“Humans are more important than Hardware.”

Standing as the first “SOF truth,” that observation reflects the criticality of special operators across U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) elements. Consequently, it could be argued that the hardware projects and programs directly supporting those human operators have a unique importance within the SOF materiel arena.

A recent representative example of one of those projects is the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS), which was quickly branded with a public persona as “SOCOM’s ‘Iron Man’ suit.” Although never intended to be a fielded system, the research and development effort is already supporting a range of warfighter needs, while establishing the foundation for follow-on efforts in both special operations forces (SOF) and broader military communities.

“TALOS was initially envisioned to meet the need to protect the operator at ‘the fatal funnel,’ at the most vulnerable point, by providing enhanced survivability features,” explained Col. Alex MacCalman, former chief engineer and current director for Joint Acquisition Task Force TALOS. “From there we went very quickly into the solution space of deriving an exoskeleton powered suit that would provide full body armor protection. We then tapped into enhanced situational awareness, and increased surgical lethality. Those were the four original tenets: survivability, human performance, situational awareness and surgical lethality.”

Characterizing the TALOS project as “a great experiment for SOCOM to get after something disruptive,” MacCalman offered. “Disruptive innovation certainly involves our ability to get after changing tactics, techniques, and procedures; how we do business. And we knew from the get-go that SOCOM had to do this in a nontraditional way and from a lot of fronts, not only just from an acquisition dimension, but also teaming up with nontraditional partners and assembling the right expertise in forums and venues to get aggregate insights across these different perspectives with the operator in mind. In fact, in many ways, the TALOS project pioneered many of SOCOM’s abilities and prototyping endeavors now evident in the SOFWERX ecosystem. That has been a great takeaway from the TALOS experience.”

Elaborating on SOCOM’s early TALOS work with non-traditional partners, he pointed to “a lot of rapid prototyping events with the right people in the right forums to get an understanding of what the SOF needs were at the time.

Although never intended to be a fielded system, the research and development effort is already supporting a range of warfighter needs, while establishing the foundation for follow-on efforts in both special operations forces (SOF) and broader military communities.

“Those vendors went off in different directions with a vision of operator needs in those areas,” he said. “And things emerged. Things were catalyzed by that. There was investment in some of the technologies, both on the industry side and through government initiatives.”

Along with fostering the technology developments, he credited the TALOS project with organizational lessons learned; lessons that could be applied to facilitate broader service activities, like the recently established Army Futures Command.

MacCalman highlighted visual augmentation as one example of specific technologies explored under TALOS, noting that early concepts of integrating sensors, night vision, and augmented reality paved the way for interface control documents that informed programs like the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS).

“We recently had the closeout meeting for our TALOS integrated visual augmentation system, which we have been working on for the past several years,” he said. “And over that period we’ve been working with a range of external government players that are involved with the Army’s IVAS program. They serve as key stakeholders, taking advantage of all the insights that we arrived at, and contributing to a deliverable of a functioning system. It’s a prototype. It’s not fieldable by any means. None of these prototypes are. But they serve as an opportunity to understand the technical trade space, to test and learn as fast as we can and share that technical knowledge with the other government entities.”

A key beneficiary of the TALOS research and development experience is a concept, unveiled in May 2018, called the “Hyper Enabled Operator” (HEO).

He pointed to other TALOS spin-offs in new tactical armor designs.

“In TALOS, we focused very heavily on the physical domain, about protecting the operator at ‘the fatal funnel’ and building out a combat suit with increased armor,” he said. “And I have to say that there’s been tremendous success in our partnering with industry to reduce the weight of that armor. In fact, we’ve got some successful products that are being fielded right now at a significantly reduced weight. I’m not going to identify the threat level, because that’s not something we talk about, but it is very exciting. We’re doing combat evaluations and exploring ways of how we can get maximum coverage with a lighter material that provides protection balanced against the risks that we’re willing to take in different environments.”

Choosing his words carefully, he offered that, for the equivalent of the “20 some-odd pounds” of current body armor designs, the new designs could protect “five times as much surface area.”

“Now that’s at a reduced threat,” he quickly added. “And that goes into the risk calculation for the environment that you’re in. But it is certainly an achievement that we didn’t have prior to TALOS and it is a win that we are very excited about.”

Other TALOS technology benefits range from 3-D audio to exoskeleton subsystem designs. In terms of 3-D audio, MacCalman acknowledged that the SOCOM project “never expected to solve that challenge to the fullest extent,” but that TALOS helped to foster an endeavor that “could be further developed by industry with an eye toward both military applications as well as commercial applications.

“Another effort involved our exoskeleton work,” he added. “We did a variety of exoskeletons, not just for the TALOS suit that caught everyone’s attention, but also to understand the design space of different actuation strategies, control strategies, and different ways to develop an integrated solution to get after an intended need. Now the ‘ask’ in the beginning was a long shot. And people certainly knew it was not going to be achievable in five years. But it gave us a ‘North Star’ to challenge industry, explore opportunities, and learn the state of technology.”

He noted that part of that exploration involved heavily leveraging the Small Business Innovation Research program to incentivize small companies who might not have supported SOCOM efforts in the past.

“For example, we explored pneumatic actuators, instead of the electric motors,” he stated. “And now there’s a commercial product out there that’s being rented at certain ski slopes that actuates the knee when the user is skiing down the slopes. Certainly, our involvement and our effort investing in that technology helped move its development, over time, into their business plan. And now we can explore bringing that commercial product back in for a SOF need.”

A related spin-off encompasses a variety of lessons learned in placing kinematic structures around human joints. “That involves not only location, range of motion, and articulation issues, but also an understanding of loads and torques that are applied to joints in the human body,” he said. “So in the beginning, you start out with human motion treadmill detection, with operators running on treadmills without any weight. Then you put on weight, and you’re able to do inverse dynamics to get an appreciation of the torques that the  human is experiencing.”

He continued, “Then how do you take that information and design a kinematic structure around the human body? Because without that kinematic structure being built, you’re using models and making assumptions about how that added weight is going to apply torque to a joint. Then you’re thinking through the hard challenge of how much added assistance you’re going to need at each joint. There are a vast number of design space solutions out there with several complex trade space decisions needed to converge on a solution.”

Pointing to broader service interest in kinematics to support efforts like the Army’s Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team, MacCalman noted that the information also directly supports SOCOM component efforts, “like USASOC’s endeavor to enhance mechanical augmentation in some form in the future, which certainly is in the space of what we did.” In parallel with these tangible advances, TALOS is also a story of intangible benefits. To illustrate that point, MacCalman offered the analogy of industry’s lean startup philosophy of “looking at a big idea versus a big bet.”

One underlying tenet of the HEO concept is the fact that planners do not want to interfere with an operator’s basic situational awareness.

“The ‘Iron Man’ was the big idea,” he asserted. “It was an inspirational endeavor that motivated people and got them excited. And these nontraditional organizations were recruited and came in to be part of our ecosystem. Along the way, we really focused on a lot of the individual components of stand-alone capabilities. That allowed us to evaluate their effectiveness, to inform our state of the art on these technologies, and be able to feed that forward into other initiatives, whether those are in the government or here within SOCOM.”

He summarized, “Part of this is trying to accelerate as much learning as possible as fast as we can. And in many ways, there are lessons that we can reflect on as to how we can really move forward. Ultimately, SOCOM is embracing technological change like we always have. But in a lot of ways, we’ve got to model ourselves like a tech company, in that we are actively using lean startup approaches that industry is certainly getting after. Our intent is to get some sort of prototype or minimally viable product in the operator’s hand as fast as possible, so that we can get insights and learn whether we’re going in the right direction, we need to pivot, or we need to kill something right away. That is an approach that we have taken and will continue to take.”

A key beneficiary of the TALOS research and development experience is a concept, unveiled in May 2018, called the “Hyper Enabled Operator” (HEO).

As outlined by MacCalman, the new concept reflects a shift from the TALOS focus on the physical domain to a broader focus incorporating physical, cognitive, and virtual domains,

“The cognitive domain certainly involves getting into the minds of our adversaries, populations, and even our own commanders,” he said. “And, together with the virtual domain, which includes cyberspace and other influencers in the computer environment, it reflects a shift towards the cross-domain environment that we will have to learn to operate in. Not only are we concerned about the physical domain, but we want to be able to enhance the operator at the edge, in those contested and denied environments, with the right information, at the right time, for the right person, so they’re not being distracted. We are reducing the cognitive load, but we’re giving them the information at the point of need.”

Acknowledging that the stated goal is not reflective of a simple challenge, he added, “We certainly have the ability to flood the human with as much information as you can ever imagine. But that can be a detriment in certain environments. Instead, we want a ‘digital workforce’ working beside us, providing information and aggregate insights to us, narrowing in on key decisions, accelerating decision making, and partnering with us in a way.”

One underlying tenet of the HEO concept is the fact that planners do not want to interfere with an operator’s basic situational awareness.

“We’re encouraged by the research involved with the effectiveness of these technologies, their projected time frames, and potential distractions as we converge on the right set of technologies that ultimately will enhance the operator,” he said.

“That training that you get with assessment and selection still comes into play,” he said. “We don’t want to reduce that. The operators still have got to look up and use their own vision to see and discern. We don’t want the technologies or the Hyper Enabled Operator concept to become a distracted operator concept.”

Reflective of TALOS’ lessons learned, the way forward involves experimentation.

“From the Joint Acquisition Task Force perspective, we’re really honing in on that operator on the ground, in the contested and denied environments, with limited ability to push data through data links,” MacCalman said. “How do we push that data through those links? How do we consume all the data assets that will arrive from these cloud architectures or platforms? How do we consume all the variety of sensing modalities, in every spectrum that you can conceive of, that would aggregate into and pass through the data link, such that the processing of this information is done in a distributed smart way, so that you can deliver the insights and accelerate decision-making?

“This is not just raw numbers, but analyzed, filtered, prioritized decision-quality data delivered on a tailorable human machine interface,” he added.

It is likely that the human machine interface will also evolve through a future experimentation process. Asked if experimentation might begin with the currently fielded Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), he noted that the current system requires the operator to be “head down” for use. However, he returned to TALOS experimentation results, noting that advances achieved in visual augmentation, combined with some emerging acoustic and haptic technologies, offered some promising approaches to move forward.

“But I can tell you that, in the near term, we’re certainly interested in experimenting with the existing prototypes that we have on hand from the TALOS experience,” he said. “They will help us transition into the next endeavor. Ultimately, our focus will be on our operator needs from the components that are aligned with our high command’s vision to hyper-enable the operator.”

“We’re encouraged by the research involved with the effectiveness of these technologies, their projected time frames, and potential distractions as we converge on the right set of technologies that ultimately will enhance the operator,” he said.

He added, “In my mind, it goes into trade-off analysis; understanding that trade space as early as you possibly can, so that you can get those trades in front of the user and they can make those critical decisions along the way. That’s part of this experimentation, working with prototypes as early as possible to identify the trade space so that we can make those key design decisions up front, so that, by the end of the endeavor, you’re going to converge onto a viable product for the operator.”

Asked about experimentation plans over the next two years, he asserted that specifics remain to be seen.

“But I can tell you that, in the near term, we’re certainly interested in experimenting with the existing prototypes that we have on hand from the TALOS experience,” he said. “They will help us transition into the next endeavor. Ultimately, our focus will be on our operator needs from the components that are aligned with our high command’s vision to hyper-enable the operator.”

“Other experimental opportunities involve building out architectures that incorporate the digital pillars of sensing data assets, of communication, of computing, and the human-machine interface. This is ongoing. It is not just something that our organization as a Joint Acquisition Task Force is getting after. This is a collective effort across all our components, who are getting after this in different ways. It is a cohesive effort across the entire enterprise to better understand how to immerse ourselves in these technologies, in the virtual environment, the augmented reality environment, and how we interface with information,” he said.

As such, he agreed that it would be fair to brand the Joint Acquisition Task Force as “an experimental problem refinement tool focused on HEO” for a much larger enterprise.

“This is a process that we’re trying to champion, along with other components and innovation groups, such that you have an understanding of the current capability gaps,” he observed. “Then you feed that into some of the science and technology foundry events we will do, where we will go to cities that have a lot of innovative companies and work closely with our components, entering into these events focused on future concepts for a particular mission. We will try to conceptualize these future operating concepts, and then follow through that endeavor or that event with this collaborative environment, and with users and industry working to narrow down a better understanding of a problem, which we can address with technology.”

He noted that the actions will be accompanied by prototyping opportunities at SOFWERX, within the Joint Acquisition Task Force and across SOCOM components.

“We will come out of those events with better insights of what the problem is,” he said. “Ultimately this is how we want to focus on getting after disruptive innovation, by first understanding problems. We incrementally innovate when we start with existing solutions. But we’re disruptive when we have a clear understanding of a particular problem. And it’s only then that we can start ideating on new solutions that we can test in a crude way, as early as we can, to get the learning and insights so that we can pivot, invest more, or just kill an idea.”

Noting that much of the past TALOS coverage has focused on the integrated ‘Iron Man’ suit and when a particular prototype of that suit might be ready, MacCalman observed, “I think that the point of emphasis should be the fact that we’ve been demonstrating subsystem prototypes for a year now. As we speak right now, we have our operators up in one of our vendor sites putting on an exoskeleton. We are continuously demonstrating the system component prototypes as well as subsets of integrated system component prototypes. And the endeavor to integrate all those components into the originally envisioned TALOS suit has to be weighed against the worth of doing that, knowing where we are in the state of technology and what the opportunities are.”

He concluded, “From our perspective, the idea of integrating everything into an ‘Iron Man’ suit wouldn’t be something that would be beneficial, given the state of technology. But, by having that as a charter from the get-go, and having the government as a prime integrator, we had a ‘North Star’ to move towards and ultimately converge on what we have now with all of this collective learning across these prototypes.”