Less than a month after the announcement of the Army’s “Right to Integrate” Hackathon Sprint, soldiers down range are already benefiting from more integrated systems.The initiative, also known as Project Jailbreak, which Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is overseeing alongside several defense contractors, is designed to fully integrate systems and weapons manufactured by different defense companies that had previously been siloed and were unable to fully share data or communicate seamlessly. Historically, systems would often not be able to integrate with those made by different companies.The first couple of systems that were jailbroken to make them more integrated were the Army’s command and control platforms, and those have already been pushed to troops in the Middle East, according to Dr. Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, during an event at Fort Carson, Colorado, Thursday.
Also jailbroke were “our C-2 platform and the ability to actually tie in a lot of the counter[-drone], the counter-unmanned system, radars, cameras, and effectors,” Miller said.
Driscoll said the Army is “failing” if the service cannot push many of these integration efforts to troops within 30 days, particularly those in the Middle East, due to the risks they’re facing amid the fragile ceasefire with Iran. Six U.S. service members were killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait in the early hours of the war, and several troops injured in the attack have said they were not adequately prepared for such attacks.
