The U.S. Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), the service’s new intelligence ground station, and the Maven Smart System (MSS) “absolutely complement each other,” Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir [PLTR], said in an interview on June 5 at the company’s Washington, D.C., office.
The sites of interest DoD can sense for a given fight has gone from thousands to millions, but that surfeit now places a premium on artificial intelligence (AI) to sort through the chaff to identify targets.
TITAN is to be the Army’s tactical intelligence ground segment in the field, while MSS “starts with the combatant commanders/combatant commands [COCOMs] and then the [service] components underneath them, and, increasingly, space, as space for COCOMs is coming online,” Sankar said in the June 5 interview.
In March, the U.S. Army said that it had chosen Palantir over RTX [RTX] to continue TITAN development (Defense Daily, March 6).
The $178.4 million March contract is for Phase 3 of TITAN, which includes the development and delivery of 10 prototypes and the integration of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning from Project Linchpin to shorten targeting time, advanced space antennas, aerial and terrestrial sensors and advanced computing.
On May 29, the Pentagon’s announced an up to $480 million, five-year contract to Palantir to move MSS from prototype to production (Defense Daily, May 30).
Under the initial, $153 million task order, Palantir is to ramp up the use of the commercially-based MSS from hundreds of users at five U.S. Combatant Commands (COCOMs) and the Joint Staff to thousands of users in the five COCOMS and the Joint Staff, beginning June 1, the company said. The five COCOMs with MSS software licenses are U.S. Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command, and Transportation Command.
Palantir’s TITAN team includes Northrop Grumman [NOC], Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies [LHX], Pacific Defense, SNC, Strategic Technology Consulting and World Wide Technology,
In TITAN Phase 3, Palantir is to deliver five Basic variants of TITAN and five Advanced.
The Army has said the “Advanced” version of TITAN is for heavier platforms such as tactical trucks, and includes a space direct downlink capability, while the “Basic” model is for lighter platforms (Defense Daily, Aug. 31 2022)
TITAN will include “satellite downlinks to exquisite national capabilities,” Sankar said this week. “It’s bringing together your ability to see and sense beyond line-of-sight and from space, and then integrating that data, doing the sensor fusion, drivng a kill chain to get to targets that you’re then gonna dispatch from TITAN to shooters. The idea is you’re gonna be able to do this on the move.”
The TITAN sensor processing data links are “well beyond Link 16,” he said. “We might use Link 16 to dispatch to the shooters, but on the sensor processing side, there are National Technical Means that we’re using. There’s exquisite collection from Title 50 [assets] that’s going into the back of that [TITAN] truck that’s then being processed, being mensurated/going through the target nomination process. Then it exits that truck in a target quality track that you’re dispatching to a HIMARS or to whatever weapon system. You might even send it back up to link to an airborne shooter.”
Sankar said that the sensing for TITAN will include electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, electronic/signals intelligence.
DoD has said that MSS is the initial version–the “minimum viable” one–of Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2)–DoD’s effort to link sensors, data, decision makers, and front line forces in order to shorten the “kill chain.”
Palantir looks to have a presence in the strategic, operational, and tactical stacks.
Battalion and above units are using Palantir’s Army Intelligence Data Platform (AIDP), for example, for targeting in Yemen.
The Army’s AIDP program was formerly known as Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) Capability Drop 2 (CD-2) (Defense Daily, Feb. 2, 2022).
AIDP involves intelligence processing work, for example correlating electronic intelligence and data from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Modernized Integrated Database (MIDB) to ensure a suspected transporter erector launcher is not a dummy. AIDP may provide targeting packages for combined air operations centers’ air tasking orders, for example, or to the Navy for its strikes. DIA is to replace the more than 30-year-old MIDB with the Machine-Assisted Analytic Rapid Repository System (MARS) next year.