Virtualize to Visualize - From Sensing to Sense Making with Real Time Immersion for Command
In my previous article, Decisions Under Fire - Future of Computing on the Battlefield , I addressed decision making supported by computation - the digitized version of the Decide step of the OODA loop theory by Colonel John Boyd (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).? In this article, my focus is on the first two steps: observe and orient, for which I will substitute “sense” and “sense-making” for the two original terms for their more intuitive language and broader application in the technical domain.??
The rationale for my focus is on improving the performance on these two steps by leveraging technology in a systems approach to make them faster and more seamless to support commanders and operators to outmatch their opponents.? As the nature of war is changing and accelerating, the need to make quality decisions quickly is critical but dependent upon sensing and sense-making. Therefore faster sensing and sense-making is more urgent than ever to achieve victory.
Flow Chart Source. Boniface Yogendran, CD
Sense - Essential to Understand What’s Happening
In the past, scouts saw their advancing enemies and relayed word back to their war chieftains. Cavalry were also used for their speed and range to detect the movements and anticipate the axis of advance of the foe.? The eyes, nose and ears played the role of sensors.?Occasionally, animals played a role, such as dogs employed by the Roman legions when on campaign and in a temporary encampment.? Their keen hearing and smell gave an advantage in avoiding surprise. Having these “sensors” isn’t enough.? Careful placement and employment is essential to develop and maintain an understanding of enemy location, intent and capabilities with sufficient notice to be able to seize advantages or avoid destruction.
Photo Source. https://www.gordondoherty.co.uk/writeblog/thedogsofwar
Sensors that are available today and those that are just a few years away have immense capability for sensitivity and precision.? Sensors such as multiple spectrum cameras, acoustic sensors, radars (including over-the-horizon), offer significant range and performance improvements from what’s been seen in the past.? Sensing can be done from space, drones, vehicles, people and fixed infrastructure.? Sensors are so ubiquitous now that the challenge is bringing together all the inputs into a real-time understanding of the situation.
The types of sensors available are very similar for Navy, Army, Air Force, Special Forces or Space.? However, the performance requirements vary widely depending on the requirements for time, space and warning.? The velocity of threats typically dictates how far out threats must be detected in order to provide sufficient warning and enough information to define the evolving threat picture or progress of the battle within the operating environment so that leaders are provided timely and accurate information to make their decisions and influence the outcome of the battle.
Photo Source. https://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24689.0
The problems of sensor synthesis are common to all domains.? The sheer volume of data is creating an evolving set of problems of a technical nature.? Sensor improvements and changes in computation are creating new risks for capability acquisition programs and the traditional ways of managing those risks are not keeping pace.? Those risks have traditionally been managed by a broad spectrum of standards, including technical, such as common interfaces, user experiences, data representation, performance and environmental requirements.??Not all standards exist to fully leverage and ensure successful integration of these budding technologies.
Further, the focus on advancement of capabilities is often too focused on technology and inculcating technology across every step of battlefield operations.? In essence, this looks like a push to completely automate the nature of war, and leveraging technology away from the human side of war, namely command.? Command is what pulls all the functions together to win and therefore must be the focus of sensor synthesis.
Sense Making -? Visualization for Command
Though the sense function serves the commander, the management of the sense function has traditionally been a preoccupation of immense importance with commanders because of its relevance to the outcome of battle.? The sense function is always important for a commander during operations.? Sense helps create understanding of the situation to plan, and also to watch the plan unfold and refine the direction of battle to ensure victory.? The sense function is performed by teams and systems, to ensure commanders have the understanding they need of the battle space.
Reconnaissance teams operating far forward relay back their sightings through high resolution digital cameras, infra-red cameras, image intensifiers or radar, relayed back through contact reports.? Drones stream video imaging above enemy columns or defensive positions directly into headquarters for real-time viewing.? Acoustic sensors determine the bearing and distance of incoming artillery.? Engineers examine soil and river conditions to prepare for an assault river crossing.? Meteorology technicians examine their radar, wind speed and humidity to forecast the weather conditions and their impacts for operations.? Logistics assessments are created counting combat supplies on hand and their consumption rates for an eye on sustainability of operational tempo.? All these feeds are used to create an operating picture using various overlays to help make sense of the situation through visualization of the decision space of combat leaders to determine their plans.
Maps with clear plastic overlays marked with wax pencils were used up to a few decades ago to help create the virtualization of the operating picture.? These paper maps were replaced with digital maps updated by analysts and operators with the evolving picture and coordination lines.? The challenge was and always will be to represent the aggregate of sensors into a real time visualization for leaders to understand and dominate their environment.? Every delay, every manual process, every disconnected sensor represents a time lag and risk of error.? In war, it makes the difference between life and death.? The need isn’t just to see first but to sense first, make sense, decide and act first.?
The Liability of the Current Approaches to Sense and Sense making
Sensors today are ubiquitous and bring in more data than ever.? The sheer volume of information needed for brigade or division-sized formations on operations is staggering and as such, their headquarters have grown significantly in staff, equipment and support demands to produce the visualization of the battle needed for commanders.? But as has been seen in recent conflicts, the ubiquity of sensing platforms such as drones has been commensurately matched with rapid striking of slow moving troop formations, headquarters and tactical infrastructure.??
Headquarters’ size and limited mobility are at risk of becoming a liability, an easy target and a priority to strike.? Visualization must adapt quickly to both reduce the risk of destruction of one’s own command capabilities and provide commanders with the necessary ability to understand the evolving operational picture to overcome threats at a superior pace to the enemy.
Photo Source. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2023/Graveyard-of-Command-Posts/
A natural and important response to this includes data fusion, drawing together all of the inputs from the various sensors and bringing them together.? Supported by higher quality sensors and machine learning algorithms, the ability to detect, recognize and identify threats can be quicker and more precise than ever.? This, however, does not address the analysis of the fused data to make sense of the battle through visualization.
Analysis is the role that a portion of headquarters staff perform manually to create commanders visualization.? A whole additional layer is needed to expedite the analysis of the fused data, and with operator analysis added. Leveraging data fusion and a combination of artificial intelligence with human oversight to perform the analysis functions can accelerate expert assessments such as intelligence, engineers, and logistics.? With artificial intelligence augmented analysis, it then becomes possible to take visualization to the next level.??
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Command - A Human Endeavour
Commanders command.? Automation won’t replace this and care is needed when looking at adopting new technologies into military capabilities and not trying to automate command in modernization.? Sense and sense-making is about answering questions commanders have - their critical information requirements. Though war has evolved along with technologies over the centuries, the nature of the questions and their purposes has not changed.? Those questions seek to clarify the decision space of the commander, how much time they have to act to influence the outcome of the battle and to prevent being surprised or overcome.
Commanders have used new technologies in novel ways for battlefield advantage throughout history, beyond the scope of what designers intended.? Imagination remains firmly a part of the command function, to leverage innovations.? Therefore innovations and advances must support commanders in their tasks and fulfill their requirements, not try and replace them.
Sense and Sense-Making As a System - Virtualize to Visualize
Leveraging new technology in support of commanders can focus on using complex technologies to simplify the processes of sense and sense making to provide the next generation of battlefield visualization - virtualization.? Virtualization is about rapid and intuitive visualization of the battlespace, allowing commanders to see and feel the flow of battle as if on the battlefield and give intuitive representation of key areas such as the state of enemy or own combat power, enemy objectives, days of supply, and time until reinforcements come into play.? The elements from the expert analysis provided by the various analysts supported by AI are elevated and integrated into a living picture.
Virtualization must be focused on the commander but usable at every level.? It must represent the sensing data and sense-making analysis in intuitive ways such as visual and immersive means.? To help this change, headquarters and manoeuvre units will evolve, structured and equipped differently, with operators having greater speed in analysis and supported by additional automation in fusion and analysis of real-time data.? The answer is to virtualize to visualize the operating environment to provide an unmatchable advantage to decision makers for clear and confident decision making.
Photo Source. https://defense.info/multi-domain-dynamics/2024/11/making-the-connected-battlefield-a-reality/
In adopting technology and evolving how to leverage it in war in a keynote speech, retired USMC Lieutenant General Michael Groen spoke about adopting a systems approach to transformation: that the approaches for adoption of new technologies must come with new ways of war, new structures, and new techniques.??
Video Link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRhan7ms5Eg
Of particular importance to both combat leaders and industry leaders, he noted that technology is not the same as capability and that an integrated system will always outperform a deconflicted one.? These are powerful truths that must impact any acquisition program and force structure design, in terms of strategies, links between programs and platforms.? The integration is what reduces the time lost during sense to sense-making, potentially making a seamless and rapid process for decisive outcomes.
Better and more numerous sensing systems require a complete system upgrade and integration, to gather, network, fuse and analyse as a single system to sense and make sense in support of commanders and operators alike.? It must not stop with data fusion, but cascade through the whole system to include analysis to become a capability that is fit for purpose to the leaders who will deploy with them and the teams who will flow with an unmatched speed.? The potential payoff is exponential.
Exponential Impact on the Operating Environment
Lieutenant General Michael Groen recently released a paper that tackles Command in the digital era of warfare to take its advantages to the next level.? In this paper, he identified that at its core, the power of digital technologies lies in their ability to harness exponential capabilities. Unlike physical tools, which serve individual users, digital tools can scale rapidly across entire networks, enabling widespread adoption. For instance, a shared data environment allows multiple entities to benefit from insights generated by any single node in the system. Similar to how ride-sharing platforms grow with minimal additional cost per user, military transformation must capitalize on these synergies. High-quality data environments can fuel numerous tactical tools, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency.?
Full Paper Title with Link. Digits Collide. Commanders Decide. Command and Control in a Digitally Transformed Age
The Bottom Line
On the modern battlefield, the need to leverage technology to systematically combine sense and sense-making for rapid decision making will truly accelerate the decision support for command and enable conducting war at a pace no opponent can match.? Virtualize to Visualize is a concept that can achieve this.? This sounds easy enough, but to create this will take a combination of hardware, software and algorithms, all of which are in a period of rapid change and risk management.? Perhaps a good topic for a future article...
Special Thanks to:
Boniface Yogendran, CD for his suggestions with this article and for the excellent flow chart
Michael Groen LTG Michael S. Groen USMC, Ret, for his references and review
CAF Gunner ||3D Vertex Labs @ FCS || 1st Year BACS student @ Dalhousie University || Passionate about AI and Tech
1 个月Great insights, Bryan! The ability to rapidly process and act on real-time data has always been a game-changer in warfare. Virtualization seems to take this to the next level by enhancing situational awareness and decision-making speed.From an Artillary Gunner, Do you see any challenges in integrating these technologies across different military trades like artillery ?
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2 个月It seems we're still lacking the humint intelligence that every other branch still employees. Drones nor anything else can do what a LRRS team can.
CEO | Defence Consultant | AFCEA | Pilot | .*.
2 个月All very well but useless without strike capability and for that you need ammunition.
Building the Core of Tomorrow, Powering Up Future Energy Systems, Securing Critical Infrastructure with Cyber Resilience, Accelerating AI Evolution.
2 个月Adib Enayati List of papers you might enjoy with an upcoming Paper releases In February: The Convergence Doctrine Aegis Framework: Advancing Comprehensive Defense Planning ? Cerberus Containment Chain: Suppressing Insider Threats ? Arbiter Framework: Electronic Deterrence and the Adaptive Strike Chain ? The Mechanics of Spaceborne Warfare: Exploring Anti-Satellite Operations ? The Mechanics of Spaceborne Warfare: Integrating Stealth Technology in Orbital Assets ? Mechanics of Spaceborne Warfare: Redefining Orbital Suppression Dynamics ? Revolutionizing Electronic Combat: Mastering Anti-Drone and Autonomous Robotics Operations ? The Culmination Point of the Russian Army ? Advanced Mission Planning: Plan of Action Against the Iranian Nuclear Capabilities (Part 1) ? The Convergent Algorithm: Revolutionizing Air, Missile, and Orbital Defense ? Single Pager Series (various concise analyses on defense topics) https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-the-convergence-doctr-vC97N8ufQeiMwSs5BHqSTw
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2 个月A great insight into military history, challenges and solutions that the latest tech can bring. In the world where national and international security comes to the top of the list (our current state), addoption of this tech enhanced OODA loop will play a huge role. Im my imagination it's similar to how medieval force would stand against industrial.