Last Thursday, the Navy awarded a new contract to five intelligence, computer and security companies to provide both hardware and “the development, integration, and test of intelligence, battlespace awareness, and information operations applications”.
In other words, the US Navy is embarking on a major new project in the area of surveillance, technology and data acquisition to provide military commanders with a detailed understanding of any conflict area.
According to the Department of Defense’s own definition “battlespace awareness” includes an area’s “environment, factors, and conditions”, “the status of friendly and adversary forces, neutrals and noncombatants” and “weather and terrain.”
The addition of “information operations” in the contract suggests the project will go beyond the remit of geospatial intelligence and may have some capability for commanders to organise messaging campaigns in an attempt to influence various actors in an area of operations.
The contract raises questions over exactly what information the US Navy is intending to collect and in which conflict areas.
The investment can be understood in the context of the influence of ‘network-centric warfare‘ on US military thinking which emphasises the value of a digitally connected force as a means of improving situational awareness and military decisions.
A press release earlier in the year from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) calling for ‘big data’ projects noted that:
“the demands for actionable information have spiked as warfighters at every level—whether at the planning table or on patrol—are called upon to make well-informed decisions”.
The battlespace awareness contract was awarded by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and will initially last until August 2013. The US Navy has options in the contract to extend the work to 2017.
The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center reports directly to the Navy’s Information Dominance Systems Command.
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Data is the future, if it’s not already the present.
At a recent press conference announcing US military investment in ‘Big Data’ projects, the acting director for DARPA noted that the Atlantic Ocean contains 100 billion, billion gallons of water.
Kaigham Gabriel went on to state that "if each gallon of water represented a byte or character, the Atlantic Ocean would be able to store, just barely, all the data generated by the world in 2010".
Or as Scott Keeter, the director of survey research for the Pew Research Center, put it:
“At no time in history has so much of the public’s discussion…been so accessible to a wide audience and available for systematic analysis…we are just at the very beginning in understanding what’s possible”.
The challenge for militaries, governments, businesses, journalists and publics is working out how to harness it all in a way that also safeguards our privacy and freedom.
On 27 April, I’ll be moderating a panel at Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media which will begin to chip away at the tip of the iceberg.
The one day conference will bring together experts from academia, business, journalism and the third sector on the ways social media analysis can be applied more intelligently and creatively.
Lawrence Ampofo, the organiser, has been been analysing and interpreting social media data for a long time, before Twitter and YouTube became integral parts of our culture.
He reckons the time is right to explore the boundaries of social media analysis:
If a community of interested parties can start engaging with these questions, then Lawrence believes a more multidisciplinary, socio-technical and markedly more profound way of understanding social media data and human behaviour will emerge.
And if you want to join this exploration into the future of social media analysis, tickets are available here.