IoT for Defense and National Security

4Operationalizing IoT Data for Defense and National Security

Steve Morgan¹ and Jaime Wightman²

¹Chief Technology Office, Raft LLC, Herndon, VA, USA

¹Chief Data and Analytics Office, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Bethesda, MD, USA

Abstract

Operationalizing IoT Data for Defense and National Security is the common language among all processes and digital systems, yet our military and systems were never designed to fully communicate end‐to‐end. Due to information protection policies enforced by government agencies and their defense contractors, even leveraging technology effectively across domains has become excessively complex. Foundational data architectures which can enable digital threads from the product or service concept or need, through the supply chain, to the military exercise, bringing parts to the point of need, have not been effectively implemented. There are many obstacles that are currently preventing Defense and National Security from using sensor data from their own operations to reduce the cycle time of the Observe–Orient–Decide–Act loop. This chapter will outline what many of those obstacles are, and what will need to be done to deliver scalable infrastructure to enable IoT data as the common language for the Defense and National Security enterprise.

4.1 Introduction

Data has been generated by sensors in military operations for decades. Attempts to capture data from sensors on a military asset, join it with other sensors, and use it to create a competitive advantage ...