How Contextual AI Can Augment Special Operations 

“AI is a tool to enhance our capabilities”- Colonel Rhea Pritchett, Program Executive Officer, PEO SOF Digital Applications (SDA), SOF AT&L, U.S. Special Operations Command, told the audience at the SOF SDA Deep Dive. Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing and being applied to more and more domains, but it is a tool, not the capability. 

Valkyrie focused our week on how we could use our contextual AI to support the specialized missions and operations carried out by special operations forces. By leveraging contextual AI systems that can understand and adapt to the specific situational context, these elite military areas, kept top of mind during SOF Week 2024, could see asymmetric advantages across several execution capability areas:

• Warfighter Performance: AI can analyze real-time biometric data, environmental conditions, and other inputs to optimize warfighter performance. This could include customized wellness interventions, fatigue management, cognitive/physical workload adjustments, and more. 

• Multi-Domain Communications: The complexity of multi-domain operations requires seamless communication and common operating pictures across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Contextual AI could enable multi-modal communications, smart relaying, multilingual translation, and knowledge synthesis to enhance coordination.

• Computing & Battlespace Awareness: With contextual awareness of the tactical situation and mission, AI could optimize computing resources and direct sensor/system prioritization. AI-enabled analytics could fuse multi-source data into comprehensive battlespace awareness for decision advantage.  

• Precision Effects: By understanding the context and objectives, AI could enhance targeting solutions and effects modeling. It could enable more precise and discerning use of scalable effects to increase military capability while reducing collateral damage.

• Access & Emplacement: Operating in denied or infrastructure-poor areas, contextual AI could help optimize logistics, find entry points, provide environmental mapping, and support specialized emplacement missions more safely and efficiently.

The speakers at SOF Week also noted there are many technical challenges and concerns around the use of AI for military operations that would need to be rigorously addressed. These include:

• System robustness
• Adversarial attacks
• Ethical bounds
• Maintaining appropriate human control aka keeping “humans in the loop”

But if developed responsibly, contextual AI could provide powerful decision aids and augmentation capabilities for special ops forces executing their critical missions. That’s where the key public and private partnerships through programs such as SBIR can help.

As we leave SOF Week 2024, we know that the impact of AI across the military sphere will be profound. Harnessing contextual AI, which Valkyrie specializes in, could be a key enabler for the difficult special operations domain specifically. With enhanced awareness, precision, coordination, and capabilities, AI can be the tool that provides an asymmetric advantage for the American warfighter. 

To learn more about the work we’ve done with previous defense clients and our use of contextual AI, schedule a call with one of the experts on our team.