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It's my belief that we are on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of warfare, and specifically ground warfare. . .the failure to connect those dots pre-World War I, the failure to see and the failure to connect those dots in the 1920s and '30s, cost 100 million lives, a huge amount of blood, and years and years of human suffering. It is our task, the task of you and I, the task of us, both civilian and military, to do better, to see the trends, and to get the future less wrong than our enemies.
-GEN Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army
The Environment
Disruptive, transformative technologies may be creating an operational environment where many current warfighting paradigms are irrelevant. Artificial intelligence-powered decision making, human-machine interfaces, robotics, biological and genetic engineering, quantum computing, global social media, and increased access to space are just a few of the challenges that require land forces to evolve and adapt. The transformation of human-machine interfaces will change the role of humans in operational decisions.
"No matter where you go in the world today, it's observable from some device. The ability to surveil, to see and communicate, is at levels never before seen in human history. Almost everyone and everything is a potential ISR platform capable of transmitting real-time information, that if properly analyzed can be useful intelligence which can significantly help or seriously hinder military decision-making and operations"1
The U.S. Army intelligence enterprise must adopt transformative technologies and develop dramatically different approaches to data, information, and intelligence to remain relevant. Such an approach requires a data strategy to modernize the people, capabilities, network architecture, and the data itself to enable effective operations within a fluid data environment. Currently, Army intelligence analysts dedicate the majority of their time and resources to manual data discovery and data management rather than analyzing and transforming data into actionable intelligence. The volume and velocity of available data now outpaces the manpower available to extract, correlate, or condition data.
The scope of the data problem is striking: the Army intelligence enterprise needs to collect and exploit classified military intelligence; acquire and exploit publicly available information; exploit data collected by an increasingly large and varied array of sensors; and...