Research Summaries

Back Engineering Distributed Aviation Operation (DAO) and Decision Centric Aviation Operations Concepts

Fiscal Year 2024
Division NPS Naval Research Program
Department Information Sciences Department
Investigator(s) Arkady Alexander Godin
Scot Andrew Miller
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary The Commandant of the Unites States Marine Corps identified the concept known as Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations (EABO) as a central key element for near term operations. EABO means using advanced basing, often within a potential enemy¿s weapons engagement zone, to provide scouting, fires, logistics, and support to distributed maritime operations. The trick will be constant movement or undetected operations, to remain untargeted. As the previous Commandant has been quoted, ¿If you talk, you die.¿
It is hard to provide scouting and fires without emitting active sensors, so the role of aviation will be significant. Aviation assets have the capacity to conduct these missions sufficiently far enough from the EABs so that the enemy will encounter numerous targeting challenges, so the Marines can remain threatening.
Maintaining aviation assets though, requires a plethora of parts, ammunition, and fuel, and usually a dedicated place to conduct maintenance. According to the Naval Aviation Maintenance Publication, maintenance is conducted by operational units, intermediate maintenance activities, and depot level activities. There are maintenance
activities that are pre planned, both by calendar dates and by number of flight hours, and reactive maintenance when parts fail. Supporting these activities requires a constant flow of information, anathema to EABO, where silence is golden and constant maneuver is key.
Since DAO and DCAO are new ideas, they generated the following research questions:
¿ What are the DAO and DCAO functions? What are the stakeholder needs? What are the concepts of operation and employment?
¿ Can the airline industry offer ideas? What information flows support DAO and DCAO?
¿ EABO operates in the weapons engagement zone. What challenges emerge from operating in a network optional or network denied environment?
¿ DCAO sounds like it could be AI supported. If so, how?
Keywords human machine teaming, EABO, Expeditionary advanced basing operations, distributed aviation operations, DAO, decision-centric aviation operations, DCAO
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal