Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which relies on the military services to provide much of its enabling technologies and platforms, has begun blazing trails to new technologies and sharing that knowledge with the services, SOCOM commander Army Gen. Raymond Thomas told Congress on Tuesday.
Special Operations Forces, for most of SOCOM’s 30-year history have operated independently of the military services but drew from their much larger inventories of vehicles, weapons and command-and-control capabilities. In recent years the relationships have reversed, Thomas told the House Armed Service subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities.
“I would normally tell you about our interdependence with the services where they provide us platforms that we then transition with our funding authorities to create SOF platforms,” Thomas said. “What you are seeing is it trending in the opposite direction where based on our research and development and some of our acquisition activities, we’re now enabling the services and even more so we are enabling some of our foreign counterparts.”
Thomas said SOCOM is now “returning the favor” to the services by “trailblazing” research and development into certain technologies, proving their operational utility and then making them available to the regular services.
The exchange of information and technologies is possible because although SOCOM is a unified combatant command, it is manned by troops from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. And although its budget is often shrouded in secrecy, its acquisition process is not unlike that of the larger services, though it is more streamlined. As SOCOM learns new ways of doing business, it can readily transition those lessons to other acquisition bureaucracies, Thomas said.
“Our acquisition director would tell you that our acquisition authorities aren’t significantly different from the services,” Thomas said. “The advantage we do have is that he works directly for me and so we have a very direct, daily affiliation I would offer.”
SOCOM’s acquisition director has successfully enabled and encouraged innovation in the ways the command identifies appropriate technologies and how they are purchased, Thomas said. A year-old tech incubator called SOFWorks has provided a venue for technologists, operators and acquisition officials to work collaboratively outside the confines of MacDill Air Force Base.
“There we have the opportunity for a collision of acquisition types, technologists and most-importantly, operators,” Thomas said. “You will find very current operational individuals who have the problem-solving ideas and ethos that’s then married with academia, technologists and acquisition types so we can rapidly consider alternative sourcing, alternative problem-solving methods and really get to the crux of the matter of providing enabling technology to our force.”
Top of the list is using machine learning and advanced computing technologies – many of which are being used in the commercial world – to sort through terabytes of intelligence data SOCOM collects.
“I am fascinated and arguably stunted as a 58-year-old to get my head around,” he said. “That is leveraging machine learning, deep learning and cognitive computing. I can see it in terms of corporate applications. … We’re literally swimming in the morass of information and intelligence – it’s a mixed bag – and how we sort through that.”