Can Technology Save the Military From a Data Deluge?

The U.S. military is drowning in data. This is how to save it from the flood

By Clay Dillow Posted 11.02.2011 at 12:16 pm 9 Comments

MQ-1 Predator Drone, Weaponized and Awaiting Command Over Afghanistan: USAF

TIE IT ALL TOGETHER, THEN LOOP THE HUMANS BACK IN

Obviously, the supercomputer-on-an-airship model doesn’t scale to the individual Predator drone, which doesn’t have the space or capacity to carry its own onboard processing suite. But as computer language and computer vision become more robust, storage architectures shrink, and ISR platforms change to meet the demands of the future--and all of these things are already happening--it’s not difficult to envision a day in the near future when the military finally climbs back on top of its data problem. The issue then is finding the right balance between machine reliability and human decision-making so that the armed services and intelligence community can get the most out of both.

“I always talk about keeping the human in the loop,” Modus Operandi’s Barrett says. “There are always judgment calls that have to be made. But if I look across popular culture and I look at the continuing development of artificial intelligence--I watch a computer win on Jeopardy--I start to think of tremendous possibilities that exist.”

The artificial intelligence piece is integral to making the future of ISR a reality. Future drones will have the ability to gather more sensor data than ever before, process that data in near real-time, and make determinations about what information is relevant to the fight at hand so that it can be immediately downlinked and brought to human attention. The rest will be tagged with metadata and carefully filed away so human analysts can call it up with simple language queries later.

In other words, we’ll be relying heavily on machines to do a good deal of the leg-work, as well as to make some low-level judgment calls. In situations where lives hang in the balance, such reliance on technology may be troubling, but it’s more or less the only way forward in a data deluged battle space.

“Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information that were created,” Deptula says. “We now create five exabytes every two days, and that’s accelerating. So this large data problem is significant, and we’re not going to solve it by continuing to do data management the way we have been up to this point in time.”

From that perspective, not only can technology save the U.S. military from its technology, but it’s probably the only hope.

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9 Comments

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emneumann

11/02/11 at 1:17 pm

Sounds like a good job for Watson!

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Grunt

11/02/11 at 2:22 pm

I am sorry to report that some troops did not receive proper drone support do to network lag and casualties resulted.

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quasi44

11/02/11 at 3:34 pm

Well, we knew that this was going to be the hard nut to crack when this system was first implemented. Our domestic taxes on wireless broadband access; that are higher in some states than taxes on liquor or cigarettes, are supposed to be going into building infrastructure specifically to combat these trends that are only going to get worse. Sadly, those taxes are not building anything except personal bank accounts for the masters of our universe. Those who think there is plenty of time to come up with some sort of magic bullet fix. But one simple thing is in the way of any magic bullet fix, and that's the fact that other countries' citizens have access to domestic consumer computer speeds that those who would normally be called on to come up with the big fix cannot access. And once again, America, China is laughing it's ass off about it, as is Japan and India. Our president SAYS that we need our citizens to stand up, dig in, and get creative in the face of the emerging third world...but we aren't ACTUALLY allowed to. Now that we are sending our latest airliners to those countries, they'll be able to pull off mass airlifting of troops when they decide to forcefully expand their borders, and considering that they ALL have been inside our most sensitive systems plenty of times, when they decide to it will be a fait accompli with the knowledge they've gained thus far. One more time, I'll make my doomcrier rounds; begging our nation to GET OFF THE TECHNOLOGY TIT, because just as in Viet Nam and all the other places since, we aren't being ALLOWED to win the field of contention in the new battlespace.

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scientific anomaly

11/02/11 at 4:41 pm

so now robots will be controlling the robots... eventually they will control us!

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

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11/03/11 at 8:52 am

scientific anomaly,

Consider things we take for granted and no longer notice in life.

The city traffic light system is computer controlled. The environmental systems in a building are computer controlled. Much public works systems are computer controlled.
You put a search request into GOOGLE decides what you see on the first page, the order of things. So even part of your thought process is influence by computers.

I am sure the list is 100s times longer than this.

We are very much already controlled by computers.

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jonaldomo

11/03/11 at 11:06 am

Sounds like they need to enroll in ml-class.org

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Peter10

11/15/11 at 6:07 pm

To start with, why do they need those huge earphones? I do better at home.

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