Day is slowly turning into night and the American special operators are growing increasingly concerned. They are deployed in a densely populated urban centre in a politically volatile region and local activity has become increasingly frenetic in recent days, the streets and markets bustling with more than the usual bustle of city life. Intelligence suggests the threat level in the city is high, but details are sketchy and the team needs to keep a low profile – a firefight could attract known hostile elements. To assess the potential threats, the Americans decide to take a more cautious approach. Eschewing flashy tactical gear in favour of blending in with potential crowds, one operator steps out onto the neighbourhood’s main street to see what he can see.
With the push of a button, the operator sees… everything. A complex array of sensors affixed to their heads-up display begins absorbing information from the world around them. Body language, heart rate, facial expressions, and even ambient snippets of conversations in local dialects are quickly collected and sent through their backpack supercomputers for processing with the help of a built-in AI engine. The information is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and regurgitated back into the heads-up display. The assessment of the operators’ AI tactical companion is clear: a series of seasonal events are coming to the city, and most passersby are excited and elated, posing minimal threat to the team. Crisis averted—for now.
This is one of many possible scenarios. repeatedly presented By Defense Department officials in recent years, when discussing the future of America’s special operations forces, those elite troops tasked with facing the world’s most complex threats as the “tip of the spear” of the U.S. military. Defense officials and science fiction writers alike may have imagined a future of warfare shaped by Brain implants and performance-enhancing drugsor a powered armor Directly from Starship TroopersBut according to U.S. Special Operations Command, the next generation of armed conflicts will be fought (and hopefully won) with a relatively simple concept: the “hyper-skilled operator.”
More brain, less strength
First presented to the public in 2019 at a rehearsal According to SOCOM Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF) officials for Small Wars Journal, the Hyper-Enabled Operator (HEO) concept is the successor program to the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) effort that, initiated in 2013, sought to equip U.S. special operations forces with a The so-called “Iron Man” suitInspired by the Death of a Navy SEAL in 2012 During a hostage rescue operation in Afghanistan, TALOS was intended to improve the survivability of operators in combat by making them virtually resistant to small arms fire through additional layers of sophisticated armor. The latest installment in the Pentagon’s decades-long effort to build a powered exoskeleton for infantry troops.. While the TALOS effort was declared dead in 2019 Because of the challenges of integrating its disparate systems into a cohesive unit, lessons learned from the program gave rise to the HEO as a natural successor.
The primary goal of the HEO concept is clear: to give warfighters “cognitive superiority” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent,” as SOCOM officials put it. Rather than granting American special operations forces physical advantages through cutting-edge body armor and exotic weaponry, the future operator will head into battle with technologies designed to increase their situational awareness and relevant decision-making to higher levels compared to the adversary. Former fighter pilot and Air Force Colonel John Boyd proposed the “OODA loop” (observe, orient, decide, act) as the central model of 21st century military decision-making, the HEO concept seeks to use technology to “tighten” that circle to the point where operators literally make smarter, faster decisions than the enemy.
“The goal of the HEO,” as SOCOM officials put it, Put it In 2019, “it’s about getting the right information to the right person at the right time.”
To achieve this goal, the HEO concept calls for swapping the powered armor that forms the core of the TALOS project for sophisticated communications equipment and a robust sensor suite built on an advanced computing architecture, allowing the operator to extract relevant data and convert it into actionable information through a simple interface such as a heads-up display, and to do so “at the edge,” in places where traditional communications networks may not be available. If TALOS had been conceived as an “Iron Man” suit, As I noted earlierSo HEO is essentially Jarvis, Tony Stark’s built-in AI assistant who is constantly feeding you information through your helmet’s head-up display.
