Exclusive: Inside 'Trident Spectre', the yearly tech experimentation program for Navy SEALs
Exclusive: Inside 'Trident Spectre', the yearly tech experimentation program for Navy SEALs
Naval Special Warfare's Five Eyes exercise, Trident Spectre '24, is focused on "integrated deterrence" of China by fusing capabilities into "Reese's Pieces" or finding unexpected effects like "Viagra"
2023-09-14: Despite not responding to a request for comment, a Vulcan administrator deactivated the author’s account after publication of this article.
On the morning of September 11, 2023, roughly 350 industry and government representatives filled the Brock Theater on the third floor of the Nauticus naval museum in Norfolk, Virginia. It was the first, and last, unclassified meeting for U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command’s upcoming annual technology integration exercise, ‘Trident Spectre 2024’. Best known as the parent organization of the Navy Sea, Air, and Land teams (Navy SEALs), Naval Special Warfare premiered its roughly three minute Trident Spectre promotional video for the audience, with the program’s “ultimate goal” being described as “shortening the acquisition killchain”. The military speak was explained to mean helping companies speed through the hurdles of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy to win contracts supporting SEAL “direct action” and surveillance missions.
This article is exclusively publishing the 188 in-person industry attendees of the conference, including their company names and email addresses. The list shines signifcant light on the sprawling industry of often-obscure contractors selling surveillance technologies to U.S. Special Operations Forces. We are also revealing that, according to statements from the deputy director of the exercise, this year’s experiment will span not only the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, but the bulk of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance — excluding only New Zealand.
The ominous logo of Trident Spectre was on display throughout most of the roughly seven hours of the Industry Day’s Power Point presentations: a cloaked apparition holding a trident in one hand, and pointing at the audience with the other — a spooky analogue of the classic invocation from Uncle Sam. A ring of 18 U.S. government agency seals surrounds the spectre: the spearhead of U.S. Special Operations Command sits just atop his hood, with the remaining 17 being all of the members of the U.S. intelligence community, save the most recent addition, Space Force Intelligence. (One common variant replaces the pointing apparition with the Navy SEAL Trident.)
According to Trident Spectre Deputy Director Jason Galvan — the main presenter for the day — the exercise was originally developed in 2005 by “tactical operators” who needed help ‘finding the bad guy’ using commercial technology as part of the Global War on Terror. This was ostensibly coded language for the elite counterterrorism component of the Navy SEALs, known as SEAL Team Six, having developed Trident Spectre to acquire commercial surveillance technologies for use in hunting down targets during the Global War on Terror. Over the years, Trident Spectre has experimented with advanced social media surveillance, cellphone location-tracking datasets accumulated from snooping on advertising data flows, specialized satellite sensing designed to locate cellphone emissions, and even the Pentagon’s flagship operational artificial intelligence effort, Project Maven.
A leaked draft of a 2012 offshoot of Trident Spectre, known as QUANTUM LEAP, made high-profile headlines for helping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surveil Twitter users, including by determining their physical location. The commercial developer of the technology, Creative Radicals, was subsequently acquired by Stephen Feinberg’s Cerberus Capital in December 2015 and has since become known for its ‘open source intelligence’ product, OpeniO. The company has contributed its cellphone location-tracking datasets to “tactical information warfare” campaigns run by Green Berets and their Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations partners, with the goals of developing informants and building effective propaganda narratives through the additional usage of targeted social media surveillance and devices for spamming text messages. A closely related contract sells a stripped-down version of the same information operation product to Joint Special Operations Command — the Pentagon’s elite counterterrorism unit, whose naval component is SEAL Team Six — and two representatives from another subcontractor on this effort, the chatroom-infiltration company Flashpoint, attended Monday’s Industry Day.
Despite the obvious centrality of SEAL Team Six in Trident Spectre’s historic counterterrorism mission, Galvan lied to the audience twenty minutes into his Monday presentation to at least formally conceal the existence of the technically classified unit. Numerous firsthand books having been written by members of SEAL Team Six — especially as a result of their role in the execution of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden — but Galvan spread the disinformation that the unit’s cover organization, Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), simply does “test and evaluation”.
Mr. Galvan and the Trident Spectre staff did not respond to a request for comment through the official email address for the event staff.
Galvan’s formal presentation pointedly propagated the cover story for SEAL Team Six, but he seemed unconcerned with openly discussing the unit when it was brought up by audience members. Sitting stage left in the middle row of the auditorium and wearing a backpack with internet surveillance firm Babel Street’s logo, former Navy intelligence analyst Zachary Demer asked how his company — whose Locate X tool is perhaps the most infamous commercial cellphone-location tracking product — could ensure that it was partnered with SEAL Team Six. Galvan made it clear that Naval Special Warfare knows who Babel Street is and would assign them the appropriate partners.
Babel Street did not respond to a request for comment through their official contact page, and Mr. Demer did not immediately respond to a direct email request.
Also in attendance was Anomaly Six Senior Account Executive Emalee Jensen, whose company was jumpstarted by three former Babel Street employees and sued in 2018 for allegedly attempting to steal Babel’s special operations clients and the technology behind Locate X. And SemanticAI, the company Anomaly Six executives were closely partnering with during this spin-off, also sent its President and Chief Strategy Officer, Jim Ford, to Trident Spectre.
Perhaps the most surprising attendee from the cellphone location-tracking industry was Mary Souther, Public Sector VP at Outlogic, the rebranding of X-Mode Social after it was reported to have nonconsensually surveilled cellphone locations through a popular Muslim prayer application, Muslim Pro. Souther’s attendance appears to confirm that Outlogic continued its contracting with defense and intelligence agencies.
Two attendees were also listed from Flashpoint, an FBI-partnered chatroom infilatration company which has in the past attempted to sell the author cellphone-location tracking data. In addition to Flashpoint federal systems integration executive Ryan Sullivan, newly hired solutions architect Dominic Pezzoni was also registered. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Pezzoni worked for SEAL Team Six — “Naval Special Warfare Development Group” — on “Tactical Electronic Warfare” for roughly five years, and was simultaneously an intern at Flashpoint during the final five months. And R. Blake Lackey, the Senior Director of Business Development at a covert gigwork surveillance platform for U.S. special operations, Premise Data, was similarly in attendance.
Facial recognition industry attendees included Clearview AI’s Director of Defense and Intelligence Community Engagement, Bart Bonar, NEC National Security Solutions Account Development Executive Christopher Gillyard, as well as two representatives from Trust Stamp: Chief Commercial Officer Kinny Chan and President of Government Security John Bridge. And, while primarily known for their mesh networking technology, goTenna recently began experimenting with the U.S. Air Force on “off-grid” facial recognition and sent business development executive Joe Kriz to the Industry Day.
(Clearview AI’s largest known government contract — selling facial recognition to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit — yesterday increased its payout to the company by $787,500, bringing the total to $2,287,500. When the contract was originally signed in September 3, 2021, nearly eight months into the Biden administration, the ceiling had been set to $1.5 million. The HSI contract is reportedly focused on investigating child exploitation, though the company’s technology has also supported an evangelical vigilante group closely partnered with Anomaly Six.)
The cloud computing subsidiary of online retail giant Amazon, Amazon Web Services, also sent two employees to the Trident Spectre Industry Day: Jesse Funk — a Senior Sales Executive for the Navy and Marine Corps — and Eric Denis, a former Navy Surface Warfare & Intelligence Officer. Amazon Web Services is one of four U.S. cloud giants competing for pieces of the Pentagon’s $9 billion ceiling Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, as well as one of five competitors on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Commercial Cloud Environment (C2E) contract — which was initially estimated by the Central Intelligence Agency to be worth as much as “tens of billions” of dollars.
Mr. Bonar stated that he is not authorized to speak on behalf of Clearview AI, Premise’s R. Blake Lackey declined to comment on-the-record, and Anomaly Six Co-Founder Brendan Huff replied that his company “possess[es] an in-depth understanding of the capabilities of our foreign adversaries and competitors, and [is] committed to staying ahead of them.”
The remaining named attendees of Monday’s Industry Day did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two-week, “high fail” experiment at Fort Story
The ultimate result of this year’s Trident Spectre will be a two week exercise where SEALs try out commercial technologies which could potentially help them in a hypothetical ‘multi-domain’ battle with China or Russia. Currently scheduled from April 15th to April 26th of next year within a small area near the beach within Fort Story in Virginia Beach, industry attendees are expected to spend the two weeks troubleshooting any encountered problems from a white ‘circus tent’ on the northwest side of the test facility. (Undisclosed “VIPs” are slotted to attend on April 25th, the second-to-last day of the exercise.)
The precise location of the exercise area plot — Officers Circle, just north of Cape Henry Road on the northeast side of Fort Story — can easily be determined by comparing still images from the unlisted promotional video for the event with freely available commercial satellite imagery. While not advertised in the video, it is perhaps fitting that Fort Story’s daycare and Common Access Card (CAC) processing center are both directly next to the western-most region of the exercise compound.
All attendees of the Trident Spectre exercise are required to have at least a Secret clearance, and — according to Galvan — the rules include: “Don’t film. Don’t take pictures of military folks.” He went on to lament that, “When I [received] a phone call last year at two in the morning that [a] guy was taking a picture of classified people doing things on a, on a classified vessel, I’ve got to talk to you.”
This year’s test is expected to include international representatives from all of the U.S. government’s partners from its Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, save New Zealand, which fell out of favor with the U.S. after denuclearizing in 1985. According to Galvan, the United Kingdom was let in roughly two years ago, then the ‘aperture’ expanded to include Australia and then, this year, Canada.
The facility is also expected to have a Temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (T-SCIF) and to provide participants with access to both government and commercial satellite imagery, as well as to unmanned aerial, underwater, and surface vehicles in what Galvan characterized as a “high fail” environment.
Due to the close proximity of the Fort Story test site to two civilian airports — about 15 miles east of Norfolk International Airport, and less than 20 miles from Virginia Beach Airport — one of the expressed challenges was in testing Electronic Warfare capabilities, “EW is very hard for us to do…It’s especially hard because [the exercise is] between two commercial airlines.” Galvan further noted the obvious disasters that could take place if contractors inadvertently manipulated the GPS locations observed by nearby civilian aircraft and reasonably explained: “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
‘Near-peer’ competition, organized over a few drinks
One could perhaps pinpoint the U.S. transition from the Global War on Terror into ‘Great Power’, or ‘near-peer’, competition with China and Russia to November 15, 2014, when Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, introduced the audience of the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California to a new defense ecosystem designed to support the integration of artificial intelligence into the U.S. military. Known as the “Third Offset Strategy”, the pitch was that commercially-developed artificial intelligence would be the modern equivalent of the U.S.’s late Cold War advantage of GPS-guided weapons (the ‘Second Offset’), which in turn succeeded small, tactically-deployed nuclear weapons such as the Davy Crockett (the ‘First Offset’), which could be mounted on a jeep and operated by a crew of three.
(As part of her 2018 dissertation, Madeleine Clare Elish — who was later hired as Google’s “Head of Responsible AI” — called attention to a 1969 speech from General Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, where he envisioned a “battlefield of the future” nearly identical to that of the Third Offset Strategy.)
Trident Spectre followed suit and began shifting its focus from purchasing commercial tools for ‘hunting bad guys’ into broader near-peer competition, including serving as a demonstration site in 2018 for the flagship operational artificial intelligence effort of Hagel’s — and then Ash Carter’s — defense innovation initiative: Project Maven. In March, the Associate Deputy Director of Capabilities for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — which took over Project Maven in January — disclosed to an audience at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) that Maven had been deployed in Ukraine by a “military partner”.
The official mission statement of Trident Spectre 2024 was given as “integrated deterrence in a multi-domain contested environment” — with the domains having been specified Monday as: “undersea, surface, air, RF [radio-frequency], space, cyber, commercial”. As part of explaining what ‘deterrence’ means for U.S. Special Operations Forces, Galvan strongly hinted that this year’s exercise was not focused on the ongoing U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine: “We do a lot of our work before things happen. And some of what we do, helps deter the final aggression…If you think about how we do technology, probably pre event, probably maybe even the start of event, but it’s not for, like, two years into a conflict, right. It could be, but generally we try to get in before that.”
In later classified sessions, potential conflict between the U.S. and China in Taiwan will almost certainly play a major role, as it has become a common question as to whether U.S. support for the war in Ukraine serves the secondary purpose of deterring China from invading Taiwan.
(Given the U.S. military’s longstanding encirclement of China with foreign military bases — and China’s relative lack of foreign military presence — it is at least debatable as to whether the country with between one and eight foreign military bases, depending upon how you count, is the aggressor relative to a country with roughly 800. For readers unfamiliar with the plethora of U.S. military bases dotting the globe, the anti-war advocacy nonprofit World Beyond War publishes a detailed interactive map.)
Over the roughly hour-and-a-half lunch break for the Trident Spectre Industry Day, where Galvan joked many of attendees would have “a few martinis, whatever else”, at least ten people flocked to Jack Brown’s nearby Beer and Burger Joint. In front of a wall of cartoon drawings of penile puns — such as “Richard Dixon” and “I’m Dick James, Bitch!” — they would discuss their companies’ technology contributions across potentially contested domains.
At the corner of the bar, a salesman for a DC-area startup which partners with Motorola Solutions to sell their custom low-power Radio-Frequency (RF) communications systems chatted with two locals from a company developing Automated Target Recognition (ATR) technology to help drones scan and disable enemy vessels. The DC salesman lamented that he did not remember the formula for how power usage related to RF transmission distance. (For undirected emission, the effective transmission distance ideally scales with the square-root of the transmission power.)
The majority of the post-lunch event — from roughly 2-4 p.m. — focused on the bureaucratic details of how attendees could submit their business proposals for Trident Spectre through a contractor-developed system known as Vulcan. The dangled carrot was two hours of drinks on the fifth floor deck of the Norfolk Hilton immediately after, but the auditorium was at most two thirds as full after lunch, and it thinned out to less than half before the final question-and-answers session.
Deterring China with ‘Peanut Butter, Chocolate, and Viagra’
For at least the last seven years, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has been funding Cylitix, LLC to develop and maintain the Vulcan “Technology Domain Awareness” platform. Something like a stripped-down, private LinkedIn for special operations contractors and the U.S. Government, Vulcan became the official interface for many of Special Operation Command’s most important contracting opportunities, including Trident Spectre. Applications for Trident Spectre opened up partway through Monday’s Industry Day, and the CEO of Cylitix, Jawad Rachami, was there in person to explain his platform and — at times, somewhat defensively — defend it against pointed criticism from users.
Originally launched in partnership with SOCOM’s Science & Technology component, the driving idea has been to help simplify the development of a cohesive, reasonably secure — but entirely unclassified — network spanning private contractors, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Intelligence Community writ large. Discussions of classified activities have occasionally leaked out through Vulcan, including when corporate records analysis company Sayari boasted of its past, classified usage for “offensive cyber operations” and “information operations”. (Soon after publication of the story, Sayari quickly deleted its description from Vulcan.)
The focus on teamwork was constant throughout the entire day: deputy director Jason Galvan noted that many teams consist of not only multiple vendors, but also subvendors. (In his official remarks, he preferred the phrase “capability provider” to “vendor”). The standard phrase for much of the day was that the Trident Spectre staff was hoping to combine one team’s “peanut butter” with another team’s “chocolate” to produce “Reese’s Pieces”.
One such “Reese’s Pieces” example was, perhaps accidentally, revealed through a demonstration of the government’s view of the Vulcan platform, particularly for a call for proposals from the Source Operations Group of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which is responsible for integrating non-traditional earth observations alongside traditional satellite imagery. Entitled “Maritime Domain Awareness Using Commercial GEOINT-derived Ship Detection”, the call was focused on using Commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (“COMSAR”) imagery — which, unlike traditional satellite imagery, can measure three-dimensional representations — to detect ships which have turned off their public location broadcasts through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The analysis would then be operationalized using NASK Incorporated’s Joint Enterprise Modeling & Analytics (JEMA) architecture and brewlytics automation software.
As Cylitix CEO Jawad Rachami spoke, a staffer scrolled through the multiple pages describing the Source Operations Group project, which made repeated reference to a previous effort from “TS22” — presumably Trident Spectre 2022 — which “correlated” “commercial adtech [advertising technology]” location data with the Naval Research Laboratory’s PROTEUS AIS feed to attempt to detect transmitter manipulations. The Source Operations Group had in December 2020 similarly advertised its partnership with non-traditional satellite surveillance firm Hawkeye 360 to experiment with space-based geolocation of radio-frequency emissions.
But what one speaker referred to as the “moment of the meeting” came during the closing question-and-answer session just before 4 p.m., when a female Trident Spectre staffer explained that she preferred teams with unexpected side effects which were more useful than the originally planned capabilities. With a bit of hesitation, she explained that she was looking for capabilities similar to “Viagra”, whose effects had been accidentally discovered by Pfizer while looking for an antidote to chest pain. The audience roundly erupted into laughter, and Rachami encouraged Trident Spectre teams to creatively combine their “peanut butter, or chocolate, or Viagra, or whatever it is.”
Mr. Rachami did not respond to a request for comment through Vulcan.