» Understanding the operational environment is SOF imperative #1. Integrating various specialties to achieve a holistic understanding of the operating environment has always been a hallmark of USSOF. As SOCOM adds ever-more capabilities and shifts emphasis towards complex, indirect operations in outside-declared-theaters-of-active-armed-conflict (ODTAAC) environments, this task is more challenging than ever. In March of 2023 we demonstrated a modular and customizable software solution called Automate the Analyst (AtA).

AtA is designed to assist SOF personnel in achieving multi-role fusion in mission planning by automating the work required in the analytical process. SOF teams have limited bandwidth; AtA focuses their efforts on high-ROI activities needed to make sense of the data and make a coherent plan. Utilizing secure queries, our marketplace/open ecosystem approach is an AI/ML powered, autonomous, device-agnostic platform, designed to operate in a hybrid environment to collect, process, store, analyze, and transmit user-defined outputs to and from any other device or location, at any echelon. Powered by independent vendors and deliberately tailored to any user roles and mission set, this scalable system is a web of interconnected and interchangeable modules, consisting of data sources, ingestion, processes, AI-enabled recommendations, and visualization. AtA is an endlessly modular and customizable software system designed to enhance warfighter decisioning at the edge. Any user, any vendor, any data source, it is a scalable system of systems in the cloud and at the edge.

» The Next Generation Effects (NGE) Tech Sprints started out as an Innovation Foundry (IF) event conducted by the Science and Technology (S&T) Futures team. After the IF event, this further evolved into the Rapid Capability Assessment (RCA) event, once again, conducted by the Futures Team in September/October 2021. Out of the RCA event, there were 14 different focus areas presented as being available for Tech Sprints to push forward the non-kinetic direction of the NGE team. Out of those 14 focus areas, 4 were down-selected to move into the tech sprint phase. The Tech Sprints were a 9-month effort focused on bringing rapid solutions to future issues and problems in a peer/near peer adversarial great power contest from a Special Operations Forces (SOF) perspective. The aim of this effort was to present the current state of high-risk, asymmetric, and disruptive concepts, capabilities, and technologies to determine where future investment must take place to reduce risk and guarantee a competitive advantage.