It is now necessary to obtain data to make decisions more quickly: how a small team of engineers is tasked with reinventing the American army.

The American army has unveiled a new operations center whose aim is to intelligently process the enormous amount of army data, as not everything revolves around “firepower” anymore.

The future wars are not necessarily fought where one might think. In the ongoing and upcoming battles and conflicts, armies around the world are seeking to strengthen their arsenal. The American army is not shy of missiles, planes, and drones of all kinds, but it seems to have realized more than ever that data is the weapon of tomorrow, or at least the element that will ensure victories and defeat the enemy.

Thus, they have unveiled the Army Data Operations Center (Adoc), a task force composed of a small contingent of civilian and military engineers.

Their goal is twofold: first, to help solve specific short-term problems during an operation. Second, in the longer term, to help define the army’s overall approach to data management.

A problem to solve

As Lieutenant General Jeth Rey, deputy chief of staff responsible for G-6 communications and information systems, stated in mid-March, the American army does not have a data problem, “what we have is a data management problem.” The role of Adoc is to solve this problem, step by step, from the top command to the field.

The first 180-day phase will see Adoc play the role of a “technical support” for data. It will respond to requests, analyze trends to provide the army with feedback on fixes to integrate into troop training or existing procedures. This will also help determine the relevance of this “help desk” approach.

According to Brigadier General Michael Kaloostian, who heads the Army Transformation and Training Command’s future command and control capabilities, one of the organizational challenges is whether “the army will make informed decisions about the structure to adopt and the need, or not, for centralized capacity in the future.”

Dominating through data

Lieutenant General Jeth Rey, chief of staff of the American army, emphasized, “Before, everything revolved around firepower, but that is not really the case today. It’s more a matter of who can get the data to make decisions faster, to dominate.”

Adoc aims to centralize strategic data. Thus, allied countries could transmit their data through American infrastructure to compare the same situation from two different perspectives.

The Adoc teams will also have to sort requests, allocate levels of priority, especially if they come from an operations center. They will then analyze to determine how a problem or conflict can be resolved optimally.

“This is much harder to achieve than one might think,” adds Brigadier General Michael Kaloostian, “as it involves several types of cloud infrastructures, diverse locations, and highly protected data.”

The work of this contingent is just beginning. Currently, as Defense One points out, no requests from a war center have been made yet, and in the meantime, training will take place: “But if there were a request, we would prioritize it accordingly.”

This operations center now has 180 days to prove itself and improve the current functioning of the army. According to Michael Kaloostian, “We need something that can help the continuous transition and transformation of the (American) army towards a data-focused force.”

Allowing the personnel furthest from the front lines to sort the data is enabling soldiers in war zones to focus on their primary objective. For Lieutenant General Chris Eubank, who heads the American army’s cyber command center, this is one of the steps towards “creating more and more super-soldiers.”