Smart Firefighting Podcast

Episode 282: How TAK Started and Where It’s Going with Ralph Kohler

Published

Guests: Ralph Kohler

Topics: TAK & Mapping, Artificial Intelligence

Episode notes

How did TAK become a widespread, indispensable tool for military and civilian first responders?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

How TAK got started and its evolution

Insights on the open ecosystem that’s allowed TAK to grow

Why machine learning and shared data are the next frontier

Hear from Ralph Kohler - the Principal Engineer/Senior Advisor at Air Force Research Laboratory .

Ralph shares the story behind TAK : how it started as an idea during early deployments in Afghanistan and grew into an ecosystem now used around the world. He walks through the decisions that made TAK what it is today, including the importance of open intellectual property, community-driven development, and real-world feedback.

The conversation covers key moments in TAK’s evolution, how it's bridging military and civilian use cases, and why shared tools like TAK can unlock innovation across sectors. Ralph also offers a grounded perspective on where the ecosystem is heading next—from machine learning to augmented reality.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

  1. 0:00 Intro from CivTAK 2024
  2. 0:50 Live at CivTAK with Ralph Kohler
  3. 1:16 Too much credit
  4. 2:21 Why and when TAK was created
  5. 5:20 Open APIs, free and unlimited rights
  6. 6:37 Early wins: pushing TAK out in 2011 and 2012
  7. 8:57 Head-to-head evaluations against commercial apps
  8. 10:36 Shared consciousness or shared knowledge
  9. 11:36 TAK alongside other tools
  10. 13:42 It's not free
  11. 14:51 What's next: machine learning, non-GPS navigation, jamming
  12. 18:43 Complaints welcome: how to get involved
  13. 20:21 The TAK Product Center and TAK.gov
  14. 21:34 Dual use from the very beginning
  15. 23:08 Augmented reality and timing
  16. 26:03 Intellectual property is king
  17. 26:51 Wrap

Questions answered in this episode

What was the original inspiration for creating TAK?

Ralph Kohler says that in September 2003 in Afghanistan, Staff Sergeant Yoshida told him he wanted geographic coordination capability on his phone instead of a laptop. When they returned, they started trying to build it, but the technology wasn't ready yet. As soon as Android came out around 2007 or 8, development began.

Hear it at 2:31

Why is TAK free and what intellectual property approach did the developers take?

Ralph Kohler says they worked very hard to keep unlimited rights to TAK, studying ecosystems like Windows, Google, and Facebook. Unlimited rights allow the government to publish it and do whatever it wants, which is critical for building an ecosystem. He says none of the TAK ecosystem would exist without that intellectual property position.

Hear it at 2:31

How did TAK win adoption over competing tools like Esri?

Ralph Kohler explains that in 2014, the Special Operations Mission Planning and Execution Office evaluated numerous applications. TAK met all requirements just like Esri's tool did, but TAK had unlimited rights while Esri offered a per year license that would increase in cost over time. That evaluation led to TAK being selected.

Hear it at 7:00

What new capabilities is Ralph Kohler excited about for TAK?

He mentions machine learning integration for collection and prediction, non GPS geolocation for indoors and outdoors, detecting when GPS is jammed or spoofed, and simpler installation. He says they will probably have a TAK server plugin before the end of the year that makes it easy to add somebody to a server via a web page.

Hear it at 15:20

Where should people go to get involved with TAK?

Ralph Kohler says the TAK Product Center and TAK.gov are the place to go. TAK.gov lets anybody get an account and access civilian or law enforcement versions of TAK and training. He calls it shocking that a military organization does this for civilians with no military affiliation required.

Hear it at 20:35

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 282 transcript

How TAK Started and Where It’s Going with Ralph Kohler

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Ralph Kohler

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to part one of our CivTAK 2025 mini-series, recorded on the floor from CivTAK 2024. Today, we're sitting down with one and only Ralph Kohler, one of the earliest pioneers behind the TAK ecosystem, to learn about how a vision turned into a global network of lifesaving technology. Ralph shares behind the scenes moments with TAK's formations, the role of open access and collaboration, and why the future depends on listening to the end user. He breaks down complex ideas in simple terms, reminding us that real progress comes from putting people and ideas together. This is an essential conversation for anyone serious about how innovation can drive public safety forward through the TAK ecosystem. Enjoy. Live here at CivTAK, sitting alongside Ralph Kohler. Ralph, how you doing?

[0:55] Ralph Kohler: Great. It's a great day to be talking about the ATAK.

[0:59] Kevin Sofen: It's always a great day to be talking about ATAK.

[1:01] Ralph Kohler: Well, yes, it is.

[1:02] Kevin Sofen: So do you ever just kind of pinch yourself and think, wow, this whole TAK thing was something that started in your brain and it led to this culmination of people coming together and so much more than I don't know, could ever imagine?

[1:16] Ralph Kohler: No, exactly the opposite. I'm astounded at how much credit I get because of how many people are actually doing the work. You know, you look at what you get, There's probably two dozen vendors in the hall, and half of them I've never heard of. And some of the ones that I've never heard of, you know, they're not all even from the United States, are doing incredible work that adds to the ecosystem. The thing that I think I'm impressed by is how ecosystems work. And one of the things we did really well from early on was working to enable an ecosystem. And so I would take credit for that, but, you know, most of it, I don't think, no, I get credit for most of it. I'm happy to take credit, but I don't, yes, I'm happy to take credit, but I don't deserve credit. How's that?

[2:12] Kevin Sofen: I mean, you can take a little bit of credit.

[2:13] Ralph Kohler: Okay.

[2:14] Kevin Sofen: So for maybe even just take a step back of a one-on-one view perspective, going back to the inception and formation of TAK, Could you shed a little bit of light in terms of why was TAK created and when was TAK created, why was it created, and what was some of the initial impetus of all things TAK?

[2:31] Ralph Kohler: So I would say I was influenced in two different ways. The first, from what capabilities do we need, I had started doing geographic coordination with Air Force Special Operations in 2002, and I ended up working with eventually Chief When I first met him, he was Staff Sergeant Yoshida, to do coordination between combat controllers and pilots in ordinance delivery for nine lines, the whole com chain and situational awareness. And when he and I were in Afghanistan deploying that technology in 2003, in September, he said, you know, I don't want this on a laptop, I want this on my phone. And he'd kind of gearing up to that for a few days at that point. But when he said at that time, it really hit me and maybe hit us. And when we got back, we started trying and there was no, it really wasn't, technology wasn't ready for it. You know, we got some flip phones with a GPS and I think it was Nortel charged $10 a month for access to the GPS. That's crazy today, right, that you'd pay to use your GPS and then do it over text messages. But then separately, AFRL was innovative at the time project called the Joint Battlespace Infosphere, which did routing of messages for subscriptions and publications, which is the core of TAK Server now. And so AFRL had that as a technology. And so Alan and I and a few other people at AFRL goofed around with how to do that on a phone before Android or Apple came out. And as soon as Android came out, Alan pushed his support organization at what is now called AFLCMC to do some prototypes with Draper. And that was probably 2007 or 8. And I didn't know that at the time, but then I and a couple of other people at AFRL pitched the program for TAK to take the Android phone and the what is now TAK server and merge them together because nobody cares about your back end server. Facebook and Google Maps are servers. All you see though is the front end. So you want to just get that front end and that's magic to you. But it's the server magic in the back, but nobody cared at work about a server. them an interface and they love you. So I proposed to take the Android phone to be the interface for the server. And that was really how we got started. But I want to go back and say the other key thing is understanding how the government works and how intellectual property works to create an ecosystem and a monopoly. Because I spent a lot of time studying Google, Facebook, IBM, and what pieces make a good ecosystem that is a monopoly. And Windows is your iconic example, right? Windows, and before that, DOS, was valuable because Microsoft wasn't the company doing all the work. It was other companies adding to it. And so having that API to have other people add onto it was critical. Another component that was critical was free. So we worked very hard to keep unlimited rights to tech. We had unlimited rights on the server from the beginning because we've been working on that. But there were a couple of times where companies tried to assert other than unlimited rights on TAK, which would have wrecked the whole thing. And government rights are not good enough because you want to have it so that the government can publish it and do whatever it wants. That's a very powerful thing. And most government people don't understand that they need to aggressively pay attention to their intellectual property rights. All right, there you go.

[6:37] Kevin Sofen: So we're here now, and you were talking about some of that formation in 2007, 2008, it's 2024. That time in between in terms of having this community and having these different innovators and entrepreneurs build on it, what have been some of the evolutions over the years and maybe even some high-level case studies you can point to about, you know, TAK doing what its intended purpose is?

[7:00] Ralph Kohler: Let's see. The first thing that comes to mind is that when we started pushing TAK out 2011 and 12, it was just a phone app because in 2011, you didn't have persistent systems or trailer swear really anywhere. They were just showing up. And so the DOD didn't have IP-based communications on the battlefield. They had non-IP-based communications and Harris had some capability with HPW, but few people used it. And so you started with military using the phone. And then we got one of those key special operations organizations to say, oh, I love this server because they got the persistent systems radios. And so when you took that chocolate and peanut butter and put it together, it really took off. And so we think of TAK as the thing, but it's not really. It's really the convergence of several technologies, the smartphone, a supercomputer in your pocket, and the com to go either on the battlefield or disconnected from Gotenna to Beartooth, trellisware, persistent systems, having that suite of communication systems that really did not exist 15 years ago. Those brought things together. Key events, One that, for the success of the military program, was really the Special Operations Mission Planning and Execution Office, SOMPI, had their own application that was the follow-on to FalconVue, and they decided they saw 10 or 15 different applications that were all trying to do the same thing in the mobile space, including their own. So rather than keep funding their own, they decided to do a competition. And so they did an evaluation of numerous applications, one of which was Esri's. And when they did the evaluation, they found that the tool that AFRL had developed with support from other organizations met all of their requirements, just like Esri's did. But ours was unlimited rights. And Esri was offering a good deal to license it per year, but you could project out 10 years and say that if it was the Esri tool you were buying, A, the government wouldn't have control, and B, that price would go up as the capability went up, although the government would end up funding the additional capability, because that's the way things standardly work. So Sompy decided to go with TAK instead of Esri, and they didn't evaluate the connectivity piece. That was just a free add-on we had. So that was one. That was in 2014. And somebody published that report on... That was a public release report. They did another one a couple of years later that wasn't public, but it was basically the same thing, 10 or 15 different applications, I'll compare it and when. I think the formation of the tech product center was key, and open sourcing the application so that we could make it fully legally public in the Play Store was key. I had put it in the Play Store actually in 2014, but my government counterparts were just not ready for that and asked me to take it out after about six hours.

[10:36] Kevin Sofen: So one term that I've heard thrown around here quite a bit, and I feel like I first read it on TAK Product Center, but is that a term of shared consciousness and this idea of being able to have different people, different groups across different borders in different areas to be able to have a shared consciousness. In your words, in your opinion, you know, what does that mean and how does TAK help support and accomplish shared consciousness?

[11:03] Ralph Kohler: Well, I'll tell you, I haven't heard that term applied to TAK, but shared knowledge, I guess I would say, and we can call it shared consciousness if you want, but understanding where you are and where your friends are and what their, you know what their intent is usually because you've pre-planned that. Understanding intent and what's going on where reduces the fog of battle and lets people act much more decisively. And so I suppose that's what shared consciousness means. That seems a little grandiose to me.

[11:36] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, shared knowledge is probably a better way to lay it out. So then, you know, within this, you mentioned Esri, a great supplier of maps and interactive tools. But one thing I feel like one of the challenges within the CivTech community and the public safety side is There are a lot of other tools out there, and I think we all know that there's within the toolbox, you have a bunch of tools, you have different types of screwdrivers, different wrenches, all those analogies and cliches and whatnot. But I think one of the challenges that you've seen is that people are like, oh, I already have tool X for this, I already have tool Y for this. One thing I talked with AJ quite a bit is this mindset of and, not or, of how you can have TAK and this, TAK and that. What are your thoughts in terms of, again, how TAK is another tool and how they can work in unison with other tools?

[12:21] Ralph Kohler: So from the military perspective, the goal of TAK is to provide flexibility and cost efficiency to do state-of-the-art things to win wars. But the civilian ecosystem is a little different because for all of your different civilian areas, you have a number of vertically integrated tool sets that want to capture the whole market so that they can capture the money. You want to maximize your return. You do it by controlling the whole vertical market. And so TAK, to some extent, competes with all of those. And we can't be everything to everybody, so you're going to have to use other things. But sometimes there's some tension between the vertically integrated, because they want to provide you with everything. right? In the military world, there's a lot of ways that can happen. In the civilian world, well, we're trying to do what we can. And I agree with AJ that it's and not or. And the civilian world, it can't really get on top of making big improvements to TAK, I think. I think that's part of the challenge. It would be more cost-effective if you had a tool that everybody could use and contribute to. It just doesn't work that way, though.

[13:42] Kevin Sofen: And one of the challenges that we talked about is this perception of free. Anytime something's free, you don't really value it. What would you say to someone that's sort of like, well, because it's free, it must not be valuable? Or again, you just talked about how much you've worked to make it free. How do we overcome that perception of free within the civilian market?

[13:59] Ralph Kohler: Well, there's two answers to that. The first is it's not free. You paid for it, right? As somebody I heard yesterday say, I don't know if it was AJ or somebody else. No, it wasn't. I don't know who it was, said, you know, this isn't free. You pay for it every April 15th, enjoy it. And there is a law that was passed that said that government agencies are supposed to release technology and developments to the public, assuming that there are no security issues. And I worked very hard to leverage that law. It got a lot of press in the early 90s during the peace dividend after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In recent times, that has been largely forgotten, but I've used that to push the release of ATAK to maximize that benefit to the public consistent with the needs of the DOD.

[14:51] Kevin Sofen: We're sitting here, it's what, October 2024, and I know we were gonna walk around, and kind of was impressed at all these different entrepreneurs and innovators out there, and you were kind of alluding to some of this yesterday of some of the exciting stuff that is happening in terms of where the TAK ecosystem and community is now and ultimately where it's going. What excites you right now? What's kind of on your roadmap and what are things that you're really tracking and excited for in the next six, 12, 24 months?

[15:20] Ralph Kohler: Well, I got a bunch of things, I guess. First, I'm impressed by the things I saw out there that I was unaware of going on. VK with a, I normally think of VK systems as a, as a TAK server supplier. But they've got out there a technology that keeps track of how and where you use a gun that is certainly gonna be useful for the military and civilians for both training and operational use that just blew me away. And as part of that, so another thing I'm interested in is machine learning. We've been working to bring machine learning to TAK for about six, seven years now. And we have a bunch of work to build tools, which we believe we can release to the public, to do collection, organization, appropriate distribution based on whose data it is to machine learning people, and then put those into the TAK ecosystem and consistent with MDMs so that you can manage quickly update those machine learning models. And so we've been working on that, and then I see the data that VK Systems is collecting that fits so well with that, and I was twice unaware of the connection. So bring that up only because I saw it in the last 15 minutes, very impressive. Let's see, machine learning in general is a thing I'm working hard on. We have that data collection ecosystem that we're working to build, and we're doing that in collaboration with the TAK Product Center. And if it works out, they will probably accept that so that everybody who is doing TAK can use the data and leverage it to do learning and prediction and a bunch of other things. We also have machine learning, as I talked about yesterday, in the UAS tool. So you can put your own model in UAS tool to find whatever it is you're looking for. You know, we didn't do people, for instance, but you can see how the search and rescue people would like to be able to just fly that drone and have it tell you when it finds a person because you're looking for people, right? Another thing I'm interested in, there's a company outside from Belgium doing non GPS geolocation. It's another topic I'm very interested in. I was very impressed by what they saw. I know of several other efforts in the DOD that applied attack that are liable to bring similar capabilities and being able to know where we are without GPS, both indoors and outdoors is an important capability that we need. Another one that I am more long-term excited about is being able to tell when you're jammed or spoofed. GPS jammers are $30 on Amazon now. And they also apply in Ukraine. And I care about both of those. So I want to be able to tell that I'm being jammed. I want to know, and I want to know where the jammer is. So that's another thing we're working on that is pretty exciting. I probably got, you know, I got a list of like 30 things that I had on a piece of paper that I talked about yesterday.

[18:43] Kevin Sofen: Well, we can always do a follow-up, but then I guess to continue to build on all that, of like, it's exciting to be in this room of entrepreneurs and innovators and just seeing the energy and camaraderie in the community here. What's your message to companies within or even outside of the tech ecosystem about how they should consider approaching, developing, innovating, and really participating in the tech development ecosystem?

[19:08] Ralph Kohler: I love complaints. Tell us where we're going wrong. I learned a lot here yesterday about, I guess I learned the same lesson over and over. 15 years ago when I was doing the predecessor to this system, I listened to actually Alan Yoshida say, tell training people, say, well, this is how it's done, you know, and it's, you know, I know it's really hard, but this is the way it's done. No, tell us it's hard and we'll do it the easy way. So it's a pain in the ass to get ATAK installed and get it configured and run. Wouldn't it be great if you could just open up your phone, click a button, and be on a server? Just so we can track where you are, right? It turns out, that's drop-dead simple, right? And so, we probably will have a TAK server. plugin before the end of the year that will make it drop dead easy to add somebody to your server via a web page. So I love complaints. So to answer your question, my message to people out here, keep up the good work. You know, I don't know that I have good advice for them because they come up with so many things that I would not have thought of.

[20:21] Kevin Sofen: And I know you're with Air Force Research Lab, but you mentioned the TAK Product Center and what would you say is the best avenue roadmap for groups to get involved? Is it direct with AFRL? Is it direct with TAK Product Center? And how should they approach that?

[20:35] Ralph Kohler: I'm not sure people appreciate how innovative the TAK Product Center and TAK.gov are. TAK.gov lets anybody go get an account and get access to the entire civilian or law enforcement, if you're a law enforcement person, versions of TAK and a bunch of training. But then also, I don't know if you've used the link EUD button. What it does is it lets you link directly to TAK.gov as a civilian with no military anything to keep your stuff updated and interact with it. And that is, you will not find another military organization that does that for civilians. That is shocking. And so the TAK Product Center is the place to go for the military, civilian, and law enforcement users groups. It has a lot there and it is it is really surprising how much it's there.

[21:34] Kevin Sofen: Well earlier you had a pretty clear vision in terms of the TAK perspective from a military perspective and you kind of alluded to some of the challenges on the civilian side and how there's just there's various other factors and desires at play. But in Ralph's words, you know, what do you see as the ultimate vision, mission and goal for TAK within the public safety civilian sector?

[21:58] Ralph Kohler: So I want to go back and I'll say correct an assumption there. We wanted TAK to be a dual use tool from the very beginning. And when we were first prototyping it out, the use case we used. There was a Little Caesars ad a thousand times a day at the time. Pizza. And so the canonical example we would use for all of our planning was you and 11 of your friends are gonna come from different parts of town and you want to arrive at the pizza joint at exactly noon. And you need to know where everybody is and how they're getting transported and whether they have problems. And so you need dots on a map and be able to coordinate with them. And that was that was kind of the origin. And that doesn't have anything to do with the military specifically, right? So it was targeted to be a dual use application from the beginning. And the more I hang around here, the more I see that there's a lot of overlap between what the military does and first responders, both law enforcement and fire do all the time. But I don't I don't know I don't know what the ultimate end is. One of the Polish attendees here reminded me of a presentation I made 10 years ago, which said in part, AFRL is going to get out of this business and probably soon. Well, it was 10 years ago and we still got who knows how much more to go, right? But I don't know what the end is. I don't know if there is an end. The previous tool to this was eventually replaced by something else. There's going to come a time when augmented reality is cheap and useful and the battery lasts a long time and maybe TAK will make the jump to that or some of that infrastructure probably will. I think it has a better chance of making that jump because of the intellectual property approach we've taken. But I think that things are the same and then suddenly they change, right? I don't know what that change will be. But TAK has done a fair bit of work in the, especially the army, in virtual reality and augmented reality. I think those are going to be the next thing. And let's go back to Chief Yoshida. He liked to say that the technology is ready when Japanese school girls are buying it. And we're not ready for augmented reality yet, but when it showed... You don't want me to ask you questions, but here's a rhetorical one. Do you know when the first smartphone was made? When was the first smartphone come out?

[24:30] Kevin Sofen: I would guess 2005.

[24:33] Ralph Kohler: Well, I'll give you a hint. It was made by Apple, 1993. Three. It was an absolute failure because the technology was not ready, the Apple Newton. And so, you know, it didn't have the connectivity. It didn't have the compute power. It didn't have, you know, the display. And so when technology is ready, there's a big change, right? When the, in 2007, when the Apple iPhone came out, well, you had a bunch of things that were convergent and the whole world changed, right? When the world changes, these ideas are gonna change and I don't know when that'll be.

[25:13] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, I mean, there's that balance in terms of the desire and the technology being available and ready to be able to meet the need. A different example of, was it David Cameron, the director of Avatar, he had the idea and the vision before the movie, 10 years before the technology was available for him to produce it. So obviously different contexts.

[25:31] Ralph Kohler: We've been playing with augmented reality glasses since 2007, I think was the first one I saw. We still don't really have one that's workable, although I haven't tried the Ray-Bans, but I can't make ATAK interoperate with the Ray-Ban because Facebook or Meta is not going to let me.

[25:50] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, you need the Facebook plug-in or something for that. Well, I know there's other sessions and whatnot to attend and it looks like it's about lunchtime here, but one final question I wanted to throw at you, and this is somewhat of a, not necessarily a wild card, but you know, I'm interested, is there any sort of quote or life lesson or anything that you kind of live by or something that you could share with us to leave us here today?

[26:15] Ralph Kohler: Well, I wish I had some. I probably got a bunch. Unfortunately, the one that comes to mind that I used a couple of times this morning, I'm blank on everything else. It's first get the money. That's the first in the government. That's the first thing you got to do. And then you figure out how to spend it to work well. I would say in TAK, the intellectual property position is king. None of this happens if we're not unlimited rights. That I think is the key thing, a key thing that made this whole thing happen. You don't have plug-in developers and international partners downloaded off the Play Store if you don't have that.

[26:51] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. Well, it's really special and remarkable to see the ecosystem that you were a piece of starting. So thank you, Ralph, for your leadership on that. And it's, you look around here, it's just, it's kind of, it's got a life of its own. So I think just all we can continue to do is shepherd it and push it forward in the best way possible. And I'm grateful to be a piece of the puzzle and be able to have this conversation with you here today.

[27:12] Ralph Kohler: All right. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here.

[27:14] Kevin Sofen: Thanks, Ralph. Thanks for listening today. Make sure to join us at CivTAK 2025 November 4 through 6 in Washington, D.C. CivTAK is where public safety professionals and industry leaders come together to collaborate, innovate and advance TAK integration. This is your ecosystem for real world solutions and shared mission success. See the website and show notes and we hope to see you there. TAK is the way.