Building the intelligence picture to thrive in the information battlespace

The digital world is changing the tactics and mechanisms our adversaries employ, transforming the battlespace in which we all now operate. In our recent survey of senior defence decision-makers, 95% agreed that ongoing digitalisation has led to a more dynamic and complex battlespace, while 85% agreed the future battlespace will be an information battlespace. As such, we are all looking for advantages in this context.

This new landscape has opened broad attack vectors for organised crime, terrorism, psychological operations and military activities across not only defence, but also industry, academia, CNI and society more broadly. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has framed this new norm as one of ‘persistent competition’; a competition where we have yet to fully harness our national strengths.

In this climate, we need to build and arm ourselves with an up-to-date and comprehensive intelligence picture. We must put establishing truth as the core tenet against adversaries that will not only seek to conceal and disguise their activities to limit our situational awareness, but also run disinformation campaigns in their endeavour to attack our democratic foundations.

Action is founded on intelligence. Such a picture informs national decisions to help maintain the public’s confidence. As we move into the military environment to execute the national intent, then close coupling of intelligence and action will help our forces achieve superiority in the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Loop.

But each piece of information contributes to truth and untruth. So, when we fail to connect what we have available, or a department or analyst fails to realise its relevance to the larger picture, we weaken our position. In the execution of military manoeuvres, this is afforded through Multi-Domain Integration (MDI) – with 98% of defence leaders deeming MDI important to shaping today’s military operations. Greater predictability of enemy action and better coordination of data will lead us to be more agile and adaptable in today’s information battlespace.

Federating the intelligence mission

The field of intelligence has been thoroughly disrupted over the past decade by the abundance of open-source and commercially available data sources. GEOINT, for example, is provided by commercial companies at resolutions previously only available to government providers. And not just traditional imagery either, but Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and RF.

Meanwhile, the advent of social media and camera phones has brought with it a firehose of data that documents activities relevant to the defence and security community. Commercial and government organisations are applying tradecraft to the exploitation of intelligence from this data. Cyber intelligence from the private sector, building detailed profiles of threat groups, is now regularly provided to law enforcement and security agencies. This emphasises the blurring of boundaries between government and industry in a battlespace that does not recognise traditional boundaries of home and away, peace and war.

Amid this new dynamic, we shouldn’t be resisting information from new sources. We need all the help we can get, and should be looking to pull upon all our data and data analytics skills and capabilities; as a state, as a group of allies, as an ecosystem of public, private, academic and small business players.

The skills aspect is proving a particular challenge. Currently, we are struggling to feed the modern demand for data scientists, data architects, cyber practitioners and CEMA specialists. To turn the tide and ensure we are equipped with the requisite decision-making capabilities in the information battlespace, we need to collaborate across industry, academia and government. This is what will enable us as a collective to develop the resource pool to compete.

Empowering the edge

To become agile and make better decisions in action, we need information and intelligence to be delivered to the point of need at, to employ an MOD term, the speed of relevance. Tools must support continuous evolution without introducing training burdens and must employ advanced capabilities such as AI to do what they do best; work with large complex data sets and narrow down courses of action.

In the UK, the MOD is attempting to progress this through the formation of a data fabric over which information can be routed, and through a data strategy to enable information to be exploited. Both of these activities will be provided by a combination of government and commercial organisations and span sub-sea to space.

Today, we are starting to see some progress toward the establishment of such a fabric. Software-driven products will provide interoperability with legacy systems and software applications will inject intelligence into the mechanisms of information distribution, prioritising and automatically compensating for disadvantaged communications.

Doctrinally, we will need to flatten structures and empower the edge. This will happen by default as we progress MDI. Operational demands will create the pull for information services and, as in our personal lives, patience won’t be afforded delays. Users at the edge will task and receive information which previously would have been centrally managed and, to enable best-in-class to be seamlessly adopted, we must continue to maintain focus on adopting open architectural solutions.

In this light then, data management is key. This includes knowing what data we do or don’t have access to, recognising the control we need over that data, understanding its origin, and organising it so we can exploit it ethically and legally. We need to understand what information is needed where and when – something so complex it will have to evolve rather than be prescribed. We must be especially careful not to do things now for expediency that result in us losing control of data exploitation and security in the future.

Pushing on

The term MDI has spawned multiple interpretations. But if we can cohere our military as a single effective fighting force, through whatever construct is optimum at the time, then that is MDI. Right now, we’re seeing progress being made.

For a start, MDI seems to have endured unlike prior initiatives, and ambitions for freedom of action and national resilience are informing a different psyche which will incubate a strategic and collaborative approach to a sustainable defence and security enterprise. Trust between industry and MOD can still be improved, and is essential if we are to build a sustainable evolutionary capability.

Ultimately, a comprehensively informed intelligence picture – supplemented with the skills, analytics and tradecraft to exploit it – will be a game changer in the competition ahead. This is what will enable us to outsmart adversaries at pace in today’s digital-first environment.

To learn more about decision-making in the battlespace of the future, download our new report.