Admiral Joachim Rühle

from NITECH: NATO Innovation and Technology – Issue 5, June 2021

Data science glossary

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.

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

NITECH ››› FOREWORD

NATO’s challenge is not only to ensure sufficient capacity to collect data, such as from this satellite ground station, but also to share information swiftly and effectively (PHOTO: NCI AGENCY)

18 accordance with collective defence priorities. Production nodes will be created in each Joint Force Command and Single Service Command. They will be fitted with high-performance computers equipped with AI systems to automate many of the basic, repetitive tasks currently performed by human analysts. Freed from the manual data-management tasks that consume a large amount of their time, such as data labelling, analysts will be allowed to focus on mission-related analysis and production. Apart from its efficiency, this cloud approach to NATO’s IMINT production will increase its flexibility and resilience against any kind of attack.

This approach, which may be extended to other collection disciplines, is raising several challenges, one of them being the human being’s place in this construct and its interaction with technologies. The introduction of AI into exploitation will generate new ways of interacting between analysts and technology, and building trust is at the centre of that relationship. Understanding trust limits requires integrating new knowledge in the teams, like data scientists, and developing new education and training programmes. Ways in which NATO will hire, educate and train its workforce will require a new approach. Moreover, a new symbiosis will have to be created between engineers developing the technologies and users.

Many changes have occurred in the past decades – from digitalization, satellite proliferation to cloud computing, AI etc – and the pace of change is still increasing. Behind buzzwords such as AI, Big Data or cloud, which are shaping today’s speech, there are still men and women that will have to find their place in this new environment and to catch up with this pace. In the Intelligence domain, some people who started their career doing silver photography interpretation are now just about to run AI systems on digitized pictures.

NATO’s future will be a complex and balanced relationship between technology, analysts and engineers, and this relation needs to be based on confidence. As such, the NCI Agency’s knowledge in those domains will be instrumental in accompanying ACO’s evolution towards this endlessly evolving environment.

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