From the outside, the turret system on a ground vehicle may appear a straightforward mechanism.

Military-display designers continue to face stringent size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints while integrating commercial innovations like HD – and soon 4K – into systems that must work with legacy sensors and interfaces while also complying with a variety of open architectures and standards.

Today’s modern warfighters have grown up with smartphones and tablets with intuitive, multitouch projected capacitive (PCAP) touch screens. They rely heavily on these devices in their personal lives and they expect to have access to the same capabilities and conveniences in the field.

Military experts are developing new enabling technologies to help unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles, submarines, and surface vessels swarm and make decisions without human intervention.

Industrial participation is seen as a way to develop and maintain production, technology and expertise, so that critical defense products and services can continue to be produced under emergency conditions.

In order to keep up with the continued acceleration of new technology and to be able to protect the warfighter from the latest threats, it is essential that we can turn our deployed platforms into adaptable entities that can evolve over time and are not static. The SOSA [Sensor Open Systems Architecture] Technical Standard is the next major step in realizing this goal.

Size, weight, power consumption, and cooling technologies today block quantum computing from the embedded world, but new generations should yield advances in artificial intelligence and computer security.

In the defense industry, AI is on the path to becoming a loyal companion to the warfighter and manufacturers alike. As technology progresses, so does the range of defense capabilities that AI could not only supplement but eventually manage.