JERUSALEM — Israel’s two-year experience fighting in Gaza and along other fronts has led to rapid developments for some larger, signature defense systems like air defenses, but it also prompted developments in the realm of smaller, more tactical systems used by ground forces.
Tomer Malchi, co-founder and CEO of ASIO Technologies, said that after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, “the cries from the field were not that we didn’t have enough F-35s … but rather vests and socks. … The gaps in maneuvering forces and equipment are huge compared to the expensive platforms.”
The gaps also included, according to Malchi, unit-level tech.
ASIO is the maker of Orion, what the company calls a handheld “tactical mission enhancement system” designed to provide battlefield data to troops on the ground. Malchi said the system was widely deployed to ground troops during the Gaza conflict, but was also many years in the making before that.
Six years prior to Oct. 7, the company had created a ruggedized PDA (personal digital assistant) and “pushed onto that a GIS [geographic information system] mapping engine with a touch screen,” Malchi told Breaking Defense during a recent visit to ASIO’s offices. At the time, he said his team identified three gaps they wanted to address.
One was in command and control, essentially bringing C4I down to the battalion level. This is a lesson he said has been learned in Israel and can also be seen in places like Ukraine, in terms of the need to put new technology in the hands of troops.
The ASIO team also wanted to better enable situational awareness. During the interview, Malchi pointed out the window of his office on the top floor of a building in central Israel to illustrate the point.
“Let’s look out the window and try to pinpoint a building on Google Maps,” he said. Troops operating in the field want to be able to pinpoint threats and share the information with forces operating nearby.
A third challenge was in ISR and enabling tripod-mount optical solutions that were lighter and cheaper.
The result of identifying these gaps at the tactical level was the development of Orion, as well as the Lynx handheld monocular imaging device. The Lynx was designed to be lightweight, around 650 grams, or about 1 1/2 pounds.
“It had to be mounted on personal gear. It connects to the Orion command-and-control and soldier architecture; that can feed it with entities and targets. The Lynx takes those entitles via geo-fusion and augments it onto the landscape,” Malchi said. He compared it to the game Pokémon Go augmented reality game, layering tactical information over the real world to see threats.
A third system that ASIO developed is called Nocta for unmanned aerial vehicles. The concept is to take similar technology the company was using on the optics of Lynx to help drones navigate over terrain using imagery that “matches to a stored map and generates a true and low latency position of the drone.”
Malchi said the challenge with smaller drones is providing a lightweight add-on that helps the drone navigate and know where it is in GPS-denied environments. The result was a system weighing around 100 grams separate from the existing optical payload.
During the recent war one of the challenges for many devices was the issue of GPS jamming and other technological challenges. To overcome that, Orion was designed to work offline, Malchi notes. “We can share data optically. We can go through battalion and squad level with zero communication and they used it freely,” he said.
An issue that battalion-level maneuvering forces also have in Israel is that most of the ground forces are reservists. That meant that infantry need to be able to take a device and use it quickly, without a lot of new training. Unlike special forces or regular army units using specialized equipment, the learning curve needs to be quick.
“It was a feat to get it that simple and intuitive,” Malchi added. ASIO says it continues to refine its Orion system and introduce “new enhancements directly informed by feedback from the battlefield.”
“You need to fully control a terrain and know where forces are, and the IDF reached that in Gaza and Lebanon at the tactical level,” he said.
ASIO said that Orion’s success on the battlefield has garnered the attention of foreign militaries, and trials abroad are already taking place.
“Maneuvering forces [are the] the most neglected element today and yet the most important element,” Malchi said.
He pointed out that conflicts from the 1991 Gulf War to Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and the recent conflicts in Ukraine or Gaza illustrate that “if you don’t get the ground forces in nothing happens, but those battalion-level forces are the least equipped.”
“The technology we bring today is adopted to intensity, usability, command and control and situational awareness and has potential to bring serious impact to war fighting,” he said.