Raft

Raft is a leading defense technology company dedicated to empowering the U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI/ML and data products. We transform complex data into actionable insights, enabling mission-critical decisions on Earth and beyond. Our modular platforms are designed to eliminate operational friction and data fatigue, ensuring you have the correct information at the right time to achieve mission success.

Mission Critical Application

2025

Mission Critical Application

2025

Mission Critical Application

2025

Mission Critical Application

2025

This system protects civilian aircraft, military assets, and infrastructure across North America

‍Data Streaming Technology Used:

Kafka Streams
Apache Quarkus®
Kubernetes
AWS
XML/JSON Processing
Real-time Data Enrichment
AI/ML Integration
Grafana
observability tooling

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What problem were they looking to solve with Data Streaming Technology?

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The Department of Defense faces increasing limitations in its legacy C2 weapons systems to handle the complexity and scale of modern Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) requirements. Legacy systems that have served for over 15 years have hardware-based architectures that create significant operational challenges for future needs:

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Scale Limitations: Legacy systems process hundreds of data feeds, but modern threat detection requires more comprehensive sensor integration. Each day, civilian and military detection systems must monitor 10,000+ aircraft, pushing the limits of current sensor integration capabilities.

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Cognitive Burden: Command center operators manage disparate data sources across multiple interfaces, creating substantial workloads that can adversely impact the speed of decision-making for air battle managers during critical air defense scenarios.

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Legacy Technology Constraints: Hardware-based architectures combined with legacy desktop-application user interfaces limit deployability, scalability, interoperability, and the ability to incorporate modern AI/ML capabilities essential for maintaining detailed situational awareness in contemporary and future threat environments.

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Modernization Need: The DoDs operational demands continue to intensify, requiring faster, more accurate decision-making from better-integrated data sources. Current systems require urgent modernization to handle emerging threats and technology integration.

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How did they solve the problem?

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Raft developed the data layer for the future tactical C2 weapons system using Kafka Streams as the core data streaming technology to create a modern, scalable architecture. The solution leveraged sophisticated stream processing topologies to handle real-time data fusion at unprecedented scale:

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Massive Data Integration: The system processes over 800 Department of Defense and civilian feeds through Kafka Streams topologies, representing a significant increase from the hundreds of sensors in legacy systems. The architecture uses complex enrichment pipelines, including notification processing, entity enrichment, threat assessment, and relationship designation tracking.

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Real-time Stream Processing: Multiple sophisticated Kafka Streams applications handle different aspects of the data pipeline, including entity enrichment with metadata, operator notifications, and route planning; threat actor and threat zone processing with real-time assessment capabilities; relationship designation enrichment for tracking entity relationships; XML-to-JSON transformation and validation pipelines; and enrichment for operator visualization.

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Cloud-Native Architecture: Built on Kubernetes and AWS using microservices, enabling horizontal scaling, resilience, and rapid deployment across multiple defense installations.

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AI/ML Integration: The streaming architecture supports real-time AI/ML capabilities for enhanced decision-making, incorporating tactically relevant data feeds in addition to radar data.

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What was the positive outcome?

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The data layer for future tactical C2 weapons system has achieved remarkable development and testing milestones, demonstrating the transformative potential of data streaming technology for critical C2 operations:

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Technical Achievement: Successfully developed and tested a system processing over 800 streaming feeds, representing a 60%+ increase in sensor integration capacity compared to legacy systems. Performance testing demonstrated that the Kafka Streams architecture can process over 10,000 aircraft monitoring messages per second with sub-50ms latency, while maintaining 99.9% uptime during stress testing scenarios.

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Development Success: The system is nearing full operational capability, with testing phases successfully wrapping up. It has demonstrated reliable processing of massive data volumes through sophisticated stream processing topologies, validating the architectural approach for mission-critical military applications.

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Pre-Deployment Validation: Operator acceptance testing is scheduled to begin within weeks, marking a critical milestone toward operational deployment. The streaming architecture has successfully handled all integration testing scenarios, proving its readiness for the demanding requirements of air defense operations.

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Technological Advancement: This system represents a proven leap from hardware-based legacy systems to modern cloud-native streaming architecture. The successful development and testing phases demonstrate that Kafka Streams can handle the most demanding, mission-critical military use cases at massive scale.

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Operational Readiness: The system has demonstrated the capability to provide unified situational awareness under a single cloud-based interface, with early testing showing significant potential for reducing cognitive burden on command center operators and improving decision-making speed for air battle managers.

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Strategic Impact: Upon full deployment, this will modernize C2 capabilities across the armed services, positioning command and control functions for future technological evolution while maintaining continuous operations.

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Additional links:

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