President's Commentary: Enabling a Data-Centric Army

The U.S. Army’s ambitious data plan released last fall provides the principles, goals and guidance needed to transform into the data-centric Army of the future.

It establishes a foundation to enhance decision-making efficiency and effectiveness at every echelon and aims to improve interoperability among the sister services and with coalition and mission partners. “The digital Army will be fueled by data and data analytics. The right data, at the right time, at the right place will enable faster and better decisions at echelon—to out-think and out-pace any adversary,” the plan states.

Varied and isolated data sources, where they still exist, limit data sharing, hamper decision-making and constrain cloud-computing capabilities, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Evolving toward data-centricity requires the Army to unleash the full power of information across all mission areas and share across the military services and the entire Defense Department, enabling joint all-domain command and control (JADC2), allowing technical dominance and ensuring operational advantage over the peer and near-peer adversaries.

Simply put, data is the future of land warfare. And we can see that future forming in Ukraine.

An article published by West Point’s Lieber Institute notes that the Ukraine-Russia conflict “presents glimpses, though likely not a full picture, of what warfare looks like in a hyper-connected, data-rich world.” The article, written by Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, West Point’s 15th dean of the Academic Board, and Robert Lawless, a Lieber Institute assistant professor for Law and Land Warfare, explain that “the importance (and availability) of data in the Ukraine-Russian conflict ensures States will seek to increase the efficiency of collecting, processing, and analyzing data.”  

Army leaders have taken, and continue to take, a variety of steps in the right direction, including the data plan itself. As just one example, U.S. Army Cyber Command has:

• doubled network endpoints contributing log data to Gabriel Nimbus, the Army’s big data platform.
• increased the number of data feeds.
• doubled the amount of storage.
• and increased the number of analysts using the big data platform.

This digital transformation is a whole-of-Army effort with leaders across the service working diligently together and with the science and technology community and businesses large and small to gain data superiority on the digital battlefield and ultimately outmatch formidable competitors such as China, Russia and North Korea.

This Army effort will take focused leadership and alignment of effort in lockstep with the rest of the department. AFCEA is committed to supporting the Army in this challenging but vital transformation to data-centricity. At TechNet Augusta, August 14-17, we will celebrate the successes so far and continue supporting the search for solutions by fostering dialogue among the Army, industry and academia.

This year marks the 10th in-person TechNet Augusta. For the first event in 2013, 2,275 people registered, and except for 2020 when the pandemic forced us to hold the conference virtually, registration has grown each year. Last year, 5,442 people registered, more than double the number for the first year, and we expect another dramatic increase in August.

This year’s event, from which I borrowed the title for this column, offers the opportunity to explore the promise, challenges and solutions of the cyber domain. We are thrilled to once again have the support of the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence, industry and academia.

We also look forward to seeing Army leaders from Fort Gordon and from around the country continuing AFCEA’s mission of fostering communication and facilitating networking, education and problem solving, especially in this era of great power competition, uncertain budgets and rapidly advancing technologies.

And we certainly look forward to celebrating the signal, cyber and electronic warfare soldiers on whom our future rests. Along with the leaders across the service, it is those soldiers who will enable the data-centric Army, and because of their intelligence, dedication and patriotism, we are assured the Army’s future is in the best of hands.