The images and other readings gathered from afar were critical to grasping the situation in Eastern Europe at the time, and their continued dissemination, including through the press, aids public understanding of the war.

Among those involved in the capture and distribution of such information is Maxar Technologies, which provides satellite imagery to the Defense Department and intelligence community, among other national security pursuits.

In February 2023, for example, the Colorado-based company won an additional round of work on the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain, which compiles extremely accurate virtual maps of territory across the globe for military purposes. It’s considered a key piece of the service’s Synthetic Training Environment, an immersive training-and-rehearsal tool. The company is also involved with Project Maven, launched by the Pentagon in 2017 to detect targets of interest in footage captured by uncrewed systems.

C4ISRNET reporters interviewed two Maxar executives — Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of public sector earth intelligence, and Jennifer Krischer, vice president and general manager of intelligence programs — on the sidelines of the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis.

Portions of the interview below, conducted May 23, have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Where do you see the future of One World Terrain and, by extension, the Synthetic Training Environment going? What does that look like?

Frazier: We started with a focus of helping the Army modernize its training with geospecific data, with a goal of being able to provide soldiers as realistic an experience as possible.

Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais, she was the first cross-functional team lead for the Synthetic Training Environment. Her vision at the time was: If we can have reps and sets with hundreds of experiences in the virtual environment, then we can help soldiers be safe when they actually deploy.

That has continued to be the core focus of the program. That being said, as we exposed the data to different parts of the community, there was insatiable demand from the operational users to apply it to current missions. Whether it was in support of the Afghan drawdown, there was data that we provided over Ukraine — using it for operational mission-planning was very prominent.

Even the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, there was a reference to One World Terrain, and I think it did a nice job of highlighting the variety of use cases that had been proven out.

So what we’re seeing is, as we build out more complete, global coverage of that capability, being able to use it as a reference layer to integrate other data sources against it, and have all those data sources inherit the same accuracy, that foundation really enables a form of sensor fusion that we haven’t been able to see at scale.

One example that we are demonstrating is how we can apply 3D geo-registration software that uses that reference as a way to take — whether it’s space-based, or airborne, or even an unmanned surface vehicle — a sensor feed and use the terrain as a source of registration to tie that down, both in terms of the right location and the right orientation, so that you’re able to inherit the same accuracy as that base.

Think about a realtime feed from a drone. That would then allow you to be able to know exactly within this type of radius where that pixel is. That, I think, is probably one of the more breakthrough opportunities, in terms of taking it fully operational.

Q: How has the conflict in Ukraine shaped or factored into Maxar’s business? What is that consumption like — is there an increased need for satellite imagery or your other products?

Frazier: We support a global mission, and we’ve been providing these capabilities for decades. And you can look at every major event, and Maxar has played a role in that, in some capacity.

I think what’s unique about Ukraine was that at all phases, the crisis leading to conflict, we were able to, through different channels, expose our capability in a way that was helpful to the mission.

The focus of the Defense Department now is integrated deterrence — the role that commercial was able to play to bring transparency to what was happening, with troop buildup and, as it pivoted to conflict, what was happening on the ground.

The combination of what was exposed through the media, through our partnerships there, along with the fact that the intelligence community, Defense Department, allies and partners were all able to access current imagery over those areas, just allowed a level of interoperability and mission planning that, I think, has helped support the mission, but also helped a lot of decision makers think through ways that can be applied, more broadly.

NATO hunger for info driving deals for commercial satellite imagery

I know you recently covered the Global Information Dominance Experiments series.

One of the things that’s helped us do is have conversations with different stakeholders across the community, who have been looking at how do I take the increased commercial collection, some of the innovation that’s happening with applied machine learning, so computer vision, to be able to interpret imagery quickly, the types of technology I referenced earlier with our 3D, where we can georeference that data on quick timelines, and then how can that support different forms of experimentation. That is demonstrating how new use cases for how commercial can be applied to the here-and-now missions.

We’ve supported Project Convergence and Scarlet Dragon; those were examples of exercises and experimentation that we supported with commercial capabilities. I think we’re seeing that there’s a lot of interest.

Q: The big news at GEOINT yesterday was Project Maven, with Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth talking about its transition to a program of record. How do you envision Maxar taking part in Project Maven, and what do you hope to contribute?

Krischer: We’re already contributing to Project Maven.

We are generating algorithms around both electro-optical and our synthetic aperture radar imaging capabilities. So object detection, using those different modalities.

We also have been working with Project Maven for years now on providing low-latency imagery so that we can run the algorithms against the imagery in a sensor-to-shooter methodology that really resonates with the warfighter. So we’ve already been doing these things.

We envision the future of Maven as being: How do you bring the vast computer-vision algorithms sets to bear on the different missions, whether it be the intel analyst or the warfighter in the field, and how do you enable the warfighter to do these things?

We’re working kind of hand-in-hand to understand what it needs to be and helping shape the future, so that it’s not vendor-locked, it’s really meeting the users where they need the information.

Frazier: In our conversations, the intent is to enable geospatial AI at scale. And, as a result, as these capabilities get more mature, you want to be able to take advantage of all the collection that’s happening across the constellation.

For the U.S. government, the constellation includes commercial as a part of that. That’s why EOCL is electro-optical commercial layer. With the contracts that were awarded to us, and Planet and BlackSky, and then what’s being done now to add other modalities, like radar and radio-frequency sensing and the like, the goal is to create an architecture where you can quickly run the algorithms against that source to then get the information out to those users.

Geospatial-intelligence agency making strides on Project Maven AI

We’ve had a lot of use of our existing systems to apply computer vision against the imagery that we’re hosting and disseminating now, across the community, and now it’s about how do we actually do this at scale, have more machine-to-machine exploitation at scale. The last couple of decades have been focused on how humans visualize imagery.

Q: With Project Maven, and with a lot of these things like Joint All-Domain Command and Control, there’s just an incredible amount of collection and data that has to be sorted through. So you can’t ignore the AI or ML portion on your side, right? That has to be baked in, basically?

Krischer: Absolutely.

Frazier: Correct.

Q: Is there a need for a One Space Terrain? Maybe with a more artful name?

Frazier: I can see that happening.

You heard the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, his comments, about how they’re supporting the lunar mission. And I think, yeah, we need to have an accurate representation of all domains, where we expect to safely navigate, to be able to mitigate threats, et cetera.

Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, who runs the Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Novosel, Alabama, is playing a key role in leading that process.

The Army plans to field a Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), as well as a variety of tactical drones and launched effects to aid crewed aircraft, giving pilots greater standoff from enemy threats.

But the Army must also modernize its fleet of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters and CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopters to keep them flying at least two more decades, albeit some will remain in the fleet considerably longer.

At the same time, McCurry is also focused on ensuring aviation training keeps up with the service’s newer, complex missions expected in the future.

Defense News sat down for an exclusive interview with McCurry at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual symposium on April 26 to talk about how the service is preparing for a new era of aviation. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The U.S. Army chose the Bell-made V-280 Valor tiltrotor for its FLRAA effort, and this is the first the Army will fly a tiltrotor aircraft. How are the Army Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Novosel preparing for training with the aircraft and its integration into the fleet?

The team has started working with the Capabilities Development Integration Directorate and the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence, working together to refine all of those things that wrap around a materiel thing to create a capability so you have the trained people at the right time, you have the doctrine at the right time, we have leaders able to employ the system and understand how we want to do that doctrinally, and we have the facilities and things available.

As we look at it, facilities are clearly the longest lead time.

The good news is the models that were downselected have a reasonable correlation to our aircraft today. It’s a larger aircraft, a little bit, but from a height, width, and how it can stack in a hangar perspective, it’s very close. We don’t see a lot of blossoming needs there.

We’re working on the force design update, and we’re working on the allocation. The basis of issue is probably not directly one-for-one for a Black Hawk. With an increased capability, you probably don’t need the same amount in each formation, so we’re looking and doing the modeling [to determine] how many do you need.

On facilities specifically, everyone seems to gravitate to hangars. Most of our aircraft live outside. When you go by an Army airfield, we don’t have all the aircraft parked in the hangar; most of the aircraft are living out on the ramp. When you need to take them into the hangar to do certain things, whether it’s overhead lift capacity or something else, then we do that.

As we look at increased speed and range, then we begin to look at how we’re going to conduct training, and that’s really where our focus will largely be. We have gone out to every installation and done assessments, and the Army G-3/5/7 ultimately decides prioritizations for fielding. Once we get further in the program where we have a Milestone B, and we’re in the [engineering and manufacturing development] phase, and we’re working toward a Milestone C, then some of those things will fall into place, but I would expect them to follow the other Army priorities for the divisions.

The good news is, it’s not the first tiltrotor in the Defense Department, and we have sister services, so we’re relying heavily on what the Marines and the Air Force have done and how they use their platforms. Then we’re going to do individual training, so some sort of individual qualification will have to occur. My focus will be on how you build a cadre of people that know how to fly that. Then from there, it’s almost like when we first brought the AH-64 into the Army, we had a collective training opportunity where we formed those units, and we did one-station collective training before they landed at an installation. We’ll look at models like that in the future.

LUH-72A Lakotas became the Army’s basic trainer about seven years ago replacing TH-67s. That took the fleet from a single-engine to a dual-engine aircraft, among other changes. How has that worked out?

We picked at that time when aviation restructure was being worked. We kind of picked it because we had it, right? It’s not like we went out and said: “This is the purpose-built thing.” We said, “We own them,” and Congress was very gracious and gave us more to create the training base.

It’s been an effective trainer. My daughter and my son-in-law are both aviators, and one of them trained in the TH-67, and one of them trained in the LUH, so I got firsthand feedback from my kids — and my kids will always tell you how it really is.

[The digital cockpit features in an LUH made for an easier transition to more advanced aircraft with similar cockpits]. Some of the more tactile flight skills might be more developed in TH-67. [The Lakota] has been an effective trainer. It probably has a lot of things on it that you wouldn’t necessarily just go out and put on a purpose-built trainer, but it’s worked.

Do you see the LUH-72A as the trainer for many years to come, or is there an appetite within the Army to look at more purpose-built trainers as you modernize?

It’s something we’re always assessing and considering, and certainly as we start to look at future platforms we will continue to assess the training fleet and what’s right. But again, we also have a top line, and you have to be sustainable.

How are you looking at modernizing Black Hawks and Apaches? What upgrades need to take place for these systems if they are to fly for a couple more decades and keep up with the future vertical lift fleet?

You can always do a range of things from nothing to a new aircraft, and so we’re obviously not going to do nothing. The next step would be safety enhancements only; we’re doing more than that. And so we fall into this “targeted modernization” term, and twice a year we get together with product managers in the [Program Executive Office Aviation], with our capability managers, with the branch chief, and we go soup to nuts through each platform.

During the year things emerge — whether it’s the generators on AH-64 that we’re looking at — so we keep a running list of the things in order of priority from “need to do” to “really nice to do” on each platform that we kind of continually modulate. If you look at Apache, for instance, in this year’s fiscal 2024 request, Apache mods went up 30% — about $27.3 million. That’s specifically focused on giving us some additional capabilities with Link 16. Additionally it’s focused on going from metal to composite main rotor blades on the portion of the fleet that was still metal. That’s kind of how we go about it.

When we say “targeted modernization,” we’re watching for those things that are either emerging obsolescence, as in the case of the rotor blades, or some sort of safety or emerging quality problem that we can work together with our [original equipment manufacturers] on. We’re doing that across both of those fleets.

A aside from that, it’s not just the platform — you’ve got the aircraft survivability equipment, you’ve got the [Improved Turbine Engine Program], [degraded visual environment] capabilities that we’re also working on to continue to keep these current capabilities viable as we transition to the future.

There were a few aviation accidents with the National Guard in recent history. What is the service learning from these most recent accidents, including March’s Black Hawk collision that is still under investigation?

For the last three years, we’ve had the safest three years in history — never had another three-year period below one accident per 100,000 [flight hours]. And we were well below that. Last year it was 0.5 per 100,000. And last year we didn’t lose a single crew member in an aviation accident. So from that perspective, we’re proud of the record.

Now, every time we lose a soldier, aviation or otherwise, it’s a tragic occurrence. It’s somebody’s father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter out there, and so we want to take them all seriously. We’re working with the [Combat Readiness Center], we’re waiting on the outcome of the latest investigation.

I talked with everybody in the Army National Guard, state aviation officers, aviation support facility commanders that are here, and we talked specifically about how across the force — not component specific but component agnostic — we have to continue to apply the same rigid standardization that the branch was built on. That’s from initial mission-approval authority through mission briefing officers, mitigating risk, to final mission-approval authority, and then the crews executing the mission. All of us are focused on that. The great thing is, when we get together and have our [virtual meetings], we’ve got the director of National Guard aviation [attending] each week, and we freely circulate. There’s no component compartmentalization on any of this.

We will work through it, I think that we will stabilize. But as the branch chief, I keep a keen focus on what are the causal factors, so once they come out we’ll be able to see if there’s something we need to change.

In recent years, have helicopter-related incidents more often involved user errors or technical issues?

Historically, we have more accidents because of human error.

There are a couple things to think about as we transition from heel-to-toe rotations for 20 years, where your average chief warrant officer two had two combat tours under his belt and was getting almost 1,000 hours a tour. Now, some will argue those hours were all the same, but it’s experience in an aircraft to help you deal with things in extremis.

We have definitely seen a loss of flight experience across the force with less heel-to-toe rotations. And with retirements and those of us that are around my age retiring out of the force, we’ve seen this decrement in experience. At the same time, we are asking them to do some complex tasks in large-scale combat operations; more tasks focused on combined arms maneuver and operating in larger elements. Those things bring additional risk. That’s why my focus as the branch chief is on standardization.

Without deployment experience in a wartime environment, how are you training and preparing pilots? How much could be simulated training versus actual flight hours?

We’ve never equated one simulator hour to one live flight hour. I don’t know what that calculus is, but it’s not 1-to-1. Emergency procedures of some of our most extreme emergencies should be trained in simulation. Also, in some instances, reaction to threats can be trained in simulation.

We have to be able to collectively maneuver platoons and companies in that simulation, so that’s where our focus is. We’ll continue to leverage that to the maximum extent in both institutional training at Fort Novosel and in the operational force.

We’re not going to fly the number of hours we flew downrange, certainly, but we have been adequately and well-funded by Congress to give us the opportunities to fly.

The U.S. Army is renowned for its logistics capability, but is acknowledging how much more challenging and contested it will be to move weapons, equipment and people from fort to port, and into theaters of operation.

The newly confirmed head of Army Materiel Command, Gen. Charles Hamilton, is focused on overcoming logistical problems, improving how the service predicts operational needs, and more precisely carrying out the delivery and maintenance of supplies and equipment.

Defense News sat down with Hamilton at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium here on March 29. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What do you mean when you say “predictive” and “precision” logistics are key priorities? What do you need to accomplish these efforts?

What you’re going to hear from me is “precision sustainment” and “predictive sustainment.” Basically, they’re interchangeable. But the mechanics of it involves getting that logistics tail a little leaner and a lot more agile. And precision comes in at the tactical level.

Gone are the days when we had everything down to your favorite ice cream. It’s going be a lot more expeditionary and, in a lot of cases, you may get what you need just in time for that next big move.

Predictive is more back toward my end at the strategic level, what we’re calling the joint strategic support area. What’s in that space is the organic industrial base and the defense-industrial base as well as a bunch of enterprises that are similar to Army Materiel Command.

How it works is when something happens at the tactical end today, it doesn’t inform the strategic end. It could take a day, or it could take a couple of days, for the information to allow me to react to it. The must-do is when it happens at the tactical end; it’s got to inform a decision at my end.

I’ll give you an example: If I have 20 airplanes at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois with “Class 1″ food and water rations getting ready to take off, and something happens at the tactical end with ammunition, I need to be able to have something that tells me in real time that just happened and gives me courses of action.

One course of action from my device would be: “Hey, let that Class 1 go forward.” Although they already have 10 days of rations, that makes sense. It could be: “Take off half the Class 1 and put the ammo that they need on it.” That’s a good mix. Or it could say, “Offload all the Class 1 and put the ammunition you need,” getting to what they really need in theater, what’s the priority. That’s what we must do in the future to get to predictive sustainment.

Regarding the precision sustainment side — being able to, for instance, lighten the logistics tail — what are you looking at doing to achieve that?

I’ll just use this rudimentary example: Right now, a division or brigade is required to take so many generators. Well, I’d like to use that space to get to the right commodities they need — ammo, food, water. So through technology, perhaps, as opposed to 30 or 40 generators, they have one or two of these new batteries that don’t run off fuel, are quiet and provide the power grid for those units to operate. That’s just one way to cut down on the fuel requirements.

You’ve been tasked with leading a strategy for contested logistics. What are you doing to figure out a path forward?

We’ve got to almost redo the entire way we support. We’ve got some great platforms in place. As seen in Ukraine, it’s almost like giving support while you’re modernizing at the same time. The whole U.S. Army is doing that, and AMC is not absent from that equation.

We’ve got to rewrite our doctrine. For instance, no longer are the days when I could just — like I’ve done many times downrange — send convoys out to resupply. It’s too dangerous to do that.

What we might do in the future is use an autonomous resupply of some kind. It might involve putting those supplies along the route that I know they have to support, unsecured, but I have sensors there that are able to say: “Hey, your operation has been compromised.” ... We’ve got to totally rethink the whole way we resupply, and that’s kind of at the tactical level.

The center of gravity for the next fight? To me, it’s the joint strategic support area, right where we sit, because it’s got some vulnerabilities that I need to work on with industry to fix. So the organic and defense industrial bases, they are where we’ve got to ... focus through technology. Then we’ve got to shorten that gap, close that gap, with industry on how they get requirements so they can make investments to increase capacity.

Sustainment has to be bad for our enemies. If they see that we have the capacity through our industrial bases, they’re going to think twice about taking that next step.

What observations in Ukraine are driving the way you view future logistics?

After [Russia] decided to take on Ukraine, we’ve all been surprised at the logistics side of it, basically how they were landlocked and didn’t plan for the weather, the fuel, etc.

So we would do a little Monday morning quarterback on that, me and my fellow logisticians. But on Tuesday, we were looking at ourselves, looking at our processes and making sure that we were, in fact, doing what we said we can do.

But here is the big difference: It came down to leadership. As you know, they had to move some senior officers to the front to direct traffic. That will not happen in the United States Army.

We have some very capable junior leaders and an incredible noncommissioned officer corps that could do those tasks. I’ve watched staff sergeants lead convoys in combat, certainly young officers do that. I think probably part of our secret sauce is that we have a great noncommissioned officer corps, and we entrust and train our junior leaders to perform those tasks.

With the Army focused on contested logistics, especially in the challenging Indo-Pacific theater, how are you rethinking the logistics tail in that region when it comes to Army pre-positioned stock or other strategies to get equipment to the right place at the right time?

It was a huge mission — just the distance, the time-distance math problem you have to [solve to] get stuff there. In about three weeks, there’s a summit on Army pre-positioned stocks that’s going to happen, and that’s going to drive our strategy for what we do with that stock.

Once we narrow down some more of the agreements for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility, that would allow us to better posture our pre-positioned stock in that theater.

We always use terms like “set the theater.” Having done that a couple of times, I always remind my team it’s about not just setting the theater, but about resetting the theater. Because it changes almost weekly, you’ve got to be very flexible.