War is good for absolutely nothing. Yet if you have absolutely nothing to defend yourself, war will come to you. “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves” says the T-800. Our endless strife over resources, religion, and respect is the defining bloody throughline of world history. Nature, as Alfred Tennyson remarked, is indeed “red in tooth and claw.” Life finds a way. It finds a way to kill. 

We live in precarious times. Mark Rutte, Nato Secretary General, has said the alliance should shift to “a wartime mindset”. You don’t need to remind any Ukranian that their country is currently involved in an existential threat for survival. Blinken may have called it a “regional conflict”, but it could well be merely the first of many flashpoints that erupt across the globe as the post-nuclear era of peace after WW2 comes to end. Of course, describe the last 70 years as ‘peace’ to someone in the Middle East, in Vietnam, in multiple African countries - and they’ll laugh you out of the war room. 

It seems once again we are destined to take arms against a sea of troubles. And when we do, we will rely on computers ever more to fight our battles for us, and to assist our troops on the ground. Modern warfare is electronically based. The drone armies of Skynet are already a reality. War capital is measured in transistors, not blood. We’re living in the future war - you just don’t know it yet. 

The Internet of Battlefield Things

It’s against this dark background we must consider the implications of what military forces (whoever they may be) quite literally need to survive. When you’re relying on combat data to perform your duties, you can’t be funneling operational info through a potentially vulnerable central server. An API request timing out during work is annoying, an API request timing out on the battlefield can be deadly for whole battalions - and the populations they defend.

Data for military systems is far more than just about relaying intel to the troops. These days, there is a Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT):

• Drone fleets and autonomous land, sea and air vehicles
• Satellites for realtime battlefield analysis
• Supply chain and logistics through changeable conditions
• Battlefield sensors to track enemy movement and activity
• ‘Smart” weapons used by soldiers
• Cybersecurity against enemy state hackers
• Medical data devices for emergency triage and rapid response
• Local-first command and control systems

Lessons from the Frontline

Much like the consumer IoT, the IoBT is best served by data-centric paradigms that create resilient, robust systems that can operate even in the most adverse conditions, and where data can be synced locally and quickly in realtime on the ground in reaction to ever changing conditions, and where the data of national security importance is kept sovereign and secure. 

These are all the things that Source Network champions for every user, including of course the soldiery. Indeed, the military’s rapid advance towards local-first paradigms in its systems is one of the best examples of exactly why we should be rebuilding a new internet. You think the military is using AWS to back up its precious files? Well, the Australian military actually is, but we won’t judge.

In the US though, huge investments in distributed data services to achieve that goal have already been made by the Pentagon, for example, and for the last decade the US Defense Department has done much to become “much more decentralized”. BAE in the UK is building drone fleets that can sync data locally between themselves without recourse to central command for their operation. Meanwhile, France’s Scorpion Program is developing local computing environments at the battalion and regiment level to create autonomously functioning units that can continue to operate at full capacity should HQ be taken out.

All over the world, you can suppose most militaries are adopting the same approach and adopting distributed data paradigms in their strategy. You can’t run a wartime operation and rely on the cloud when electronic interference technology is so widespread. Always-on local-first resilient systems are essential for modern warfare, just as they should be for our civilian internet and our modern life.

The logic extends to AI military systems too. The military are well aware of the importance of local edge AI and how distributed model training and updates even in adverse conditions could change the course of any future war. Syncing and managing divergent models in limited connectivity environments is a crucial tech challenge that is still ongoing, but one that distributed data management systems must take on. Supporting heterogeneous data environments is a challenge that Source Network is facing head on through LensVM and DefraDB, allowing rapid sync, conflict-free collaboration and interoperability for individuals and edge devices in networks. There is a potential integration for a system like AIMS with Source Network as the technology develops.

Source Network’s Battlefield Role

Our distributed data stack is generalist, not specific to military systems - yet the principles of Local-First computing are the same. There is no reason our tech couldn’t be used in military systems to help them sync, share, protect, and operate on their data in battlefield environments. Source Network’s stack helps any device fleet, including combat devices, process, propagate and protect their data throughout the network without any recourse to centralized systems that could be prone to failure as a result of enemy attack. We are building resilient data architectures of unimpeachable data integrity that are interoperable with all device-types and in all environments, and military systems are no different.

Take satellites, for example. Satellite fleets are vulnerable to weather conditions - be it snow, rain, or atmospheric disturbances - which can degrade signal quality and disrupt communications. The costs of transmitting over satellite spectra is also fearsomely expensive, and due to their high orbit can also suffer significant latency issues. They’re vulnerable too: signal jamming, hacking, or even anti-satellite weaponry. 

Source Network’s stack will allow satellites to process data on-device and minimize back and forth communications. That includes the local HQ where the imagery and all other data sets are sent. The raw data collected by satellites can be pre-processed and compressed locally before transmission, reducing packet size and decreasing operation cost. The sent data can then be propagated locally amongst the devices themselves, rather than the satellite individually sending data to each necessary recipient.  Satellites using our stack can also communicate with one another, moving orbits in reaction to information propagated by their peers in the network. Moreover, in the event of enemy activity, the data redundancy provided by Source Network means even if some satellites become non-operational, others can pick up the slack and respond appropriately. Military systems are just one of many potential use cases for Source Network in satellite infrastructure, which we’ll be covering in an upcoming blog.

Giving Peace a Chance

Nobody wants war. With any luck, some of the use cases described in this article will never come to pass, and we will enter an era of uninterrupted world peace, with fairness and equity amongst the nations of the world made possible by effective diplomacy. Sadly, though, we all know that our military systems - whichever side we are on - must continue to advance in order to ensure that they are not outmatched and that the status quo is upheld and even improved upon. Distributed data management and edge computing are as important to modern military operations as bullets and bombs, especially in a world where machine soldiers will become the norm.