The United States faces a dizzying array of threats. North Korea’s rattling nuclear saber, China’s hypersonic weapons research, ever-evolving insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and electronic warfare waged by aggressive hackers represent just a few of the hazards emanating from around the globe.
These risks and President Donald Trump’s response—aggressive international relations tactics paired with a commitment to increased military spending—have yielded a time of plenty for the defense industry. One player at the feast is Raytheon, which has seen its shares rise 19 percent since the beginning of the year. The maker of Patriot surface-to-air missiles, radar technology, and much more is tasked with helping the American military face down any challenge it encounters, and thus gets one of the best views of every threat—and opportunity—the 21st century has to offer.
For Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy, artificial intelligence is perhaps the greatest source of potential, and worry. “There’s a term that came out of Air Force originally called the OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act,” he says. “The person who wins on the battlefield is the person whose OODA loop is fastest. Artificial intelligence and machine learning aid humans in terms of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting faster.”
So Raytheon’s engineers focus on enabling software to learn from past experiences and available intel about the adversary (including what intel the adversary has) to arrive at better decisions than a human could, and faster. That could mean grasping the operational layout of the battlefield, assessing threats, and advising on the best courses of action. Meanwhile, the company is using AI to advance more down-to-earth projects, including robotic "insects" whose neural networks are based on that of the octopus and learn to walk and explore on their own.
Another concern on the software front: cybersecurity. Raytheon began taking the matter seriously when it faced its own (unsuccessful) attack. “In 2007 we had a wake-up call as [targets] ourselves, and knew we needed a strategy. First to protect ourselves, then our customers and their data, and then to provide cybersecurity solutions to new customers,” Kennedy says. Raytheon the decade since, it has developed its own effort, Forcepoint, to bulk up its defense. “We wound up acquiring over 14 cybersecurity companies and knitting those together to create defense-grade solutions. You don’t want a Tomahawk missile doing a 180 and coming right back at you.”
Like an iceberg, Kennedy says, many people just see a tiny percent of the cybersecurity problem. Threats from nation-states, organized crime, hacktivists, and corporate or governmental insiders can have grave outcomes—and require new tactics. “Whether it’s from good employees with poor cyber hygiene or someone with ill intent, we need to protect against all of those,” he says. “So our new strategy is to step back and take a look at how people actually use the systems. We’re approaching the problem in terms of the users’ behavior on the network, and letting them do their work in a free way and developing solutions for keeping it safe. Just doing patches every other week is not enough in today’s environment.”
Of course, tackling problems as complex as cybersecurity and AI requires deep reservoirs of talent, the kind of talent that’s easily lured away from potential defense work to the faster pace and more lucrative world of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Uber, and Apple. Kennedy denies Raytheon has had trouble filling its ranks, and points to the import of their work as a draw.
“We’ve been fighting wars of insurgency and counterterrorism for 20 years, and now our adversaries have unbelievable capabilities that we need to answer,” he says. “We can start with a blank piece of paper and be very creative in developing that next-gen capability. This is game-changing in terms of the security of our nation and the capabilities we provide to our military, and it’s the kind of challenge our engineers love.”
For a taste of that creativity, check out Raytheon’s new laser cannon. Along with conventional missile hardware and hypersonic weapons (which move at multiple times the speed of sound), company engineers are working on what’s also known as “directed-energy systems.” Last month, they shot down a moving target with a laser mounted on an Apache helicopter, the first time a high-energy laser system successfully hit a target from a rotary-wing aircraft over a wide variety of flight regimes, altitudes and air speeds, according to the company. But Kennedy stresses that Raytheon’s work on ballistic-missile defense technology remains the most urgent.
“The world is a scary place, so we absolutely must have new defenses and they must work with coalition nations,” the CEO says. “We’re looking to be able to observe, determine if a launch is going to occur, and then prevent it from ever occurring through different technologies. Or it’s using hypersonic technology to shoot down targets. It’s shooting bullets with bullets. Tell me that developing an app is as hard as that.”
