MARCH 4, 2022 – Get ready to jump in the sandbox.
A partnership involving the Office of Naval Research (ONR); the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (DASN RDT&E); and the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) is conducting the first virtual sprint demonstration of the Aggregated Digital Ecosystem for Naval Advantage (ADENA) during February and March 2022.
ADENA, also known as “Sandbox,” is a virtual digital battlespace where users can create customized “experimentation sandboxes” for a particular technology, or for mission planning and training.
The ADENA event is being overseen by SCOUT—an ONR-sponsored, repeatable system for identifying alternative ways to bring unmanned technologies to problems, operationalize them and get them to scale. SCOUT is committed to getting nontraditional, commercial-off-the-shelf, government-developed and/or government-sponsored technologies to the fleet rapidly
ADENA’s sprint demonstration is part of the larger SCOUT Experimentation Campaign, which will leverage the Naval Research and Development Establishment communities, capabilities and enterprise tools to solve warfighter-driven problems. The goal of SCOUT is a series of innovation sprint events, exercises and experimentations to encourage learning and innovation, in order to rapidly develop technologies and techniques to improve warfighting capability—and assist in quicker leadership decision-making. These events will ultimately culminate in a large-scale demonstration sometime this summer.
The ADENA sprint is the first event using a digital representation to help address the interdependencies and scalability of the complex warfighting operational environment.
“It’s vital that we connect innovators, industry, acquisition professionals and fleet stakeholders to attack and solve key operational problems, so our naval capacity and capability grow affordably,” said Paul Mann, the Department of the Navy’s chief systems engineer. “Through ADENA and SCOUT, we expect to harness the capacity and speed of our teams and rapidly drive learning and engineering progress.”
Both SCOUT and ADENA support Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Lorin C. Selby’s call to reimagine naval power. This concept focuses on bringing capabilities together in novel ways and changing the way we solve operational problems. For decades, the Navy focused on building large, complex systems that are too expensive to generate in mass. Instead, Selby says we need to create a Strategic Hedge, or backup plan, that focuses on the small, the agile and the many. Selby calls for dozens, hundreds or even thousands of unmanned systems to augment warfighting capabilities.
“I believe it is vital to consider something besides the old conventions we’ve been exhibiting for decades,” said Selby. “Our time to innovate is now. The small, the agile and the many have the strong potential to define the future in a world where the large and the complex are either too expensive to generate in mass, or potentially too vulnerable to be put at risk.”
With the ADENA sprint event, teams can use digital tools to build, scale and test operational problems, and make adjustments that save time, money and resources.
This would be of great value to JIATF-S in its mission to carry out drug interdiction. JIATF-S currently works with U.S. Southern Command and partner naval forces to leverage all-domain technologies and unmanned capabilities to target, detect and monitor illicit drug trafficking in the air and maritime domains. This facilitates interdiction and apprehension to reduce the flow of drugs, as well as degrade and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.
The SCOUT partnership with the DASN RDT&E ADENA team (including Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport and Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division) and JIATF-S seeks to create a mission simulation (i.e., the warfighter’s “problem space”) in which ADENA will help evaluate the technologies (i.e., “solutions”) that the SCOUT team is identifying though various sprints.
Meanwhile, this first ADENA sprint will pave the way for future digital tools in an enhanced digital battlespace enhancement. Organizers say this sprint is a critical value-added step in creating a virtual mission battlespace for dual-use JIATF-S mission planning, training, wargaming and future SCOUT events.
This kind of collaboration, training and innovative planning provides an advantage in testing and providing cost savings. From the digital battlespace, teams can take what they learn and build rapid solutions to the operational problem sets.
Story by Warren Duffie
Office of Naval Research