Published in Military Technology (MILTECH)
Written by Charlie Kawasaki
Whether centralized or at the edge, one of the biggest military needs extant today is the imperative for a common operating picture (COP) with support for Pattern of Life (POL) analysis across all relevant data sets, to enable powerful capabilities such as anomaly detection, entity tracking, real-time alerting, predictive classification and historical analysis.
The result is a greater level of situational awareness, which is key to anticipating an adversary’s tactics. POL is defined as “the specific set of behaviors and movements associated with a particular entity over a given period of time.” Capturing and processing POL data is already underway with the US DoD’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) project, and supporting projects, such as the US Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). However, the resulting avalanche of data masks important trends from human operators.
Modern computing hardware and data analytics software have the ability to fuse spatial and temporal data into a COP that is visible to and actionable by human beings, accompanied by a seamless communications infrastructure that enables a COP to be delivered to the warfighter. Evolving the IoT concept to an IoMT [Internet of Military Things], JADC2 promises to provide the soldier at the edge, and decision-makers at the command post, with access to the same COP.