Northrop Grumman makes plenty of intelligent systems, including unmanned ones, and so do many other defense contractors.
 
The company would like to allow them to all work together, seamlessly, while requiring relatively little human oversight: what it calls Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), and its subset, Distributed Autonomous Responsive Control, or DA/RC.
 
"It is essentially a battle manager on steroids," says Scott Winship, the senior vice president for advanced programs at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. "These are all command nodes that exist, and communication nodes that exist ... so we could use what we have and link them this way."
 
On huge video screens at the company's Center for Innovative Solutions in McLean, Virginia, Winship and Bryan Lima, JADC2 business lead, walked reporters through a DA/RC scenario. Simulated manned and unmanned aircraft flew over a contested area — in this case, California — and conducted various missions on the fly.
 
The aircraft could communicate to each other and home base, in this case an aircraft carrier. Once a mission was established — say, to monitor a certain door on a certain building — the systems would "bid" to carry it out. An aircraft that was too far away and too low on fuel probably wouldn't get the job.
 
If an aircraft was on the way to evaluate a target and happened to come across a radar site, it could alert HQ and other aerial systems to decide what to do about it.
 
DA/RC answers the question, "I want to hold an area at risk perpetually. How do I do that?" Winship asked.

Long-term effort
 
The work started 15 years ago as part of the UCAS (Unmanned Combat Air System), a program to fly large drones off of aircraft carriers. That posed a problem, Lima said, as carriers don't have the space to hold a conventional air crew flying drones to cover a large area over a long period of time.
 
Over the last five years, Winship says, Northrop Grumman has been "treating airplanes not as airplanes but as data nodes ... it is basically a measure of autonomy that you're pushing up to an airplane."
 
The number of aircraft or other systems that can be used by DA/RC is intended to be unlimited. The company has done simulation with up to 100 systems involved, and in real-world testing has used 10. They aren't all aircraft, either — as part of ANTX demonstrations in 2016 and 2018, the system included unmanned underwater vehicles.
 
"The number of these [aircraft or vehicles] doesn't really matter," Winship said. "The types of these doesn't really matter."
 
Almost anything can be used in the system, Winship says, as long as they can talk to each other and give and receive tasking. 
 
The company doesn't plan on selling the software to the military for, say, the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, an idea for a very similar type of functionality.
 
Instead, DA/RC and the broader JADC2 "enables the kind of systems that we sell," Winship said.

Below: A look at a JADC2 command room. Photo: Northrop Grumman