For the first time, the U.S.’s Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, in partnership with the U.K.’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, or Dstl, demonstrated state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, or AI, technology at two major back-to-back military exercises.
In November 2022, a team of 30 AI and autonomy experts from the U.K. and U.S. deployed as a joint taskforce to the Project Convergence 22, or PC22, experiment at the U.S. National Training Centre at Fort Irwin, California. In December, a subset of the taskforce reconvened at the British Army’s Salisbury Plain Training Area in Wiltshire, England, taking lessons learned from PC22 and rapidly applying AI into a new operational environment as part of the Dstl HYDRA project’s Integrated Concept Evaluation, or ICE.
Both exercises addressed the challenge of making AI and autonomy agile, adaptable, trustworthy and accessible to warfighters, albeit under different U.S. and U.K. military use cases. The goal was to deliver mission specific AI that can be deployed to meet the ever-changing mission conditions and needs of warfighters.