Defense Digital Transformation: A U.S. & U.K. Conversation (E55)

Today’s current events sharpen everyone’s focus on how the United States military can cooperate with other allies. Jeffrey Phelan from Rubrik leads a discussion among two American leaders and Brigadier General Crossfield from the United Kingdom.

Each one of them comments about four key elements: security, interoperability, data sharing, and data as a structural asset. Each person presents concerns about each issue.

Dr. Raj Iyer from the American Army begins by mentioning modernization and readiness as first movers for the Army making a digital transformation. Part of working together is publishing the data strategy that the Army has; he notes that the United Kingdom Army also has published strategies. This means that staff on both sides of the Atlantic can have a deeper understanding of systems.

One aspect of data readiness is the data sovereignty rules the military must follow. For example, moving data to the strategic edge can provide benefits for warfighters. But this advantage must be tempered with the strict policy rules about where data can reside, whether on U.S. soil or non-U.S. soil.

Brigadier Crossfield reflects many of the same sentiments that the American leaders expressed. He stated that, under his leadership, everything they produce is in the cloud. He returns to the concept of data at the edge and adds the component of applying artificial intelligence to that data.

Tom Sasala boils down the whole endeavor to a phrase, “It is our view that the future war fight is a digital war fight.”  To this end, he highlights a program called a “gate review.”  This is a process whether a system should even make progress through the acquisition life cycle. Even before an initiative gets to the acquisition stage, they look at sizing the data, and impact the data will have on a target system.

One overriding concern for all parties is ethics. All the data in the world will have no value if the algorithms are designed with an intentional or unintentional bias. In fact, Brigadier Crossfield observes that that are some areas where technology is ahead of them, and the policy, procedures, and government standards may be holding them back.

To view this webinar: Defense Digital Transformation: A U.S.-U.K. Conversation.

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