World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

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Project Alpha

http://www.jfcom.mil/about/fact_alpha.htmProject

Alpha fosters accelerated discovery, development and application of fresh ideas to issues of defense and national security.By quickly identifying and examining promising innovations, Project Alpha analysts:

• Evaluate potential technologies, concepts and capabilities• Propose practical, near and long-term solutions to the defense and military communities

• Identify and assess ideas in order to accelerate joint military transformation. Working in three-to-four-person teams, Project Alpha typically moves from idea identification to action in as little as four months. Project Alpha analysts appraise multiple topics during a given calendar year.Working with a large, diverse community of experts and leading institutions and organizations, Project Alpha produces actionable recommendations and encourages relevant, lasting dialogue among the military, industry and academia. Project Alpha seeks to build networks among the military, government agencies, academia and the private sector to promote the discovery and implementation of innovation to support national defense. Project Alpha reports are known by the acronym RAP, for Rapid Assessment Process. RAP reports

• Rapidly deliver knowledge to decision makers
• Streamline the vetting process to accelerate innovation
• Link the usefulness of new ideas to joint operations and emerging concepts• Reinvigorate ideas that may not have been initially recognized as relevant to military transformation

• Produce actionable recommendations for consideration by the defense community.

• Lead to follow-on conferences, collaborations, workshops and small-scale experiments Ongoing Projects• Near Space or Sub-Orbital Applications - The future warfighter will need unique wide-area surveillance and communications capabilities. Project Alpha is investigating inexpensive, unmanned systems capable of sustained operation over large distances, hovering in the Earth's stratosphere as high as 60-plus miles above ground level and providing continuous surveillance and in-theater communications support for areas several hundred miles wide.

• Confrontation Analysis - With multiple factions and non-state actors competing for power, resources, and control in the world's conflicted regions, the military must be capable of negotiating consensus and encouraging collaboration among diverse players during sustained operations. A Project Alpha team is examining the best means of achieving those ends.

• Effects Assessment - Policymakers and commanders need accurate ways to measure the overall impact of military effects and whether they meet intended goals. Project Alpha is investigating how best to create such a framework that would blend modeling, simulation and human role-playing into effects assessment.

• Enabling Technologies for Effects-Based Operations - To accurately understand and engage adversaries, commanders need an expansive view of battle conditions. Project Alpha is looking to ways to vastly improve this operational net assessment --- known as ONA --- by integrating and visualizing data and information to make it immediately and clearly available.Completed Project Alpha Reports include

• Swarming Entities -- Using lessons learned from bees and ants, swarms of unmanned, autonomous airborne vehicles collaborate to converge from dispersed locations to strike and disable targets. Humans monitor progress and intervene if necessary.

• Pattern Recognition For Time-Critical Targeting -- New software detects patterns in the sensor-tracking data of enemy missiles and air-defense capabilities in order to determine location of bases and loading facilities, weapons type and enemy intent.

• Compressive Receivers: Hard to Get Signals -- To improve air superiority and assure access to enemy resources, troops must be able to detect, identify and locate “threat emitters”: missiles, radars, attack aircraft and the like. Elimination of such threats establishes operational superiority, significantly reducing adversary strength and ability to campaign coherently.

• Alternative Space Access -- Access to Earth orbit remains expensive, averaging upwards of $10,000 per pound of payload. Current launch systems cannot accommodate space deployments on demand nor multi-mission capabilities. This RAP report discusses alternative payload-delivery systems, including a new generation of launch technologies being developed to replace costly and often cumbersome chemical-propulsion approaches.

• Unmanned Effects: Taking Humans Out of the Loop -- Robots have the potential to reduce injuries and deaths from military actions while providing certain capabilities superior to those of humans. Relatively inexpensive autonomous systems can be deployed that augment or, in some cases, replace altogether conventional forces while providing up-to-the-minute intelligence on battlefield conditions. Toxins, mines and other lethal threats can likewise be neutralized by robotic agents.

• National Knowledge Advantage Capability -- A single centralized analysis center is not necessary if joint force commanders have access to multiple sources of data and information that are virtually networked and immediately available for decision and action.

• Communications Implications of Distributed Operations - Future warfighting concepts frequently advocate the distribution of forces across wide geographic areas, self organizing as necessary to conduct missions. Such operations play out in a very information-rich environment. Because robust communications are required to support this vision, this report addresses the feasibility of providing the communications capabilities needed to support widely distributed operations.

• Synchronization, Adaptation, Coordination and Assessment (SACA) Tool - Millennium Challenge 2002 pointed out the need for decision support tools to enable effects-based planning. Project Alpha developed a prototype software tool to support the generation and selection of courses of action that are feasible and adaptable, which synchronize and coordinate across services, multinational partners and interagency partners.

• Knowledge Workers - This RAP report raises concern about identifying and retaining those who will be effective and efficient operating in an information-rich, collaborative command-and-control environment.

For more information about Project Alpha, request a RAP report or to submit an idea, please click here to send us an email.