Taking The Tactical Cloud With You...High Speed, Secure Networking At The Edge Of The Battlefield

Published in Milsat Magazine
Written by Charlie Kawasaki, Chief Technical Officer, PacStar

In order to better coordinate deployed forces and enable new capabilities, the US Army, Air Force, and Navy are actively looking to new programs to ensure warfighters have maximum agility and situational awareness.

These programs will deliver a variety of compute and bandwidth-intensive technologies, increasing the use of video, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, for example, to deliver the command and control information that warfighters need to coordinate their activities.

The software needed to run these new capabilities is increasingly being developed to run in the cloud, which itself might reside in a range of data centers, ranging from the large commercial services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government, or the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Regional Hub Nodes (RHN), located in five separate strategic regions and used by deployed U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army units to access transport information from theater tactical networks around the world.

As forces develop greater dependence on cloud-based services, what happens when wide-area access to the cloud becomes denied due to contested communications through electronic warfare (EW), or diminished due to reduced bandwidth?

The key to delivering advanced new tactical capabilities and ensuring their continued availability if there’s no access to the cloud is to vastly increase the capability, speed, and mobility of networking and compute at the edge of the battlefield. That will make possible the replication of critical data and services in mobile clouds.

Read the full article.