074 – “CBM+ for Field Asset Readiness”

Author: Naveen Sydney
Company: hyperFIELD
Phone: (850) 276-9356
Email: naveen@hyper-field.com

In May 2018, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis discussed our National Defense Strategy. He outlined that a critical part of the nation’s competitive, military advantage is a reform of the DoD’s business practices and budgets for technological innovation to increase lethality. He stated that cyber, advanced computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and additive manufacturing, “are the very technologies that we need to fight and win wars of the future,”. In August 2018, in a message to our forces, he cited “enhanced lethality demands more than obtaining newer, more advanced equipment”. Software solutions are needed to address this gap and hyperFIELD has the answer.

Foremost, the focus needs to be maintaining America’s weapons-systems, wherever they are deployed globally. Maintaining these assets in the field of operations increases mission-critical availability and improves our combat readiness.

However, challenges have plagued the agencies. Today our nation’s weapons-systems are maintained at Defense contractor Depots or DoD organic Depots. These are often located, far from deployed locations leading to long repair turn-around times, counter to an agency’s goals to perform asset maintenance at ‘Fielded’ sites. Secondly, the agency spends the defense budget developing weapons-system/platform-centric proprietary and non-standard software maintenance solutions, instead of common software solutions that work across all platforms. Thirdly, due to the collaborative nature of maintenance work performed and data exchanged from non-standardized systems, highly sensitive data is at great risk. Finally, because numerous maintenance software systems are used, it is difficult for soldiers and field-maintainers to gain knowledge transferable across individual weapons systems. Without addressing these challenges, we are in a reactive-maintenance mode at best.

Today, with the maturation and trust gained in various technologies through industry adoption, we can take giant leaps forward. We can do more with less and transform field services into a condition based and predictive maintenance model.

Imagine being able to maintain any weapons-system on a common software platform from any global location. If our mission-critical systems and infrastructure are retrofitted with IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices, we can drastically reduce our maintenance costs and improve uptime by monitoring and predicting maintenance tasks utilizing AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) algorithms. Utilizing technologies like Blockchain, Additive Manufacturing, and AR (Augmented Reality), we are able to locally or globally source service parts from trusted sources, 3D print service parts, and turn any soldier into a skilled field maintainer with the aid of remote guided goggles enabling them to maintain an asset close to the field. We can accomplish all this, while ensuring the data generated, stored, and shared are cyber-secure in a trusted immutable technology. This would be a game changer that can give America the lethal competitive edge on the field.