Several technologies come together in support of this goal.
“Performant, tactical edge decision-making integrates secure, scalable computational power with multiple local sensors and edge analytics processing,” says Todd Matsler, senior director and general manager of the federal, aerospace and energy edge computing group at Intel.
Single or multiple clustered edge platforms provide different sensor types — electro-optical/infrared or lidar — to deliver relevant, timely information and context, while connected edge data centers provide greater computational power. All of this processing at the edge also reduces latency.
“It reduces your dependency on having centralized data centers,” Strausbaugh says.
That’s important, given all of the potential ways that communications can be disrupted, from weather events to adversarial actions.
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Secure Communications in DDIL Environments
Securing communications starts with basic block-and-tackle best practices.
"For example, using Type 1 encryption for data at rest, in flight and during compute,” Strausbaugh says. “Not having a critical dependency on any one particular means of communication.”
That may involve a mix of satellites and secure, terrestrial 5G.
“Blending is key,” Strausbaugh says. “It’s a lot easier to snoop and target when you know exactly what you’re looking at and where it’s coming from, so being able to prioritize traffic over different modalities is important.”
Agencies must also employ an array of strategies to secure communications in DDIL environments.
“Security is a function of encrypting techniques, obfuscation of data packets, clever use of spectrum to hide or avoid interception, and proper techniques for establishing provenance of the data’s source and chain of trust,” Matsler says.
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Best Practices for Testing and Deploying Technology in DDIL Conditions
Testing new capabilities in a simulated DDIL environment helps the military ensure they’ll deploy effectively.
“In general, simulations of technical approaches come before field testing, and having access to or creating a simulation environment for testing saves time and money and allows for frequent testing to occur prior to live exercises,” Matsler says.
Adversarial trials help to make the most of that testing environment.
“One best practice is to have a red team action in a simulation, and during live tests exercise the blue system’s agility and responsiveness” against human and autonomous attackers, Matsler says.
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Planning is essential to successful testing.
“You need an actual strategy for how much you can do at the edge,” as well as how much latency and potential data loss will likely occur, Strausbaugh says.
Planners can also look to manage their digital workloads to test successfully in a DDIL setting.
“There are lots of different techniques you can apply to low-bandwidth types of situations, reducing the size of the things that you’re trying to send over the wire,” Strausbaugh says. “If you only have a cocktail-size straw, don’t try to send full motion video over that.”
It’s also important to utilize disruption-tolerant networking techniques. With software-defined networks “you can look at what spectrum’s available, what’s most performant right now, what has the least latency on it and choose to use that modality at a particular time, for particular data,” Strausbaugh says.
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The Future of Tactical Edge Computing in Military Operations
Tactical edge computing is on the rise as the military shifts away from a centralized cloud model.
“There used to be this sense of the cloud as the epicenter, with the tactical environments hanging off of it,” Strausbaugh says. “Now there are a lot more interesting patterns emerging, if you look at things like the Advanced Battle Management System in the Air Force or the Army’s next-generation command and control effort.”
The growing role of battlefield artificial intelligence is accelerating that shift to computing at the tactical edge.
“Due to AI and autonomous guided systems, the time available for humans to observe, orient, decide and act is shrinking,” Matsler says. The military “will rely increasingly upon a performant, situationally aware edge.”
This, in turn, will drive the military toward an increased focus on the security and resiliency of operations in DDIL environments, because communications suppression and cyberattacks are on the rise there.
“The tactical edge must be resilient to transient platforms, autonomous to execute missions when human oversight is unavailable and adaptive to change,” Matsler says.
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