One of the most oft-quoted statements during the Civil War was, “Get there first with the most men.”
Whether this battle cry was true then, it is not the case for military leaders today seeking asymmetric advantages on the modern battlefield. A more apt quote may be: “He who decides best, first wins.” Commanders cannot earn victories on speed and might alone; they win by making informed decisions based on access to real-time, accurate information. This is no easy feat; particularly for units operating at the farthest edges of the battlefield.
Modern-day commanders do not suffer from an information vacuum. The data is there, all around them, so much of it that the sheer volume slows rather than speeds up decision-making. There exists a lack of tools to parse all of this data at the edges of the battlefield, sort it, aggregate it and get it in the hands of commanders without having to wait as it cycles through command IT systems and data centers. The result? “Disconnected data” battlefields that often fall victim to a laborious flow of information between operation commanders and the Defense Department's upper echelons.
DOD leadership is acutely aware of the need to extend data capabilities to the forward edge of the fight. The U.S. Army, for example, has initiated tactical cloud pilots designed to extend soldiers’ command post applications to a distributed cloud environment. Longer term, the goal is to enable battlefield intelligence and data fusion in pioneering ways.
Extending the tactical cloud to the edge addresses the disconnected dat ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
