The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is working to speed up the development of autonomous technologies that can operate across multiple military platforms and domains, as officials say efforts to connect military systems are moving too slowly.

During the SOF Week conference in Tampa, David Breede, SOCOM’s deputy director of acquisition, said SOCOM is now prioritizing “collaborative autonomy,” a concept in which autonomous or semi-autonomous systems work together and share information to accomplish a mission. 

Breede said the military is facing challenges in enabling different systems to communicate and exchange data seamlessly.

“The ability to quickly integrate autonomous behaviors on multiple different platforms in multiple different domains, without it having to be specifically built for that platform, is something that I’d like to see move faster than we are right now,” Breede said. 

“I think it’s we’re still moving very slowly in that area to be able to just pick up something like automated target recognition and drop it into whether I want it on a Group 1 unmanned aircraft or a medium-sized unmanned surface vessel, so that they can both use that same algorithm, and then talk to each other and share that information,” he added.

He pointed specifically to the need for systems that can rapidly integrate capabilities such as automated target recognition across unmanned platforms, including drones and unmanned surface vessels.

Breede’s comments come as military leaders across all branches work to improve integration between old systems and newer technologies. Earlier this month, the Army announced a “hackathon” with defense companies aimed at linking older systems with modern capabilities through a common software architecture.

Army leaders, citing lessons from the war in Ukraine, have acknowledged the service has relied too heavily on manual and “bespoke” integrations that proved costly and ineffective.

While Breede stressed SOCOM’s focus on moving quickly to develop and field new technologies, he said speed should not come at the cost of building the right capability.

“A lot of people want to say ‘I can iterate fast’ just for the sake of saying ‘I can iterate fast,’” Breede said. “That’s not it. Iterating fast needs to be done with a purpose, and if you have the time and space to do it deliberately and do it right, take the time and space to do it deliberately and do it right.”