Day is gradually turning into night and American special operators are becoming more and more worried. They are deployed in a densely populated urban center in a politically unstable region, and local activity has become increasingly frenetic in recent days, with roads and markets teeming with more than the normal hustle and bustle of urban life. Intelligence suggests the threat level in the city is high, but details are vague and the team must keep a low profile: a firefight could draw in known hostile elements. To assess potential threats, the Americans decided to take a more cautious approach. Eschewing ostentatious tactical gear and blending in with potential crowds, an operator heads out onto the neighborhood’s main drag to see what he can see.
With a simple click, the operator sees… everything. A complex suite of sensors attached to its heads-up display begins to suck up information from the world around it. Body language, heart rate, facial expressions and even bits of ambient conversation in local dialects are quickly collected and routed through its backpack supercomputers for processing using an onboard artificial intelligence engine. Information is instantly analyzed, streamlined and regurgitated into the heads-up display. The Operators’ AI tactical sidekick’s assessment is clear: a series of seasonal events are coming to town, and most passersby are excited and rambunctious, posing minimal threat to the team. Crisis averted – for now.
This is one of several potential scenarios repeatedly presented by Defense Department officials in recent years when discussing the future of America’s special operations forces, the elite troops charged with facing the world’s most complex threats head-on, as the “tip of the spear” of the U.S. military. The American Army. Defense officials and science fiction scribes may have imagined a future of war shaped by brain implants and performance-enhancing drugs, or powered armor straight out of Space Soldiersbut according to U.S. Special Operations Command, the next generation of armed conflicts will be fought (and hopefully won) with a relatively simple concept: the “hyper-enabled operator.”
More brains, less brawn
First introduced to the public in 2019 in an essay written by SOCOM Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF) officials for Small Wars Journal, the Hyper-Activated Operator (HEO) concept is the successor program to the Tactical Assault Light Operator Combination (TALOS) effort. which, launched in 2013, aimed to equip American special operations forces with a so-called “Iron Man” suit. Inspired by the 2012 death of a Navy SEAL during a hostage rescue operation in Afghanistan, TALOS was intended to improve the combat survivability of operators by making them virtually resistant to small arms fire through additional layers of sophisticated armor, the Pentagon’s latest opus. a decades-long effort to build a powered exoskeleton for infantry troops. While the TALOS effort was declared dead in 2019 due to difficulties integrating its disparate systems into a single cohesive unit, lessons learned from the program gave rise to the HEO as the natural successor.
The main goal of the HEO concept is simple: to give warfighters “cognitive superiority” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the adversary,” as officials put it. of SOCOM. Rather than giving U.S. special operations forces physical advantages through next-generation body armor and exotic weapons, the future operator will go into battle with technologies designed to improve situational awareness and its relevant decision-making at levels higher than those of the adversary. Former fighter pilot and Air Force Colonel John Boyd proposed the “OODA loop” (observe, orient, decide, act) as a basic 21st century military decision-making model; The HEO concept seeks to use technology to “tighten” this loop until operators are literally making smarter, faster decisions than the enemy.
“The goal of HEO,” as SOCOM officials explained in 2019, “is to transmit the right information to the right person, at the right time.”
To achieve this goal, the HEO concept requires replacing the powered armor at the heart of the TALOS effort with sophisticated communications equipment and a suite of robust sensors built on an advanced computing architecture, allowing the operator to suck up data relevant and distill them into actionable information. via a simple interface such as a heads-up display, and this, “at the edge”, in places where traditional communication networks are not available. If TALOS was envisioned as an “Iron Man” suit, as I previously observed, then HEO is essentially Jarvis, Tony Stark’s built-in AI assistant who constantly feeds him information via his helmet’s heads-up display .
