Case Study: Recovery & Humanitarian Assistance

Following the withdrawal of US Forces from Afghanistan in August 2021,

many American Veterans took it upon themselves to remotely rescue their Afghan partner forces they served with. As these Veteran Recovery Organization formed, they needed situational awareness and logistical resources to accomplish their mission. It was important for these organizations to understand where the locations of their Afghan Partners were to stage resources and ensure they were properly spaced out to avoid Taliban raids.

Raytheon BBN partnered with multiple recovery organizations to

aid them in their mission of “honoring the promise” for serving on behalf of the USA’s national security interests. Our team stood up a TAK Cloud Server to enable WebTAK’s situational awareness capabilities in less than 24 hours once operations began. For five continuous months, every morning the Raytheon BBN team provided snapshots to the operation leads of the Veteran Recovery Organizations to share the latest operational insights. Below highlights the TAK Lab capabilities that were custom developed to support their mission:

• An ADS-B TAK integration for commercial ADS-B feeds to counter misinformation about when evacuation flights were occurring.
• A configurable snapshot tool that produces visual summaries of where Afghan Families were over a specified time interval.
• A user analysis tool that helped server maintainers move back and forth between user names and callsigns.
• A tool that builds a spreadsheet of how many users have been near a set of population centers over a specified interval to aid in humanitarian aid logistics.
• A graphical user management tool (e.g., drag drops users on to groups) that was ultimately rolled into the latest version of TAK Server (v4.5).

As of January 2022, the veteran recovery organizations that we teamed with have guided over 3,000 Afghans to safety while continuing to care for those still in danger.