Program Summary
As nation-state and non-state adversaries adapt and apply commercially available state-of-the-art technology in urban conflict, expeditionary U.S. forces face a shrinking operational advantage in potential future military conflicts, which are most likely to be fought in littoral and coastal cities. The goal of the Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Operations (PROTEUS) program is to create and demonstrate tools to develop and test agile expeditionary urban operations concepts based on dynamically composable force packages. The program seeks to:
- Develop software for simultaneous and dynamic real-time task organization, force package (i.e. platforms & weapons) combination and configuration, and tactics planning suitable for implementation in devices available to Marines in the 2030-2040 timeframe;
- Develop a purpose-built virtual test environment to exercise and demonstrate this capability with an appropriately detailed virtual representation of combined arms operations in a complex urban battlespace; and
- Exercise both capabilities in a series of benchmarking tests involving a participant cohort for both friendly and opposing forces drawn from active duty Marines. These tests will demonstrate that the ability to dynamically compose small unit organization, capabilities and tactics enables superior performance in the battlespace quantified using metrics such as lethality/(area-cost), resilience, and cost imposition.
If successful, the software tools and concepts developed in the PROTEUS program will enable assessment and exploration of new approaches to combined arms operations involving coordination of effects in multiple domains.