By Jin Miao
It has become a global trend to view data as a strategic asset and launch national, organizational, and enterprise data strategy. The US Department of Defense (DoD) released a new Data Strategy on October 8, pledging to build the DoD into a “data-centric organization”, in a bid to obtain war-fighter advantage and higher efficiency by using data at a certain speed and scale and consequently better preserve its global military dominance.
Data can be used as ammunition. The purpose of the Data Strategy is to translate the multitudes of data generated from weapon platforms, connection devices, sensors, training facilities, testing fields, and business systems from abstract and machine-specific output into useful and shared information so that the US military will be able to share data, as a kind of ammunition, in the Joint All-Domain Command and Control architecture. In this connection, the new strategy is not only an important step that marks the US military’s switch from network-centric warfare to data-centric warfare, but also a ten-year roadmap of “digital transformation” that the DoD has designed for itself as the critical department driving the US digital modernization strategy.
As a data security strategy suitable for the boundaryless network today, the new strategy, like all other data strategies, is innately conscious of “barrier-breaking”. For instance, it tries to change the conventional data management to realize data governance covering all links, remove the separation between data technology and culture, and clear the obstacles on the way from data possession to data sharing.
In the meantime, what differentiates the new strategy from general data strategies is the typical awareness of joint operation. The DoD believes that data holds the key to the success of the Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem for Joint All-Domain Command and Control, so the new strategy’s focus in the next decade is how to make the DoD’s data a strategic asset with high added values that can bring immediate and lasting military dominance and give the US military data leverage on joint all-domain battlefields.
In this process, an accuracy consciousness is vital to obtaining combat advantages through the data ammo. Only through detailed standardization, precise structure, and accurate coordination, will it be possible to share the right data with the right parties through the right links and eventually put it into practical use.
As the Data Strategy is just a DoD scheme rather than a national defense strategy, it is heavily laden with DoD characteristics and intended to establish a data organization led by the DoD Chief Data Officer, and gradually endow it with the qualifications and capabilities as the data center of US military. In this way, the DoD will become a data culture incubator that will publicize and foster positive data actions and modern data mindset among its employees; a data decision-maker that will support data-driven decision making across domains; and a data development guide that will formulate data ethics, data compliance rules, and data standards, as well as implement and utilize them. It will also serve as a central data service integrator that will promote wise decision making on all levels through data services, and a data talent manager that will discover, cultivate and maintain a data expert team and establish a supportive ecosystem to advance expert cooperation by setting up a data engineering center.
It must be pointed out that while the new Data Strategy by the Pentagon seems all trailblazing and ground-breaking on the surface, it is the result of tributary practices of the US military’s digital modernization drive forcing central-level reform. As early as in 2003, the DoD officially issued the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy to meet the demand for “network-centric warfare”. Later, different military services all rolled out “data-centric warfare” practices. The new Data Strategy is devised to integrate and comprehensively manage those practices carried out by various military services and organizations. So it’s more like a much-expected patch whose implementation and actual effects remains to be seen.
(The author is a researcher from Zijin Media Think Tank)
