In one of my recent stories for Jane’s Defense Weekly, I report that the IDF is integrating its military data centers into a few modern facilities.
At first glance, that might look like another military-tech headline, but in reality, this is a major milestone in the IDF’s march towards something called network-centered warfare (NCW).
The NCW revolution means that the whole of the military is turning into a giant digital network, able to instantly send and receive mission-related data.
The military network builds up a collective, live picture of what is going on. Every unit can feed into this collective situation picture, and receive information on its sector of operations.
The network enables tanks to communicate directly with drones, and a fighter jet pilot to see what a battalion commander sees. It allows big data to be sent from intelligence gatherers, procssed, and sent on to various commanders.
All of that needs modern infrastructure to work. A consortium of companies, led by Israel Aerospace Industires (IAI), has been chosen to construct a few centralized data centers in southern Israel, which will amass and process this critical data.
The contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is the biggest technological tender issued by the Defense Ministry in Israeli military history, and only a few projects of this size are going on anywhere else in the world.
For a look at where the network revolution is leading the IDF, see my recent piece for Jewish News Service.
Here’s the 1st paragraph from that story: In the not too distant future, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) battalion commander may stare out at the urban sprawl of a Gazan neighborhood. As he surveys the residential buildings, the locations of enemy gunmen hiding in apartments will be visible, marked in red by the augmented reality (AR) military glasses he’s wearing.