AI's Power to Transform Command and Control.

• Author: Haga, Wes
• Position: INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE

By securely connecting sensors, data, decision-makers and weapons across multiple domains, the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System will move warfighters from radios and classified chat capabilities to the ubiquitous connectivity and availability that has long been established in the civilian world. It also offers powerful capabilities for command and control.

Artificial intelligence applications across the systems infrastructure will allow the service to take advantage of today's sensor proliferation and robust communications paths to synthesize and harmonize data into actionable information at machine speed. This improves command-and-control posture --and, crucially, creates strategic advantages--by enabling new capabilities in information detection, identification and synthesis across multiple domains.

How does this look in practice? Take for example anomalous traffic on a network, like a military patrol vessel sending signals associated with civilian freighters. A human analyst might believe based on traditional intelligence that a civilian freighter was using the route. In this case, the analyst would fail to view the patrol vessel's signals as a threat.

An AI system, however, would detect underlying traffic patterns. It would more accurately flag the vessel's signals as a cue to assemble nearby sea and air assets. In this scenario, AI saw something a human might not have caught and enabled information across domains to respond to the threat faster.

There are more examples of how AI can support command and control at the strategic, tactical and operational levels, enabling commanders to more effectively direct forces and achieve desired actions such as faster and more accurate decision-making.

Warfighters and commanders live by the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. AI shortens and sharpens this decision loop at every step.

The first step, observation, is perhaps the most familiar: how AI processes vast amounts of information faster and more accurately. A human geospatial analyst scanning images for a specific black truck is limited to observing a single screen. The analyst may take several hours to find that vehicle--and may spot a navy blue SUV by mistake. By contrast, an AI-enabled computer vision system can scan dozens of feeds simultaneously and more accurately identify discrete visual spectrums that the human eye can't detect.

AI also sharpens the orientation stage of decision-making by exceeding human cognitive...