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2021-10-01

Data a Key Weapon in AI-assisted Future for Air Force

The character of warfare is changing rapidly and it’s clearly time for the Air Force to shed its traditional mind-set.

There is absolutely no ambiguity that the battlefield will not be insulated from the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the Air Force, together with its sister services, needs to swiftly evolve from industrial age construct to an information age one.

Swift and efficient unlocking of the vast potential of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to support battlespace intelligence and analysis on-the-move is the way forward for a winning prospect.

Smart management of immense flow of data, information and intelligence simultaneously from multiple sources to commanders and the edge warfighter holds the key.

It’s all about data. In the future multi-domain operations (MDO) battlespace, the reliance on data and data flows will become as critical as the reliance today on freedom of manoeuvre.

Mission success and failure is determined by the Air Force’s ability to collect, process, and exploit data in near real-time speeds, and in the future paradigm of MDO, data will become the greatest tool and the most coveted weapon.

Data and communications networks that underpin the functional capacity of the Air Force will need to gather, process, aggregate, analyse, fuse and disseminate enormous amounts of data, information and intelligence faster than the speed of events in the battlespace.

Growing data and shrinking time pose a formidable challenge. There is already more raw data than can be transmitted by current network bandwidths. The movement towards MDO paired with the growing number of sensor platforms will only exacerbate the information burden and cognitive overload challenges unless data science and process automation can be integrally harnessed into the planning and operations processes.

As multi-domain integration accelerates, attention will be refocused on network design and optimisation concepts where the Air Force will need to formulate a grand strategy for the embedded application of big data, AI and ML.

Information Overflow

Gathering, processing and fusing the vast influx of data remains the most complex challenge today for the Air Force. There is also a dire need for caution against risks of information- and cognitive-overload.

To prepare itself to operate in highly contested domains across disparate and distributed areas of operation within which the tempo and nature of engagements will vary, it is imperative that the Air Force builds an end-to-end network capability that can rapidly push data, information and intelligence across a distributed command and control (C2) enterprise.

The future combat concept is characterised by edge warfighters having the superior situational awareness (SA) and decision-making to respond to events in real time. Mission command and battlespace management will be implied across the Air Force, whose components will no longer need to wait for instructions to move forward.

Rapid data fusion capabilities, a robust cyber infrastructure and digitally-enabled technologies will be of paramount importance in delivering this envisioned end-state. Across this enabling matrix of capabilities, infrastructure, and technologies, the convergence of big data, AI and ML algorithms hold the key to achieving peak performance.

Commanders and warfighters in the interconnected, multi-domain battlespace will have to be enabled by robust integration solutions from the tactical to the operational to the strategic levels.

Warfighters need better and faster intelligence extraction from data delivered and collected across widely dispersed sensor network and under increasingly arduous communication environments. This is a task that is already beyond human capacity or legacy technologies and therein lies the enormity of the challenge.

Power of AI, ML

Gathering massive amounts of data from multiple, disparate sources necessitates a big data capability for comprehensive and integrated analysis.

Though fewer analysts are required today to process and distribute data than was the case a decade ago, there is a vast and untapped potential to be exploited. AI holds the answer for generating on-the-move solutions to the Information Requirement (IR) – who needs what, where, when and why – by considering an extremely complex multitude of factors at speed. By accounting for risks and threats, ML algorithms will allow edge warfighters to focus on mission execution rather than analytics and assessments of unknowns in the environment.

AI and ML will also determine suggestions for the warfighter ahead of adversarial decision-making, manoeuvres and effects, presenting these digitally in a visualisation of the multi-domain battlespace straight to the cockpit. This digitised battlespace visualisation will be comprehensive, dynamic and responsive – but also, crucially, within the cognition limits and IR of the warfighter.

Performing as a ‘smart brain’ that continuously filters and recomputes what is vital for the warfighter and mission success at any given moment, AI and ML will distinguish between what is raw data and what is information, what is useful and what is not, where it is needed and when.

These technologies will become indispensable in delivering superior SA and decision-making for the warfighter as they resolve the challenges of information- or cognitive-overload and expedite the observe-orient-decide- act (OODA) loop by eliminating the man-in-the-middle currently required for analysis and exploitation.

Timely Solutions

AI and ML technologies offer a huge advantage by reducing the risk of human error and presenting multiple simultaneous risk and resource decision options for execution – at tremendous speed.

No longer will there be delays in information dispersion and the future Air Force will be enabled to act faster and more efficiently.

As the Air Force becomes a self-synchronising system-of-systems – human, machine, manned, unmanned, sensors and effects – the dynamics of C2 will be fundamentally altered. With communications between the ranks becoming more fluid, rapid and also less frequent, and as more autonomous systems and platforms are integrated into the network, the very notion of mission command will need to be reconsidered.

The accelerating digitisation of warfare also implies that the Air Force will render itself vulnerable to virtual as well as physical attacks on networks and the tools that enable them to perform, including AI itself.

By leveraging big data and AI, implementing the necessary integration safeguards and making necessary changes to doctrine, training and concept of operations (CONOPS), the Air Force can undoubtedly accomplish significant gains in its quest to seize the decisive advantage in tomorrow’s high-tempo combat environment.

Reference Text:

www.diacc.ae

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