Pentagon Intensifies High-Speed Attack With AI, Machine Learning

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) Massive amounts of satellite images, video and data flow in at unprecedented speeds, EO/IR sensors on fighter jets generate target specifics, ground-based air-defense radar “lights up” enemy aircraft and both air and ground unmanned systems collect, analyze and transmit time-sensitive data. Meanwhile, dismounted soldiers and ship commanders consistently uncover new threat information and need to “network” key location detail, intelligence data and targeting specifics to an optimal “shooter” or weapons platform in a position to attack.

How are all of these vast pools of seemingly disparate sources of incoming sensor data, arriving through different transport layer communications technologies, collected, processed, analyzed, integrated and quickly streamlined to combat decision-makers under enemy fire? Perhaps one data stream is an rf signal, another GPS while a third comes from a separate digital datalink or wireless signal? How can interwoven data from otherwise distinctly different data formats be analyzed in relation to one another in time to destroy an enemy?

Warfare is becoming increasingly “hyperactive,” “multi-domain” and moving at lightning speed as forces seek to find, identify, pinpoint and destroy targets much faster and at longer ranges than the enemy.

Making this happen or, “fighting at the speed of relevance,” as US Military leaders like to say, is ultimately determined by the force which better uses “information” as a weapon of war and operates faster than or inside of an enemy’s decision-making cycle. High-speed, AI and machine-learning-enabled computing and data processing, particularly if fortified by gateway technologies able to “translate” and “integrate” otherwise incompatible data formats, can expedite this process in unprecedented ways.

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Operating within this conceptual framework, various weapons developers and industry innovators are working to “break ground” on new paradigm-changing technologies which can massively “speed up” attack speeds in warfare. Arlington, Virginia-based technology firm Royce Geo, for example, uses AI-enabled algorithms, machine learning applications, computer automation and gateways to “translate” and “integrate” data streams and expand the application of its now operational cloud-enabled analytics and data-modeling technology known as the CURVE Operating Environment (OE). CURVE OE enables users to gather, merge, analyze and help transmit precise, time-sensitive combat data from both commercial and military platforms.