

By Charles F. Wald and Ted Johnson

June 13, 2017









Supercomputing power is necessary. Artificial intelligence across the system is critically important. Human-machine pairing is vital.





The U.S. military has crossed a technological Rubicon. Technological advances and their military applications cannot be undone.

With physical, virtual, and perceived presence established, operational omnipresence is possible. Offsetting the gains of other nations’ militaries, then, is not just about more ships and planes, more cyber capabilities, or a vast surveillance network. It is all these things in an interconnected, interdependent system that requires fundamental transformations of the interactions between technologies, organizations, and personnel.

Naturally, the heaviest lift is the necessity for near-real-time analysis of massive amounts of information. Technological advances mean that conflict can occur at machine-speed, and the information generated and gathered by the multitude of weapons, unmanned and autonomous systems, digital communications, and sensors can quickly overwhelm the ability to process and respond to it. The networked interdependence of every element of presence and the information required to support it “produce a data overload that will make it difficult or impossible” for humans to direct in a timely fashion.

Gen. David Goldfein, the current Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, believes competitive advantage depends on “harnessing vast amounts of information, fusing it quickly into decision-quality information, and taking action by any available means anywhere in the world.” This means that information systems will need to bear more of the burden to review information, learn from it, and make immediate recommendations to decision-makers — and, in some cases where the risk to life or the mission is at stake, to take action itself.

To enable this, operational omnipresence requires a common operating system, an architecture that supports real-time information exchanges between every component in the network of systems. Supercomputing power is necessary. Artificial intelligence across the system is critically important. Human-machine pairing is vital. They are the means by which all of the data can be reviewed and analyzed, transforming presence from three sectored capabilities into a synthetic organism that can sense and respond to the environment around it with human direction.

The U.S. military has crossed a technological Rubicon. Technological advances and their military applications cannot be undone. Operational omnipresence seems to be the logical next step in the progression of the changing character of warfare. The strategy to recover lost ground in our fighting edge over other nations needs this sort of unifying concept to ensure technological and architectural innovations are working toward the same goal. Without the vision of operational omnipresence to bind disparate efforts into a cohesive strategy, the U.S. military runs the risk of further erosion in its military technological advantage.

The future of conflict, like its past, requires dominion over the time, distance, and information associated with operations. The Department of Defense is making progress in this regard, but it should continue adapting, innovating, and evolving until operational omnipresence is achieved.

By Charles F. Wald and Ted Johnson // Charles F. Wald, a retired U.S. Air Force general and former deputy commander of U.S. European Command, is co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Program. // Ted Johnson is a retired Navy Commander, Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, and the national security research manager at Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights.

June 13, 2017