The Cloud in Combat

Today’s cloud computing trend has the potential to enable new mission capabilities for special operations forces while optimizing the costs of acquiring, inserting and sustaining information technology.

Cloud computing enables software as a service, where software applications are accessed via the internet/intranet, platform as a service (PaaS), where applications are developed and provisioned via a web-enabled application platform, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where infrastructure resources are accessed and provided over the Internet.

In addition, cloud-enabled analytic frameworks are being aggressively adopted for new insights from new sources of information.

The convergence of social computing, mobile technologies and cloud computing is clashing with enterprise objectives around security, oversight, policy and governance. Caught in the middle are end-users and warfighters, who want consumer technologies with support of the enterprise behind them.

According to the 2011 Army Posture Statement, “The ability for deploying units to access the same battle space awareness information as their deployed counterparts significantly increases pre-deployment readiness by providing current intelligence products in support of predeployment training and operational planning. The Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) has incorporated cutting edge technology in the form of cloud computing and advance analytics to provide users with precision search, increased computing speed, enhanced collaboration, and data aggregation tools ... The first tactical cloud was deployed to Afghanistan in November 2010 and became operational in March 2011, followed by the CX-I coalition cloud in May 2011. This implementation is the Army’s response to a theater Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statement (JUONS) for advanced analytics.”

The cloud is already in combat theaters. What new capabilities does it offer?

Cloud at the Tactical Edge

Possibilities of cloud computing and cloud-mobile convergence:

Capability extension: Cloud-to-the-edge enables enterprise capabilities to be extended to the operational edge by re-architecting and extending mission threads and processes such that they can be executed by ultra-mobile technologies, smartphones, tablets and other devices, yet enable very rich mission capabilities to be developed for the edge users. This could include controlling a UAV via a smartphone, or, having map, radio and GPS capabilities all in one small pocket-sized device.

Analytics at the edge: Cloud computing is an important enabler of ‘big data’ analytics focusing on semistructured and unstructured data from new sensors and new sources of information. Moving analytics to the edge offers a real possibility to improve tactical operations through rapid analysis of threat information, situational awareness, and command and control.

Infrastructure at the edge: Many cloud computing efforts focus on IaaS, which includes compute, storage and network resources being provided and accessed via a cloudenabled resource pool. Infrastructure at the edge is not that new, given the ideas of data centers in a container, computing PODs, and other portable units of infrastructure that can be deployed in situations such as disaster relief, for edge operations. Adding cloud computing functionality to these portable data centers simply means that more consumers can access the cloud resources when they need them, and therefore support more computing needs with fewer physical resources.

Tactical App Stores: Apple’s iStore application store model is coveted by commercial organizations and federal agencies that see the tremendous benefit of allowing users to access and download applications, mission services, widgets and other end-user capabilities from a catalog, all via wireless or tethered networks, and doing so rapidly and efficiently.

Many DoD vendors have already begun to develop and field mobile tactical apps and some have even announced plans to open apps stores for military customers. In addition, the military is developing apps of its own. With today’s computer-savvy warriors, we may find that the ultimate end-user community is quite capable of actively participating in or even being the leading voice in tactical apps development.

A recent example of this type of grass roots adaptation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology to solve a military problem is the adoption of iPads by some units of the Marine Corps aviation community to carry charts electronically rather that stuffing reams of paper charts into cramped cockpits.

It is not uncommon for warriors to make after action reports by speaking into their smartphones using the builtin voice recognition apps, then emailing the transcribed report to their computer. Result: much saved time, faster reports, less administrative burden on warriors, all thanks to COTS technology.

Combine all these apps with C2 apps at the edge and now we start to realize the long-sought vision of the COP, the common operational picture: each pilot, dismounted soldier, vehicle, command post, etc. all sharing real-time accurate situational awareness data.

We must understand, however, that app stores have cloud computing PaaS underpinnings, which do take time to implement, but once in place, they enable the capabilities to transform C2 at the edge.

Cloud-Mobile Fusion for Tactical Operations: The convergence of cloud computing and mobile technologies will create a new palette of opportunities to rethink mission capabilities from an architectural and data delivery perspective, and begin to explicitly build the tactical edge user experience into these architectures, and build new mission capabilities from the edge into the enterprise, or architected outside-in, from the edge to the enterprise.

Clouds and Wireless Grids: The rapid ascent of cloud computing has taken some of the thunder from the grid computing industry. However, combining these two capacities with wireless networking enables the concept of wireless clouds, which essentially means adding elements of cloud computing to wireless grids.

While this technology is still fairly emergent, the possibilities are intriguing and allow us to envision the art of the possible if a grid of linked computers can discover one another, connect, pool their resources, and allow sharing of computation to address spikes in demand for computational capacity in tactical situations. There are not specific use cases or CONOPs for this model, but then again, nobody asked for the telephone either.

Obstacles

While there are many possibilities for cloud computing and cloud-mobile convergence focused on the tactical edge community, there are also real barriers that will continue to inhibit these technology trends. The three biggest obstacles to cloud computing and cloud-mobile convergence at the tactical edge are bandwidth, latency and intermittency of connection.

First, there are significant network bandwidth challenges at the edge, which are being addressed by new network technologies and innovations. We’ll have to deal with those constraints for some time. As for intermittency, mobile cloud applications will have to be built to function despite losing network connections momentarily. While this is a current challenge, it can be addressed in part through innovations such as HTML 5, which enables data caching for mobile platforms and allows a cloud-mobile application to continue to function despite intermittent loss of connection.

Application design for the cloud-mobile convergence will have to be specifically architected from the edge back to the enterprise, and thus the DIL constraints can be better accommodated by mobile edge applications.

New technology innovations, such as 4G/LTE mobile services, offer far greater capacity for data and voice requirements, as well as low network latency, plug and play support, and provide support for both frequency division multiplexing and time division duplexing on the same platform.

Next Steps

As the infrastructure and network technologies evolve, and as enterprises continue to embrace the trend toward increasing mobility and knowledge worker portability, the demand for edge-centric, cloud-enabled mobile-oriented mission capabilities will dramatically increase.

The following actions are recommended:

Leverage the cloud: Begin to structure experimentation activities oriented toward pushing cloud computing capabilities as close to the edge as possible.

Innovate for cloud-mobile fusion: This is today’s reality, and the opportunity to innovate at the intersection of cloud computing and mobile technology is ripe. The tactical operations community lives at this intersection, and should be the driver and innovation engine for cloudmobile fusion.

Listen to the users: Many of the innovations in mobile apps and the tactical cloud will come from the men and women in the field at the very edge. The days of all great things trickling down are long in the past. The younger generation of warriors has been raised from birth in a connected world and they likely ‘get it’ much more readily than people who were raised in the age of landlines. Our future generation of warfighters will come from the age of mobile computing, app stores, text messaging and related technologies.

Design applications from the edge into the enterprise: We must begin to design applications for cloud and cloudmobile fusion, such that tactical needs are architected early into mission capabilities, and are not bolt-ons once the enterprise requirements have been satisfied. Cloud computing and mobile-cloud convergence are the forces of innovation that we will be living with for the next decade. This is our new reality. Technology development processes and acquisition models will have to embrace the reality that if a capability cannot be accessed, delivered and leveraged to drive productivity within a five minute enduser experience, it will be too late. This is particularly true at the tactical edge. This is our opportunity to drive accelerated technology insertion using real world consumer technologies.

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