From the ARPANET to National Guard training to advances in digital lowlight imaging, SRI has made monumental contributions to national defense.
SRI’s engagement with defense innovation runs deep.
In the first year of its founding, SRI took on is first project related to national defense: An economic study for the Air Force on the potential to scale domestic aircraft manufacturing during a crisis. SRI soon became a hotbed for research that helped the United States maintain technological superiority during the Cold War.
Today, SRI’s work in areas like photonic integrated circuits, hyperspectral imaging, collaborative sensing, and even startup acceleration continues to deliver new capabilities that defend the United States and its allies.
As we celebrate 80 years of innovation, we’re taking a step back to recognize a few fundamental contributions to defense.
ARPANET: The military network that became the internet
The initial ARPANET connection between SRI and UCLA was a critical step on the road to today’s internet. But as DARPA’s own description of the ARPANET project makes clear, stakeholders in the Department of Defense were deeply interested in the technology’s defense implications, seeing opportunities to create more secure communications channels and use computers for large-scale command and control.
Later, in the 1980s, the Department of Defense created the Defense Data Network (DDN), leveraging ARPANET technology to architect a secure network that was separate from what became the internet. The DDN formed one of the backbones of the U.S. military’s communications infrastructure as the DoD adopted then-new capabilities like electronic mail. SRI supported this effort through its Network Information Center, producing the user guides that helped defense stakeholders navigate this bold new information landscape.
Today, as our global internet presents both opportunities and risks, SRI’s efforts in areas like cybersecurity and formal systems continue to make the internet more secure for the United States and its allies around the world.
Training pilots and ground troops
In the early 1970s, SRI became part of a team that designed and fielded the first instrumented training system for pilots to include maneuvering and engagements in a live environment. Essentially, that meant pilots could practice realistic air-to-air combat without firing actual weapons, then review the results later in extreme detail. SRI supported the system’s expansion over the next 30 years.
In 2005, SRI began supporting the Army National Guard’s eXportable Combat Training Capability program, known as XCTC. The Guard had always faced a distinctive challenge — its soldiers maintained civilian lives, trained part-time, and were scattered across dozens of states, yet were expected to deploy at a moment’s notice. The XCTC program was designed to train combat and functional brigades to a pre-deployment standard of readiness — at their home stations, without the expense and disruption of traveling to major training centers. SRI served as prime contractor, providing full design, planning, and control of exercises using its FlexTrain multi-mission instrumentation system. SRI later spun out its cutting-edge training and instrumentation services into Ravenswood Solutions, which continues to define the future of military readiness and training.
Centibots: autonomous robots for unknown environments
In the early 2000s, SRI fielded one of the first large teams of networked autonomous robots capable of mapping unknown environments, in a project known as Centibots. The DARPA-funded research demonstrated that a team of 100 robots could collaborate without human coordination to explore, map, and surveil spaces that no soldier had entered — a capability with obvious applications in urban combat, tunnel clearance, and facility reconnaissance. Centibots helped establish the foundational architecture for multi-robot autonomy that defense researchers have continued to build on in the decades since.
Speech processing for conflict zones
In a conflict, communicating clearly is essential. Recognizing this reality, experts from SRI’s Speech Technology and Research Lab developed technology to keep US troops safe. The lab’s DynaSpeak engine, used in the IraqComm speech translation system, was deployed with U.S. forces in Iraq to perform two-way, speech-to-speech machine translation between English and colloquial Iraqi Arabic. It was a direct application of SRI’s decades of work in natural language processing, brought out of the laboratory and into the hands of troops on the ground.
Today, SRI’s capabilities in speech processing continue to push the envelope. The institute’s OLIVE platform, for example, brings a host of cutting-edge capabilities to defense and commercial customers who need to process and understand speech, including speech signals captured in highly degraded audio environments.
AI for military readiness
Long before chatbots and virtual assistants were commonplace, SRI’s work on DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program helped the Department of Defense reimagine how AI could be applied to human communication.
The PAL program delivered voice-based interaction capabilities to support military planning. Through PAL, SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center took a leadership role in one of the most significant artificial intelligence projects of the early 2000s: the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. That five-year, $150 million project brought together more than 300 researchers from 22 premier research institutions to build a new generation of cognitive assistants.
For SRI, the technology didn’t end with military applications. AI technologies created through the PAL program also gave birth to Siri, an SRI spinout that was later licensed to Apple and kicked off the commercial voice assistant revolution.
The dawn of digital night vision
Today, SRI’s DomiNite camera — built around SRI’s patented NV-CMOS Quad Pixel sensor technology — is inaugurating a new era of lowlight imaging technology with significant defense implications.
American military superiority after dark has long rested on analog image intensifier tubes — vacuum tube technology invented in the late 1940s that amplifies ambient light to give soldiers the ability to operate at night. The technology has been relentlessly refined, but it carries inherent limitations. Analog tubes are fragile and expensive. Plus, they can’t easily plug into AI-infused object recognition systems.
Matured over more than a decade of collaboration with the Department of Defense, the lightweight and extraordinarily sensitive DomiNite camera demonstrates the full potential of digital night vision. Working with a startup called Deepnight, SRI researchers are now exploring how synergies between digital lowlight imaging and machine learning might usher in a new era of defensive superiority after dark.
Staying on the cutting edge of defense technology
SRI’s impact on defense tech innovation has made our nation and our world safer.
As we celebrate our past, it’s more important than ever to look to the future. That means capabilities like secure space communications, precise quantum sensors, reliable autonomous navigation, and much more. Working with federal agencies and like-minded collaborators, we’re laser-focused on solving the deep tech challenges that will help us stay ahead of the curve.
Learn how SRI is advancing security and defense technologies today.
