total time to field the concept can easily exceed 10 years. Project Alpha's efforts probably will not impact the actual acquisition time, but we hope to cut the time it takes to go from concept to acquisition to two years or less."

Compressing Years into Months

Because Project Alpha teams try to compress years of work—from the discovery phase to the release of a team's Rapid Analysis Process report-into four months, there's little time to waste on ideas that aren't technically feasible or that can't be refined to help the military achieve transformation. So the first step is to sort through numerous ideas from many sources and come up with the most likely successes.

"Project Alpha is not a think tank," says Richards. "Most of the good ideas that we advance are the ideas of others. We just need to be smart enough to recognize a good idea when we see one, to pull together a case in support of the idea, and to have the energy and the passion to convince others to embrace the idea."

Project Alpha members can turn to Richards, the DOD, the Joint Concept Development teams, and the Joint Vision 2020 military transformation plan to understand the context in which their ideas must fit. The staffers, who have diverse backgrounds, get ideas from industry trends, academic research, and even popular culture. The "space elevator" idea, for example, came from Arthur C. Clarke's 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise. With their range of knowledge and their connections, team members can quickly find the information they need.

"Despite the small group and the short amount of time, Alpha's teams are able to fan out and get a fair amount of information collected in a short period of time," says Keith Curtis, a joint experimentation analyst with MITRE who served as team leader for two Project Alpha teams.

'A Magnet, Not a Fisherman'

Project Alpha is bringing to the forefront ideas that could impact the nation's most pressing defense challenges. Of the ideas advanced thus far, three of them address detecting, identifying, and attacking mobile targets—the area Congress directed the Joint Experimentation Directorate to focus on when it was created in 1999. In that area, Project Alpha has advanced these ideas:

Swarming entities—Emulating the swarming behavior of insects by having numerous unmanned systems, working in concert with each other, converge from several locations and strike and disable targets. The unmanned systems will indeed likely be smaller than the Predator, but they may not be. In fact, the unmanned systems could represent a variety ranging from very small unmanned aerial vehicles to Predators to ground combat vehicles or underwater vehicles. The idea of swarming has been applied to all domains—air, land, and sea.

Hard-to-get signals—Project Alpha teams are using an off-the-shelf capability to improve the ability of U.S. aircraft to detect the low-probability of intercept emissions of enemy surface to air missiles and other weapons.

Pattern recognition for time critical targeting—Building software that detects patterns in the sensor tracks of ground combat vehicles, Transporter Erector Launchers, mobile Surface-to-Air Missiles, etc. If successful, friendly forces could have an enhanced ability to determine where "hide sites," reloading facilities, and forward operating bases are located, the types of weapons involved, and possibly what the enemy's plans are.

Project Alpha teams have also pushed ideas that may aid other aspects of military transformation. The Unmanned Effects (robotics) concept, for example, involves replacing humans with robots in many scenarios, which could save lives and manpower, as the robots could do several jobs more effectively and more economically than humans. With Near-space Applications, the military could use high-altitude long loiter (HALL) balloons could provide round-the-clock surveillance and theater tactical communications. Project Alpha is exploring a cellular telephone-like capability that would utilize the HALL platform like a cell tower.

Although the implementation of these ideas is still many years away, Project Alpha's team members feel they have already contributed to transformation by setting up a system whereby good ideas can be quickly assessed and then handed off to the DOD for further development.

"I think the biggest thing Project Alpha is able to do is to validate concepts. Concepts are based on certain tenants," says Curtis. "You may not be able to validate all the tenants, but if you can pick out the key ones and in some way validate them, you know you've got a viable concept that should go forward." The DOD feels Project Alpha will be successful if the teams are fed ideas from both the top down and the bottom up.

"When I briefed Project Alpha to General William Kernan, then the four-star commander of the Joint Forces Command, I described the 'discovery' efforts of the Project Alpha teams using the metaphor of 'fishing for good ideas,'' says Richards. "He said, 'No, Project Alpha would be successful when it is more like a magnet, not a fisherman.' His implication was that ideas would flow to us without us having to go out and dig for them. And this is exactly what is happening."

—by W. Russell Woolard