IoT for Defense and National Security

Section 1Introduction: Vision, Applications, and Opportunities

Stephan Gerali

Enterprise Operations, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Bethesda, MD, USA

Future battlefields engagements will increasingly utilize myriads of multimodal intelligent sensors, seemingly unlimited computational power available using the cloud and a fast always‐on networking all relying on the power of 5G. This will fundamentally change the way nation states will engage in conflict and resolution for the foreseeable future. To better understand the future battlefield, it is important to understand the vision, applications, and opportunities for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within the defense and national security domain.

This section presents a broad view of IoT for defense and national security with several applications of IoT specific to military operations in support of ground combat, naval warship operations and defense logistics. The section starts with a review of the U.S. Army's Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) to include key fielding requirements (supporting diverse missions, rapid deployments, managing resource constrained assets, exploiting heterogenous sensors, supporting varying scale in data, and deployable within contested environments) along with enabling faster sensor‐to‐effect decision loops. In building the IoBT vision, all warfighters will need to be sensorized in order to digitize the battlefield and understand who is friend or foe during engagements. With lots of IoBT data ...