How To Help A Battlefield Commander Handle The Flood Of Information
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Olga Grosman-Ezrahi
The IDF is adjusting its land forces to cope with a “flood” of information from various sources, to turn what might be confusing to commanders and fighters in the battlefield into a critical tool for warfare.
The IDF’s C4I capabilities are going through a process of change and development these days, in order to answer the challenges of operational control and command for land forces. Colonel Avi Uliel, head of C4I technology division, land forces command, spoke with I-HLS about the challenges and the vision for the future.
IDF is looking for better and more efficient ways to improve operational effectiveness of the means for control & command in order to be more focused. For that reason the IDF is considering, among other solutions, to use civilian technologies that can be quickly implemented.
One of the challenges today is coping with a “tsunami” of information coming in from an array of sensors, leading to a very loaded picture that is very hard to make sense of. The practical challenge is to manage the videotapes along with control & command together on the same platforms.
The greatest challenge is creating an optimal system for the soldier. This calls for a simple application that allows the soldier a fast and easy understanding of the picture of the field while managing the battle – hence, the IDF is interested in programs for real-time mapping of friends’ location and the enemy’s location, much like how the WAZE app maps you car as well as all the drivers around it.
Receiving a wide picture of the activity in the field allows commanders to start making changes in the battlefield and thinking ahead. Furthermore, a joint infrastructure is needed to allow direct communications between the different forces and an online distribution of the relevant information. Another vision in the IDF is to switch to prediction programs that go over the massive collected data based on history and events, for instance. That way it would be possible to know about events before they occur and get relevant information on them some time in advance.
In conclusion, it’s safe to say that the emphasis for the vision is the use of Real-time Data, relying on cheap and reliable on-the-shelf products and on open and flexible C4I architecture for developing technologies and answer operational needs as they come up. This means not re-inventing the wheel but relying on civilian technologies and to fit the rate of development of the civilian world.
