New Training Platforms Offered to Military Analysts
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Data found on social media can be used for a variety of missions including psychological operations, intelligence gathering etc. “It’s vital for information about what’s happening among the population, but also for information that others might have about U.S. troops,” said Paul Scharre, director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The military must be able to monitor websites to see if something is trending that might be harmful to a mission so they can respond in a timely fashion, he said, according to nationaldefensemagazine.org.
Military analysts can now use new training software to get better search capabilities. One such system is SimulationDeck, a software platform developed by Nusura. The system is able to replicate traditional media such as radio, television and newspapers, along with web platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Organizations can practice using social media for crisis response and military and intelligence operations.
The company works with the U.S. military, the Department of Homeland Security and state and local emergency management agencies.
Another platform that can be used to train military analysts has been developed by Cubic Global Defense, working under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract. The social media analytic replication toolkit, or SMART, is primarily operated on the Amazon cloud server and is offered as a service, allowing the company to continuously update the system with new tools. The company uses the product primarily to assist customers with exercises. Cubic too uses internet data after anonymizing it, and then securely creating a custom “sandbox” for each exercise and generating a training script.
Users can then scour SMART to find out what caused a particular event to happen.
VATC is also in the social media training business. Its digital media replicator system, under its EPIC Ready line of products, doesn’t simulate social media, but replicates it, said Sara Moola, the company’s CEO. The company takes real information from a certain area and injects that into its system. “If you want to train in an area in Africa, you can actually extract that specific area of interest and have that … feed going into the exercise, which is in a closed environment,” she said.
The digital media replicator was recently used during the Flintlock 2017 exercise in Africa. The event brought together 2,000 military personnel from 24 African and Western nations.
