Source: Radio New Zealand
Anduril Industries has been awarded a US$159 million contract by the US Army for an initial prototyping period to develop a night vision and mixed reality system. Supplied / Anduril Industries
The Defence Force aims to send 50 personnel to a big aerial and ground drones exercise in the United States alongside American forces.
Project Convergence Capstone 6 (PC-C6) in the middle of the year, probably in Arizona, is the US Army’s leading event to include its partners in high-tech experiments.
Last year’s majored on human-machine interfaces while this year’s tests would likely include high-tech helmet-and-glasses worn by soldiers that could command drones and give them lots of battlefield data.
The so-called ‘Soldier Borne Mission Command’ aimed to give soldiers “superhero-like abilities“, said maker Anduril Industries.
The Defence Force (NZDF) said its people would train at PC-C6 with drones including aerial ones with “autonomous terminal guidance”, which is a system that helps hit targets.
For last year’s exercise they went to the Mojave Desert where some of the nine types of military robots the Americans are experimenting with were rolled out.
The Pentagon said Convergence this year was a “leading experimentation event, bringing together a diverse range of warfighting systems and personnel to enhance lethality, agility, and survivability through the integration of emerging technologies, enabling effective deterrence and, when necessary, decisive action against potential adversaries”.
It tied into the wider push to link the militaries into superfast webs of command and control called Combined Joint Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).
One aim was to enable rapid firing incredibly precisely at long distances based on masses of data crunched by AI and shared across the multinational forces on land, sea, air and in space.
The NZDF told RNZ it kept “complete control” over what information it shared with US systems through its NZDF battle management system.
This was directed by its communication policy and sharing protocols, Brigadier G A Motley said in an Official Information Act response.
“When NZDF personnel create or maintain information on systems owned by partners, it is subject to international agreements,” he said.
Project Convergence sat alongside the US navy’s Project Overmatch and its air force’s Advanced Battle Management System as CJADC2 initiatives the NZDF was part of.
RNZ asked how the NZDF controlled what it shared in these initiatives and the experiments they were running, and under what legal, policy and human rights controls that sharing had been taking place.
Motley said the international agreements for data sharing depended on the activity and the need.
“NZDF Legal Services will carry out assessments and develop national policy caveats specific to the activity to ensure that New Zealand law is followed.”
Project Convergence Capstone also involved defence tech firms like Palantir that had AI pivotal to targeting in the Iran war, and Anduril, which last year won a $270 million deal for the high-tech helmet-glasses.
The Arizona exercise might be pivotal for it. The US army had had a lot of difficulties getting its “fused digital awareness system” for individual soliders to work.
The prototype had done away with bulky helmets and resembled standard eyewear yet able to spot a threat kilometres away and instantly tag it for a strike, according to US defence news sites.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
