NITECH ››› FOREWORD
Admiral
Joachim Rühle Chief of Staff – Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
NATO and the Information Age At the beginning of the digital era, information was composed of megabytes; now it is measured in terabytes and, in the future, it will be petabytes. An average satellite will soon generate more than 20 terabytes a day, and the Earth-observation satellite count is still growing. The amount of data that can be collected on any average day may already be well above most countries’ processing capacity and, in case of crisis, while understanding to decide is critical, no country may be able to process and exploit in a timely manner the amount of collected information.
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Thus, NATO’s challenge relies not only on the capacity to collect information, but rather on the capacity to exploit and disseminate terabytes in a timely manner. In that perspective, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) is committed to develop Allied Command Operations’ (ACO) capacities at the pace of technological progress, surfing on the edge of disruptive technologies, within the constraints of the collective defence organization, but also with all the opportunities brought forward by such an organization. This approach, which is already guiding several collection disciplines’ operational requirements, will not only impact ACO’s equipment, but also its human resources and organization.
Modern commanders’ brains have not changed that much compared to their ancestors, while the amount of data to which they have access has grown massively in recent years, and it is probably just the beginning. The expression “information rich, knowledge poor” has been created to describe this situation, where organizations fail to transform their information into actionable intelligence. Getting out of that trap requires us to develop a holistic approach to the informational domains and to implement a global solution. Small steps taken in solving each problem independently proved to be inefficient with what has to be considered as a change of paradigm. Anticipating Imagery Intelligence (IMINT) evolutions, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), in relation with Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency), developed a federated approach to IMINT exploitation, leveraged by artificial intelligence (AI). The centre of this scheme will consist of a Data Lake into which nations will be encouraged to dump their images, wherever they come from (satellite, drone, aircraft etc). Exploitation nodes, either from nations or from ACO, will connect to this Data Lake to produce IMINT in
