Seize the Data

Seize the Data

The critical piece to making government work is no longer systems, but the ability to mine, analyze and use the information in systems

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.
—Richard Feynman, 1965 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics

... Force transformation

While DISA has many of the day-to-day tactical responsibilities for shifting the military’s approach to information, the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation is the starting point for creative, long-term approaches to network-centric warfare.

Cmdr. Greg Glaros, a former Navy fighter pilot, is a transformation strategist for OFT, thinking up new ways to get information to what he calls the point of the spear—the war- fighter on the ground. “He who uses that information first, wins,” he said.

But soldiers on the ground can’t be inundated with so much data they are paralyzed by the quantity of it. The information has to be sorted, prioritized, analyzed and evaluated for accuracy, as well as a host of other processes to make it useful.

To Glaros, all these tasks can be sorted into two large groups. The first is the information chain—identifying what it takes to gather, store and share information. Second is the action chain.

“What does your organization have to do to take advantage of it?” he said. “It’s organizational alignment, and how we have the capacity to organize actions with coherence.”

One example of these two chains coming together into one initiative dreamed up by OFT is TacSat—short for tactical satellite—a program to launch microsatellites, significantly smaller and lighter than conventional ones. They can be configured with many kinds of payloads, built in less than a year and launched with commercial rockets, all for a fraction of the cost of conventional satellites.