DARPA at the Tactical Edge: TIGR & RAA

By Eric Tegler - January 17, 2019

Maj. Graham Perry, the officer in charge of 4th Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO), Force Headquarters Group, checks his Android Tactical Assault Kit to see possible target areas in Cape Wrath, Scotland, on April 23, 2018. 4th ANGLICO was in Scotland to take part in Joint Warrior 18-1, an exercise that furthers their readiness and effectiveness in combined arms integration, small-unit tactics, and land navigation. Photo by Cpl. Dallas Johnson

Coalition Capability – RAA

The rise of ISIS and its subsequent territorial grab in Iraq produced a new kind of tool with DARPA roots. Remote Advise and Assist (RAA) arose from a chaotic situation in Baghdad and an American administration politically opposed to intervention to reverse it.

By summer 2014, ISIS had overtaken the northern and western provinces of Iraq and was headed for Baghdad as Iraqi regular forces folded. A special operations element that included fewer than 50 U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers had been deployed to Baghdad International Airport to support the U.S. embassy.

They realized their most effective partners were Iraqi special operations forces (ISOF) whose decade-long training by U.S. Special Forces had given them the skill and will to fight ISIS. ISOF was desperate for American technical and tactical assistance. But U.S. policy meant that Army special operators could only assist them peripherally. The question was how to do it?

In the years following the initial development of TIGR, DARPA remained active in researching and developing other distributed command and control technologies, particularly those that could be actuated from hand-held devices.

In 2012, DARPA launched a program called Transformative Apps, which sought to develop a military mobile-apps marketplace similar to Apple’s App Store. Applications would be available on Android phones and tablets, cellular or satellite-enabled. “Trans Apps,” as it was called, built on the methodology developed for TIGR and aimed to nurture a new model for acquiring, introducing, and maintaining software.

In the years following the initial development of TIGR, DARPA remained active in researching and developing other distributed command and control technologies, particularly those that could be actuated from hand-held devices.

Maeda was again a program leader, and she admits that her team naively thought their success with TIGR would ease acceptance of Trans Apps. But the same battles over resources and Army oversight were revisited. As such, the DARPA Trans Apps team started small, rolling out select applications for trials in Afghanistan.

“The DARPA thread, through Trans Apps, to place new functionality on handhelds led to several apps that became popular in Afghanistan,” Evans said.