Military Technology 05/2021

Ultimately, the nature of the threat is of secondary importance to its impact – and the job of military intelligence will be to understand and identify threats so as to predict, understand and limit negative outcomes. Specialists therefore need to be able to operate within multiple, hither- to separate, data streams at once, and to be capable of producing and understanding situational-awareness pictures that include data absorbed seamlessly from multiple domains. This raises problems for militaries and intelligence agencies to tackle, shackled as they often are to notions of ‘intelligence’ being distinct from ‘information’ - as if the former is the preserve of specialists, and the latter, being too easily accessed, can be ignored. This applies as much from a defensive perspective as it does to issues around collection of data. “We obsess about intelligence data, as though it were some special category of data,” observed Maj Gen Tom Copinger-Symes, UK Strategic Command’s Director of Military Digitalisation. “[If] you want to know what we’re doing on hypersonics, you’re probably going to be hacking into our Lt Gen Sir Jim Hockenhull, delivering his keynote address to DSEI, September 2021. (Photo: Angus Batey) Juliane J Gallina, the CIA’s Chief Information Officer, giving her keynote speech at DSEI, September 2021. (Photo: DSEI/Clarion) C4ISR Forum MT 5/2021 · 59 HMS AUDACIOUS, the Royal Navy’s fourth ASTUTE- class nuclear submarine, launched in April 2017. Providing reliable, responsive and secure communications to submarines is a pressing concern for MoD digitisation teams. (Photo: BAE Systems/James Bird)