Future Forces will Operate in Networked Battlefield

Future Forces will Operate in Networked Battlefield

future forces

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In the future, military operations will rely less on human soldiers and more on interconnected technology, leveraging advancements in unmanned systems and machine intelligence in order to achieve superior defense capabilities. The Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) will connect soldiers with smart technology in armor, radios, weapons, and other objects, to give troops “extra-sensory” perception, offer situational understanding, endow fighters with prediction powers, provide better risk assessment, and develop shared intuitions.

On the battlefields of tomorrow, humans and technology will work together in a seamless, cohesive network, giving soldiers a competitive edge and keeping troops and civilians out of harm’s way.

To Future Forces Conference

A new collaboration funded by the US Army is going to research this ability. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will lead a $25 million initiative to develop the scientific foundations of a next-generation IoBT, designed to enable new predictive battlefield analytics and services.

The “Alliance for IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN),” funded by the Army Research Lab, includes collaborators from ARL, SRI International, and various universities and industry researchers. The funding covers the first five years of a potential 10-year effort.

The project plans to change the fundamental understanding of what’s possible when computers, sensors, data, weapons, soldiers, wearables, and media analytics are networked to empower new defense capabilities, according to ischool.illinois.edu.

In a battle environment, human operators must adapt to unexpected changes. IoBT researchers aim to create a cyber network of “things” that adapt as the mission evolves. That means that a system will have to analyze its available resources and re-assemble itself to best meet requirements for the present execution.

These systems must also be self-aware and able to reason about their goals, state, vulnerabilities, and other characteristics in order to meet a commander’s intent. They have to be able to counteract and mitigate disruptions and attacks in near real-time and provide stability under uncertain conditions.

The IoBT system must also have cognitive abilities and be able to fuse data from technology with data from humans. It will have to function in a continuous state of learning. As a result, the system will be able to provide commanders with the most relevant information at any given time.

“While commercial IoTs provide some of this capability, it is not challenged in the same manner as on the battlefield,” said Dr. Stephen Russell, ARL’s Battlefield Information Processing Branch Chief and the government lead of the Alliance. “The ‘B’ in the IoBT is a key focus.”

Various aspects of future forces technologies will be at the center of the coming Future Forces Conference and Exhibition organized by iHLS on May 9, 2018. The event that will be held at the Lago Conference Center, Rishon LeZion, will gather the ecosystem’s leading defense industry representatives, experts from the armed forces, police and security services, entrepreneurs and investors.

For more details

Booth/sponsorship: Matan Shaked   [email protected]  [email protected]  +972-54-8097456