A recent test of the technology came at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 event in March at Fort Irwin, California, a joint experimentation venue for the services to test concepts for interoperability in the vein of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of the framework, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

The Marine Corps Software Factory, located in Austin, Texas with the Army’s Software Factory, developed what it dubbed Crusader software to see if it was a viable alternative to the current commercial middleware used by a lot of units to control these radars, such as Furuno and eventually Simrad, which was not tested at Project Convergence.

While the government and Department of Defense have been pushing the use of commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities as much as possible, the Corps noted several benefits of developing government-built software in this context.

First, radar systems can be complicated and not necessarily geared toward the way troops must employ them. By developing their own software, the Marines at the Software Factory can build tools specifically for Marines at the tactical edge and more easily interface with them as well as other joint service members.

Second, creating government-off-the-shelf software can be cheaper than relying on commercial products.

“It doesn’t cost the government anything more than our salaries to develop it. Whether I develop eight applications in a year or one, we pay you the same,” Capt. Brian Atkinson, a full-stack engineer at the factory, said in an interview.

Moreover, that means there aren’t licensing fees associated with the software, which can not only be costly, but if not managed properly, can expire at the worst possible times.

Atkinson noted he’s experienced licenses expiring in the middle of exercises and been unable to reach out to the vendor to renew it — an untenable situation in real-world operations. Solely relying on vendor support while troops are forward-deployed isn’t always the best option.

The Crusader software, which has been in development for about four months, was an improvement to the existing system, officials said, noting the old software was difficult to use and didn’t fit the plans the Marine Corps had.

The concept behind the new software is that stand-in forces — units based in close proximity to the enemy — need to be able to remote into commercial radar systems such as the Furuno. Those capabilities provide sonar, collision detection and navigation, which overall will give those stand-in forces the ability to extend maritime domain awareness.

Those commercially available radars fit well into the commandant’s Force Design vision because the radars are relatively inexpensive and readily available when compared to traditionally fielded systems, Sgt. Max Idler, a coder and developer, said. Thus, they provide an attractive option when the service can rapidly procure a capability and repurpose it for the joint fight.   

At Project Convergence, categorized as a big success, Crusader and the radars it controlled provided the maritime situational awareness data for the Southern California area for the experiment, which benefited all the joint partners participating. Officials said they processed Furuno radar data, produced tracks and targets off of it, and fed that data through the Secure But Unclassified-Encrypted network.

Officials noted there were tweaks that they needed to make in order for the software to be more user friendly.

Following Project Convergence and working with the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic, the Marines plan to include Crusader on a commercial-off-the-shelf radar kit that will be distributed to the Fleet Marine Force sometime in the next year. If that field user evaluation goes well, Crusader will be the centerpiece of radar processing software on the kit.

The Software Factory is also discovering that there is wider interest and larger demand for Crusader. Given it is government developed, it can be applicable to all elements of the joint team members and potentially coalition partners that wish to use commercial-off-the-shelf radars for situational awareness.

The demand comes from wider DOD interest in using different maritime surveillance capabilities for various mission sets, such as special operations forces.

Officials from Marine Forces Special Operations Command have voiced their desire to use Crusader given it doesn’t require licensing to the radars themselves.

“That is a strategic add to how MARSOC likes to operate,” Idler said, noting they’re looking to test Crusader with them off a tech stack they developed using Raspberry Pi’s.

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The Marine Corps Software Factory was launched in 2023 as a three-year pilot in Austin, Texas. The aim was to demonstrate a scalable software development capability led by servicemembers. Personnel there have been training others and building apps and other tools for different elements of the force.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide commanders with the organic software development capability to rapidly research problems and deliver scalable solutions into the hands of warfighters. After going through our training pipeline, these Marines will return to the [Fleet Marine Force] with the critical skills they need in order to provide this service to their units. And that’s something that they can do in perpetuity, that just would become essentially their new job, a new role in life,” Capt. Brian Atkinson, a full-stack engineer at the factory, said during a presentation Thursday at the Modern Day Marine conference.

There are several different types of jobs at the software factory, including product manager, software engineer, “user interface” Marine, platform engineer and AI engineer, he noted.

About 15 Marines are working there now.

Officials are pondering what comes next and how to move forward once the pilot program ends and the software factory becomes a more permanent organization.

“Right now, we’re going through the DOTMILPF [doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, and personnel] working groups to actually figure out what the lifecycle would be, because, unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just … ‘go forth and do great things.’ You have to figure out what the career progression would be, because you’re essentially creating an entirely new MOS,” Atkinson told DefenseScoop, using an acronym to refer to military occupational specialty.

“Without trying to speak out of turn, the general idea is that once we become a real unit, this becomes its own MOS, we would grow in size from the 15 that we’re at now to about 50 or 60 — and that’s again subject to the Marine Corps’ approval. And then from there we would have the potential to either start recruiting people before they even show up to boot camp, get them to sign up to be a software engineer as their actual primary MOS, or we would open it up to the rest of the Marine Corps for [lateral] moves just the way that we’ve done now. Like, I’m an infantry officer who came over here to do this. So we’re not really sure yet, subject to the DOTMILPF working group, but the idea would be that we would be about triple in size. And that would be just one cohort of students per year producing about 20 new Marines … to go out to the fleet,” Atkinson added.

Marine Corps leadership hasn’t signed off on the idea yet, he noted.

“But how we envision it would be, you would have a software engineering MOS. And … kind of the analogy I would draw is, so we have the 03XX occupational field, right? So infantrymen. And there are subsets of the infantry field where you have a rifleman, a mortarman, a machine gunner. Something that we’re toying around with as well is maybe having kind of a similar spin where you have a guy who’s a product manager and he trains to the product manager job. You have a UX guy, you have a software engineer, software development engineer, an AI specialist. There’s a lot of different directions that we’re looking at going,” Atkinson said.

After Marines finish their time at the software factory in Austin, they could undergo a permanent change of station and join a team working with a larger unit, such as a Marine Expeditionary Force.

“Our vision — and something that the Marine Corps is figuring out right now — is you would then PCS to like a software development platoon, if you will, that’s co-located with the MEFs … with the ability to generate capacity for the commanders, co-located with the commanders. And how the commanders use them is totally up to them at that point. But the idea would be you have a different software development unit that is organic to … all the large-scale units within the Marine Corps,” Atkinson explained.

Those experts could solve problems for the units they’re assigned to work with.

“We’ll stick with the MEF, because that’s kind of where we’re thinking right now,” Atkinson told DefenseScoop. There could be “a group of software engineers at the MEF who can answer problems for the MEF specifically. So if the MEF has a unique data requirement that they just need, they need something while they wait for a lasting solution from the acquisitions community, or there is nothing coming [and] they just need something on their own, like a TAK plugin — these would be the guys that would handle that stuff. So it’s not so much that they’re like software techs to help with like IT problems. It would be building solutions for the MEFs specifically.”

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The Marine Corps Software Factory (MCSWF) was stood up in 2023 as a three-year pilot to hone and demonstrate troops’ coding skills, show that there’s a demand for the concept and that it can be scaled. It’s co-located with the Army Software Factory in Austin, Texas, one of the nation’s top technology hubs.

“What we’re doing is we’re almost singularly focused on generating a force with the right technical skill sets to be able to provide an operational capability in terms of digital operations. And when I say ‘digital operations,’ I’m talking about software development, data analytics, AI, machine learning, that type of thing. Just to provide these commanders a meaningful way of being able to compete with our peer adversaries,” Lt. Col. Charlie Bahk, a communications officer and director of the organization, said during a panel at GovCIO’s Defense IT Summit Feb. 9.

Marines there have already churned out four new applications. Three of them are tactical in nature, he told DefenseScoop during an audience Q&A at the event.

“I have to be cognizant of the clearance levels, you know, OpSec and all that. But one of them is about maximizing our maritime radar assets to be able to give the fleet commander a more comprehensive picture of what is happening in that domain. And it’s fully interoperable. It’s interoperable with not just one, but multiple different types of sensors out there. Full-motion video as well,” he noted.

Another uses QR-code technology that can transmit information from unit to unit across long distances and in areas where satellite transmissions or radio transmissions are being jammed and impeded.

The other tactical app is related to “blue-force” signature management, or “understanding where or how brightly you glow on a common operational picture, based off your electromagnetic spectrum activity,” Bahk said.

The fourth app is intended to streamline back-office operations.

“It’s on the garrison or the business side where our monitors or detailers, you know, like the people that cut orders for Marines to their next assignments and work out the retention packages and things like that,” he noted. “You can imagine, due to the sheer numbers of people that they have to engage with, the potential for miscommunication and long wait times and missed appointments and hurt feelings … I mean, it’s just tremendously high.”

To address that, the software factory built a tool to gather data from service members before they meet with those types of officials.

“What we’ve done is created a simple application that streamlines a lot of that, cuts down dramatically the wait times for each of those Marines. It compels them to preload a lot of the standardized information that the monitors should already know about them, [such as] whether or not their spouse is in a graduate-level program or has a very important job or if they have an exceptional family member in the family,” he explained.

The interview window is short, in many cases only about 10 minutes, according to Bahk. The app is intended to make better use of that time.

“Most of those 10 minutes are used in discussing things that should already be known. So what this application does is it helps us streamline the flow of information. And now all of those 10 minutes are used in meaningful conversation that the Marine wants to cover with their monitor. Which if you ask me, I think that downstream of this, it helps to feed into the Marine’s mindset as far as: ‘Am I cared for by the institution? Should I reenlist? Do I want to continue to serve?’” Bahk said.

The software factory pilot is unfolding at a time when the Pentagon is putting increased emphasis on digital modernization and the rapid fielding and upgrading of software. That trend is expected to continue as the military acquires more AI capabilities and pursues new warfighting concepts like Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

Building up coding skills within the Marine Corps is seen as a way to better connect software gurus with deployed warfighters and provide operational value more quickly without relying on contractor support.

“When we have organic uniformed service members doing this type of work and leveraging the infrastructure … we tend to immediately open up a line of like an iteration loop, that’s a line of communication with the commanders on the ground, and say, ‘Hey, here’s our [minimum viable product] that we’re delivering to you within weeks — days, weeks and months, not years. Right? And make sure that we got it right. And if we don’t, roger that, we’ll see you next week and we’ll deliver it — or we’ll see you later today,” Bahk said.

“When we delivered these applications, we got to see them employ it in real-time. And as any rollout goes, there are a couple of hiccups here and there. Zero findings, but a couple of hiccups, performance issues — or maybe the users then think of a feature that they would like us to work on and deploy. We were able to do that. And we’re doing that today, within the same day. We’re pushing to production several times a day. And the responsiveness and the quality — the user base is tremendously happy with that model,” he said.

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The Marine Corps Software Factory (MCSWF) will start as a three-year pilot to demonstrate that there’s demand for the concept and that it can scale. It will be co-located with the Army Software Factory in Austin, Texas, where Marines embedded last summer to kickstart the software development effort before its formalization.

The factory enables the service to empower Marines to code applications “at the speed of relevance” and build custom software “at the edges of the battlefield without connectivity or assistance from centralized or contracted support,” per a release.

Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, deputy commandant for information and CIO, will serve as the executive sponsor of the software factory.

“The Marine Corps Software Factory is about outcomes, creating advantage for Marines at the tactical edge, today,” Glavy said. “The MCSWF will provide viable capabilities to enhance mission readiness through the power of information.”

The Marine Corps has been working to this point for several years, starting in 2021 when it launched the inaugural Marine Corps Micro-Application Development Innovation Challenge. That effort and others subsequent to it yielded good results but also highlighted untapped technical talent and the desire to field in-house software efforts across the Corps.

The initial cohort for the new software factory is comprised of communication specialists, but in the future, it will be open to all Marine occupational specialties.

They will undergo three phases during their time there: a technical accelerator and one-to-one pairing enablement with industry experts during the first year, upon which they will earn an MOS in application development and spend the final two years focused on employment utilization to solve real-world Marine Corps challenges.

“Our Marines have an amazing capacity for understanding complex technologies. We must empower our Marines to use that technological know-how to create a more lethal force,” Commandant Gen. David Berger said in a statement. “The Marine Corps is fielding more complex systems and platforms right now, and we must invest in our Marines’ and Civilian Marines’ capacity to advance in parallel.”

In total, there are a few dozen software factories across the Department of Defense. On top of the Army’s and now the Marines’, the Navy has its Black Pearl and Forge programs, and the Air Force has a variety such as Kessel Run, Platform One and Space CAMP.

The DOD issued a directive last year to streamline those software factory efforts across the U.S. military.

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